This isn't anywhere near apparent from playing this game, but it is brought to us by the illustrious Quintet - responsible for an excellent string of titles for the SNES before they more or less vanished from the face of the earth, including the excellent Teranigma and the also very good Actraiser and Soul Blazer. These titles are all very similar in theme - they all are about the concept of rebirth and they're all also pretty serious in tone. This is totally not the case with Robotrek (released under the title Slapstick in Japan - this is a hint to what they had in mind, by the way), where you live on the planet Quintenix, and you fight the evil 'Hackers' (shades of the Smokers from Waterworld, if you ask me). Of course, trying to be light-hearted doesn't stop them from being talkative as all hell either (though, mercifully, it never reaches the insane levels of inanity that Golden Sun did).It occurs to me that I should spend some time explaining what the hell Robotrek is, that being that it is an RPG where you, as the son of the great Dr. Akihabara, try to stop the evil hackers from doing something with some crystal or some shit, using your team of robot friends (and I prefer to use the Dr. John Zoidberg pronunciation of 'robot' here) which you get to build. This, the customization of your robots, is easily the most compelling part of this game - whereas a complex customization feature in a RPG can often be overwhelming and off-putting, Quintet manages to keep it straightforward and manageable. As a result, this is a rare example of a RPG where the battes are actually fun and keep you playing.
This makes it all the more remarkable that everything else built around the battle system is such a mess. Really, no one ever pays a lick of attention to level and quest design in RPGs because, well, isn't that the easiest part to pull off? It's a bit like play control - when its good, you simply don't notice it, and when its ever so slightly off you can sense it right away. An excellent example of this is the time I, in what I think was the 3rd of 4th dungeon, managed to get pretty much completely stuck without the slightest idea of what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go - even when checking every possible branch and switch. Granted, I probably was missing something - but the point is that this should not be coming to this in the first place. I expect a developer who is as experienced (and talented) as Quintet to be able to make clear objectives, especially in what is ostensibly a light-hearted romp of a game.
Granted, the story isn't worth a damn either, but it rarely is in videogames. So that, despite a very compelling battle system, the poor level design can sink things as badly as they do. (Also, on the subject of sinking things, I'd be remiss to not mention the battle music - decent enough as a standalone song, not the style you want to be hearing over and over again). And I'm also probably being a little too hard on it due to the pedigree I expect it to live up to - but if we can't expect the best from one of the best developers of the 16-bit era, [insert some idiom here].
7.0/10
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