Solatorobo (NDS)
2011 Namco/XSEED

The Short Version: Francophonic dog fights sky pirates, chases kittens, and smashes things with a robot.

The Long Version:

Okay, two things right off the bat.

1) This game has probably the least-shitty 3-D I’ve seen on the DS. Ever. I don’t usually go on about graphics unless they’re stylistically unique or… horrible, but this is one of those rare games that, like (dare I say) Mega Man Legends, acknowledges its hardware limitation and goes for simple, cartoony characters that jibe well with the low poly count.

2) This is the first ‘DSi enhanced’ game I’ve played that didn’t have to come directly from the online shop. That took a moment to sink in after I took my picture for the save-file ID and went “wait, why did the game do that?”

Solatorobo is a ‘spiritual successor’ to Tail Concerto, a PS1 game that was ‘kind of similar to’ Mega Man Legends, and with the cancellation of MML3, it sure was a lucky break that this kind of sort of similar…ish game got localized after a good while of looking doubtful. Of course, the last time I went into a game with that kind of expectations, I got Sigma Star Saga, which was alright, not a Guardian Legend successor as I hoped, but I wasn’t exactly hooked enough to loop through it repeatedly for all the endings. Well, Sola has maybe slightly more to do with MML than SSS had to do with TGL, and if I keep on with the acronyms I’ll probably have the last few people reading this article GTFO before I finish this sentence.

I don’t usually go into the details of video game packaging either, but this is going to be a review of many exceptions. Solatorobo’s only edition is a ‘special edition,’ coming in a dressy, embossed slipcase with a soundtrack CD like several other DS games, expect this CD is in an actual jewel case, with track listing, lyrics and art inserts, and is the entire OST rather than a handful of MP3’s that the manufacturer snagged off the Galbadia hotel a few minutes after realizing they promised an extra with the game. (Yes, I am still bitter that I didn’t get the full Persona 4 soundtrack because I didn’t pre-order or splurge on the game.) The cover, like the rest of the game’s art, is handled by Nobuteru Yuuki, known for a lot of anime character designs such as Record of Lodoss War and The Vision of Escaflowne.

You are in control of Red Severin, a dog-man or ‘Caninu’, who is a Hunter, which is one of those catch-all ‘hero classes’ Japanese role playing games make up that take on jobs ranging from running errands to defending cargo ships from air pirates, and surprisingly little actual hunting. Compare these to the Diggers of MML or the …Hunters in Breath of Fire 2. (Or the Couriers in Revolver Knight. PLUG.) Red rides around on the back of a sort of Medabots/Laputa robot hybrid machine he calls Dahak, though he can also hop off to flip switches, climb ladders and create false tension by being more vulnerable yet rarely running into enemies in the mandatory segments. He does carry a stungun to …stun enemies on foot, which is kind of a disappointing use of the giant, badass looking gunblade thing he’s carrying in the promo art. Dahak’s abilities mainly come from its big, powerful, yet floppy arms. Most combat in the game revolves around picking up and throwing things, heavier items and enemies requiring some mashing of the A button to get above your head. Occasionally you will be able to steal handguns or break rocks with a drill, but the extra weapons come into play rarely (and the drill isn’t really even a weapon so…). At first I was a little disappointed at the lack of blasting involved, but chucking enemies at other enemies with metal-smashing force is fun enough. You can do additional damage by grabbing your victim on the rebound for a combo or throwing them while airborne.

The game is not complicated. Not that that’s a bad thing. I picked up Radiant Historia after taking a break from it a few months ago and have no rightful clue where the hell I left off or where to go, and thanks to having time travel elements, ‘when’ to go is also a factor. In Solatorobo, at any given time you can either follow the blinking GO HERE arrows on the world map or walk up to the quest shop gal and see what quests are still open. At the same time, the game manages to avoid being too boring by constantly adding things at just the moment I’m beginning to lose interest. After the third boss or so in a row that consisted of “throw lackeys at the boss” I was about to put the game down, when suddenly your sister aboard the ship says “Let me teach you about flight mode!” while big jet boosters appear on Dahak’s back. After introducing the flying-platformer setup, we then move onto air racing, which is probably the hardest part of the game in between staying on course in a 3-D field of movement and the usual video game tactic that all your opponents have unlimited nitro boosts they’ll use any time you have a narrow lead. Mercifully, there’s only one mandatory air race in the game, but you can unlock extra flight chassis for multiplayer mode by setting lap records. If you’re into that kind of thing. It just likes to add little ‘things’ here and there to keep things from getting too stale, without it ending up with say, Battletoads’ idea of variety. I was going “oooh” more often than “oh, now what?”

I’m not going to spoil much in the plot since it’s a weird mix of predictable and… not so much. It’s pretty damn obvious that the catgirl you find early on, Ehl, is a girl, and one of those ‘girl with a mystical power and shady past’ types that you’ve seen in various anime series. Red is an amnesiac who was found nine years past alongside Dahak, and a pendant rescued from a ship in the tutorial level reacts to him. Gee. I wonder if there isn’t more to him than meets the eye. But there is a twist around the halfway point, so it isn’t all plot points from the Miyazaki Plagiarism Handbook. Overall, the story stays pretty light hearted until a few dark revelations later on, but it doesn’t mire you in endless moping scenes. Which is good… but at the same time, Red comes off as just a little too optimistic. Then again, he also seems to be a moron.

Which brings me to what’s probably the biggest drawback to the game: Challenge. I ‘died’ all of once in the entire game. The only times I really had trouble were the Duel Ship battles where Red keeps stupidly imposing new rules on himself by boasting about how awesome he is. You would think after the first time saying “I’ll beat this guy in a minute, flat!” and the referee deciding to make that an official win condition, he would keep his yap shut, but to be fair, he was probably being motivated by a desire to show off for fangirl pussy. She’s a…cat. He had a cat fangirl. Get it? But beyond that, losing races just gets y0u a ‘mildly disappointed’ reaction from Red, and the opponent says you did good and to try again, like it’s the Special Olympics or something. It’s off-putting when they introduce a racing champ with an “I’m the greatest, fastest thing in the sky” attitude, and losing to him results in him being a good winner. Dammit, game, give me a total asshole to inspire me to wipe the floor with! As far as the main game itself goes, you can get through most boss encounters without even being bothered to learn their patterns. If you jump a lot and stay aggressive, you can tank through a good number of them without really trying. There’s an upgrade system involving placing colored blocks into Dahak’s equipment grid to boost your attack, mobility, lifting power, etc, but you can do alright without a lot of it, to be honest. If you pump up Hydraulics enough, you can wall-rape most enemies into submission in no time since you’ll be able to lift faster than they can wind up and attack. The final boss of the game only had my health in the red because it took a couple times for me to figure out what part of his attack window is the vulenrable part. If that wasn’t enough, you can switch parts out (and later change Dahak’s mode) at any time, so nothing’s really stopping you from maxing out Hydraulics to throw an enemy into the air, jump after them, pausein midair, then swap in all Attack boosters before starting the air combo.

That’s probably why the air races are the only multiplayer element…

All in all, Solatorobo’s a pretty awesome game considering my biggest gripe was more or less that it’s too easy. It has a very ‘homey,’ lived-in feel to its setting (you’ll be seeing and getting to know a handful of certain NPC’s pretty well over the course of things, all the towns are distinct and memorable) that I like and yes, evokes Mega Man Legends. They go the extra mile fleshing out the world in the optional Library section, which covers the history and culture of the floating island animal-people, and well… this game goes there and states flat-out not only are interspecies romances possible, but tells us (just for the record) what kind of offspring they have. It’s more just world-building information than anything… gross, but well, how shall I put this… I’ve been to the Internet, and some people really like animals. Especially humanoid animals. Perhaps I’ve said too much. It’s not especially long or challenging, but it’s still definitely worth playing. It’s one of the few games to come by in a while that gave me the sort of childish glee of older, more abstract games, maybe because it’s simple at the core and just builds on its basics instead of total mode shifts every few levels.