Fossil Fighters (DS)

Fossil Fighters (DS)
Nintendo / Red Entertainment

Review by Anthony

All right, now I’m mad. No, not that I spent money and time on a bad game... almost the opposite. I’m a grown man who’s been playing video games for decades now, and I just spent almost 60 hours of my gaming life playing a game where I’m a kid who battles people with dinosaurs. It’s the kind of thing that should be followed with me fuming about wasting my time, but the problem is, I had a lot of fun playing Fossil Fighters.

Fossil Fighters is about a rogue band of the legendary Japanese Yakuza clan who’ve abandoned traditional weaponry and have instead chosen to train and battle each other using weapons fashioned from fossilized bones... No? Okay then. Fossil Fighters follows an unnamed protagonist who arrives on “Vivosaur Island,” a land where they’ve made technology that animates prehistoric creatures from fossils and allows people to battle with them. Your character digs up fossils, cleans them so they can be revived, and travels to different areas collecting fossils, battling “vivosaurs,” and ultimately ranking up to continue the storyline.

What’s good:
- Although the storyline is a little on the absurd side, the good news is that the localization team made sure the game never took itself too seriously. The game has a good dose of goofy humor, at times quite funny but simultaneously makes you wish you didn’t laugh. It’s nice, considering most of these franchises have no respite from the painfully dull or kid-pandering storylines.
- I was very pleased with how they designed the whole aspect of collecting and raising vivo-.. dinos. Most monster sims give you tangible creatures that you can collect multiple versions of and raise each independently. Fossil Fighters instead takes any unlocked dino and represents it with a “dino medal” that’s permanently in your inventory. Having a dino medal in your party is the equivalent of having it ready for battle where it can gain experience/level up, and you can only collect one medal for each dinosaur. While that may sound restrictive, it’s a mild note of genius in my mind. Because of this, rather than having to collect and sift through multiple copies of dinos, you instead get a permanent one that can only improve and will always have set stats and abilities. Though restrictive, it makes the whole process much more streamlined, and allows for a much greater focus on battle strategy than micromanagement, skill selection, “catching a good monster” and other issues that leech time from players.
- A “gossip” character in town exists that helps clue you in to available sidequests, and a logbook you have with you always tells you what the next flag in the game is. Very helpful inclusions to finding the sidequests and not losing track of your next goal.
- Though the amount of fossil-cleaning you’d have to do in the game to complete everything borders on excessive, they did include an incredibly nice feature that few monster games have done to this extent. Many games have options to “drop off” monster eggs/newborns etc. for training, but instead, as you clean more and more, you eventually level up a robot who you can drop any number of previously-cleaned fossils off with to do your dirty work. By the end, he cleans even the most difficult fossils near-perfectly, he can potentially take your full inventory of 50+ fossils and be done in about 15 minutes, and the game automatically donates or integrates improved fossils into the system for you. Wow... great feature.
- The battle system is absolutely the highlight of the game. It’s creative, satisfying, addictive, and can be pretty tense. Battles use a team of three dinos picked from a team of five, and each team is placed into four “zones” for battle. The single “Attack Zone” up front where dinos do the most damage, are affected by allies’ and enemies’ support effects, and are vulnerable to negative status effects. Two “Support Zones” on the side where damage taken and given are reduced, dinos can support allies and are immune to status effects. And one “Escape Zone” where a dino in the Attack Zone can be voluntarily or forcibly sent to for two turns, making them invincible but unable to participate in battle. Each team gets a set amount of ability points to use per turn, will store unused ones for the next turn, and will get a huge boost if one of its dinos dies. Strategy and mind-games are abundant here, and it’s a pretty shrewd design because of it. Status effects can manipulate a team’s ability to attack and change positions, support effects can boost allies and/or cripple enemies, and using small attacks with points or storing up for big ones can make for drastically different strategies. Putting a mighty T-Rex up to attack and having allies boost his attack sounds good, but someone with a Knocking status effect could send it helplessly into the Escape Zone and leave one of your wimpier support characters vulnerable. You might want to swap a dino out to avoid being hit by a nasty support penalty, but then the enemy could trap you in the attack zone and brutalize you with a nasty poison attack for your efforts. It’s surprisingly deep, full of strategy, and quite fun.
- Having over one hundred dinos is a nice touch, and though there are many that function in a similar way, there’s a pretty impressive roster of dinos with different specialized roles and abilities to choose from. There are a couple that are objectively none too impressive, but the variety is still pretty nice overall.

What’s neutral:
- The fossil cleaning system in Fossil Fighters is a mixed bag. From the “good” aspect, I appreciate the system in which you earn slight, immediately-integrated improvements from better cleaning scores, rather than Spectrobes’ system where a minor error here or there means you lose several experience levels. From the “neutral” aspect, I found the design and use of the tools to be somewhat restrictive. Even the weakest tool can easily destroy the fossils, which is especially annoying when after gently tapping the touch screen multiple times to remove a tiny piece of rock, that the fossil immediately breaks for the half-second you touched it after the rock was removed. The heavier tools were nice, but worked in an odd way... sometimes you could easily remove big portions without harm, other times the same action seemed to cut a swath of destruction into the fossil. From the “bad” aspect, there was just too much cleaning to do. To complete your dino collection, you will need, at a minimum, -400- trips to the cleaning station. And if you’re thorough, it will probably be another 100 or more on top of that, as you also have to clean gemstones for sale, dropping fossils, rare bonus fossils, and sometimes may just want to improve on your current score. Each session is up to 90 seconds, so that really racks up a lot of repetitive playtime.
- I’m really torn on the (re)play value of the game. I absolutely want to commend them and put in the “good” section that there’s an excellent amount of post-game content. After the ending, multiple new areas open with a slew of new dinos to earn, there’s several bonus items to collect, and numerous characters fight challenging battles that were previously inaccessible. However, the balance is off, as the enormity and challenge of the post-game content could negatively influence one’s opinion of the game in perspective to the main game. The main game has a decent length, but until the very end there is little challenge to it. Opponents have fairly low-leveled dinos throughout the game, presumably to allow you to experiment with other teams. But if someone just focuses on using the same dinos all game, even if it’s a shoddy team, just the sheer force of a max level team may get them through most of the storyline unscathed.
- The story is just kind of there. Nothing deep, but it’s not insultingly bad thanks to them keeping it lighthearted. But again, like I said in regards to Spectrobes: Origins, let’s not pretend that the storyline actually matters in monster battling games, lest the Pokemon franchise deserve to have several high scores revoked.

What’s bad:
- The graphics.. well, they’re decent enough to make it into the neutral category. Everything’s very bright, and has a crude, jagged style to it, though I do appreciate that the characters have natural looking forms/proportions (I’m sorry, I just can’t take stubby, huge-headed characters seriously, FFIV DS.). However, the dinos have a saddening amount of palette-swapping to complement the 100+ number of them. In fact, there seem to only be a few models overall, and just several coats of paint/minor aesthetics tacked onto each. This is slightly exacerbated by the fact that the dinos’ attacks look only okay at best; at no point will anything “wow” you graphically.
- Though mostly well designed, they slipped up a bit and there are a few annoying issues with the game’s functionality. Pressing B takes you out of menus of course, but pressing B when exiting the dino medal selection screen immediately undoes your changes; annoying. When digging for fossils, a fighter always challenges you to a fight for jewel fossils, and may occasionally challenge you for a regular fossil that may be rare. The problem is you only ever get 1 experience from these battles, compared to the 3-6 exp those same-difficulty battles would be worth normally. That’s kind of a dick move, especially if the fossil isn’t rare after all. Finally, some fossils are “soft” and will be obliterated by a single hammer swing during excavation. That’s fine, but rare “dark fossils” exist that have an outer layer only penetrable with hammer swings... and they are also sometimes soft. That means it’s nearly impossible to excavate the fossil without smashing it to smithereens. That’s just pointless.
- Aside from digging/cleaning fossils and battling your dinos, there’s really nothing else in the game to do. It’s nearing Eternal Sonata’s level of linearity here. Sidequests kill time, but are generally just seeking out a bonus dino battle. You can expand your sonar/bag for collecting fossils which is nice, but that’s completely linear as well. There’s just not much to do, so if you can’t tolerate cleaning and/or don’t enjoy the battling, there is simply nothing else to keep you entertained.

So there you have it... I’ve written a ton about, and spent almost 60 hours of my life devoted to a silly title that I would’ve instantly passed over if not for its distribution by Nintendo. And even then, I know I’m not scoring it particularly high.. the graphics are a little crude with tons of palette swaps, the audio package is unremarkable, the story is kind of silly, and the game design coupled with the post-game content make a second playthrough irrelevant.

But dang it, I had a lot of fun. That fact is due entirely to the fact that the robust list of dinos to collect with the very impressively designed battle system made for a very addictive experience. It was very enjoyable seeing what a new dino’s skills were, and especially when it got to the post-game content, it was nice being challenged and using good strategy to take opponents down. But because there won’t be any Fossil Fighters tournaments or friends who own the game to play anytime soon, eventually I had to reluctantly set the game aside upon beating everything. That’s sad too, because the battle system is robust, balanced, and is so conducive to differing strategies and mind-games that it’d be an excellent competitive game.

I’d say if a $30 game keeps me entertained for 60 hours and I still think fondly on it despite it being anything but a blockbuster... that’s got to speak for something.