I took a break from the playthrough duties on this one and handed that responsibility over to my 9 year old daughter. Now, being a gamer and a parent, I can pretty much tell which games the kids like and which games they don’t. If my kids don’t respond to a game, no matter how I pitch it or play along with them, they’ll always ignore it when given the choice of game to play. If they like a game, it will be the first thing they grab when they’re told they can go play whatever they like (as long as it’s not violent). My son’s current game of choice is Little Big Planet, since he’s played through the entirety of Star Wars Lego, the Complete Saga (not violent! It’s LEGO!) My daughter, however, has become a true fan and champion of a new game from Nintendo called Fossil Fighters.
This looks like a game for kids. Well, that’s ok, because it IS a game for kids. Kids who love dinosaurs and the thrill of discovery. Kids who love well-designed, thoughtful, incredibly art-directed games with the famous Nintendo polish. And, really, aren’t we ALL that kind of kid?
There’s a reason games like Pokemon, Animal Crossing and Mario Brothers are so successful, even though they are ostensibly “kids’ games.” It’s because they are great games. I think that Fossil Fighters has the potential to be another of those great games in your collection. While it’s not yet a classic, nor does it redefine the genre, it certainly does what it does well, and with a whole lot of fun as well.
You begin the game offscreen, in a boat traveling to Vivosaur Island. This is an island where the scientists bring dinosaurs back to life. Sound familiar? The setting is ripped straight out of Jurassic Park, but who cares? Not my kid! And neither will you as the setting is the least important part of the game. Once on the island, you find out that you’re a boy named Max, and you want to be a fossil fighter, a new breed of champion that finds, revives, and battles dinosaurs! Seriously, this sounds horrible, right? I never would have picked this game off the shelf.
But luckily, I was asked to review the game. And took it for a test drive. This is a solid, well designed, well-crafted game that will appeal to children of all ages. That means you, too, pops. As with any game given the Nintendo blessing, Fossil Fighters is a joy to play. The controls are responsive and intuitive, the sounds are pure Nintendo, hitting all the classic beats for melodrama and comedy, and the characters are well defined and fleshed out. The dialogue, while cheesy and full of bad puns, is delightfully and classically Nintendo. Everything in this game screams quality, and does so at high volume.
My daughter took to this game like she’s never taken to another. Fossil Fighters captured her attention and love, in part due to her specific age and gaming-readiness, but also due in larger part to this game’s storyline, mechanics, and ease of entry. The game teaches fairly didactically, which in this case is a good thing. I asked her about the game’s battle system, which is fairly deep and allows for strategic maneuvering, and she could spout off how it all worked with no hesitation. This game teaches players how to play and it teaches them well. If I were to choose one thing to complain about, it would be this non-skippable way of learning how to play the game. As an adult, the “lessons” got a bit old, and the player is talked to as if, well, they’re a child. Feels a little dissonant playing through as an adult. Now, the only, and I mean *only* thing my daughter had to criticize about this game was that “you have to play as a boy. I’d like to play as a girl.” I found it odd that there wasn’t a gender choice at the beginning. As rudimentary as a binary gender choice is, it means something to players who identify as girls to be able to express that gender in a game. I’m surprised Nintendo didn’t do so here. Maybe they thought dinosaur battling and fossil hunting would only appeal to the males of the world. I think it’s an oversight and a bit stereotypical.
The game breaks down into three basic sets of mechanics, which is what I think will be it’s appeal: fossil hunting, fossil cleaning/reviving, and vivosaur battling. Let’s start with fossil hunting. Players are given a radar-like scope, which is upgraded along the way, to find underground objects. These will usually be fossil rocks, but can also be ordinary rocks that don’t have any value in them. As you use the radar, you stand in front of the indicated spot, and hit the A button. Max will dig and pull up the object, Animal Crossing-style and hold it over his head, Zelda-style. The more fossils you collect, the more chances you have of putting together better and better vivosaurs. A head part is needed to revive a beast, but legs, arms, and boy pieces are also around, which add to your vivosaur’s stats.
Cleaning the fossils is turning out to be way more fun than it sounds. You have 3 tools: a drill for fine work, a hammer for rough work, and an x-ray to see the shape of the bones underneath. If you spend too much time with the drill on one area, the bones will crack. If you hit the fossil rock with the hammer too hard or too often, the bones can crack. Too many cracks and you will be unsuccessful at reviving the given vivosaur.
One sweet little function that I thought would be all hype and no substance is the way in which you clean dust off of the fossil rock. As you use the drill, rock dust collects on top of the bones, making it difficult to see underneath. Simply blow onto the fossil rock and watch the dust fly away off screen. While I realize that the mic is controlling this behavior, the ease with which I can blow at the screen and the way it actually feels like I’m blowing the dust away is phenomenal, and a triumph of interface design.
Vivosaur battles are a mix of strategic team planning and turn-based fighting. You use your battling vivosaurs in teams of up to three at a time. Each vivosaur has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, all controlled by how well you cleaned the fossil and how many other parts you’ve found for that particular species. There are over 100 of these monsters in the game, which is pretty impressive for such a complicated vivosaur building strategy mechanic. As you add fighters to your team, you’ll notice that they all stand on different color spots on the fighting grid. The red space is the attack space, the blue spaces are support spaces (there are two of them), and the green space is for escaping vivosaurs. As I said earlier, the game teaches this rather well, especially if you are actually a child. My daughter is able to rattle off these bits of information without a pause to think about it. I’m very impressed by that, as her times-tables are not as easily remembered. If only we could get this game to be this fun AND teach basic multiplication facts!
The vivosaurs in the blue support spaces add support points to the main vivosaur in the red attack space. These support points vary with the monsters you place in those spots, which is where the strategy is. I asked my daughter, “why did you put THAT dinosaur in THAT spot?” She said, “Well, that one is weak against water attacks, and this one helps my main one be less weak, because some of the attacking monsters use water attacks.” Whew. I had NO. IDEA. how complex and varied this game could be, nor did I realize that my kid would be able to fathom such a system.If a vivosaur gets injured, you can move them to the green esape space, losing a turn, but saving some points.
The final area this game shines is in the story. My daughter loves finding out what’s going to happen next. When the faux-attendant stole her vivosaur badges (these are how a player can carry around more vivosaurs than the maximum three for a battle), she was horrified and excited that she could go with her friend (in game NPC) to the police station and report the crime. In another oddly misogynistic moment, though, the police chief condescends to the NPC, who is a girl, by saying “what’s the matter, little girl, did you lose your dollies?” We had a nice conversation about that one, let me tell you.
Bottom line? If you have a child who can read, enjoys dinosaurs, battles and collecting things (dare I say, gotta find them all?), this is a game you can be sure they’ll like. It’s a quality game, Nintendo-Seal-Of-Approval and all, and would seem to appeal to a broad range of kids and adults. I have, in fact, found myself sneaking in my own save game to try and progress through it myself. It’s fun and not too scary-challenging, but offers a rewarding experience for the time put in. I’d hope that in future outings, Nintendo will filter out the less female-friendly elements and at LEAST put in an option to play as a girl as well as a boy. If you think you can talk your child through these moments, it might be a nice way to introduce the ideas of equality and gender bias, as well.
Popularity: unranked [?]
