Pros: Interesting creature raising system, good graphics.
Cons: Story only a grade schooler could love.
A headstrong boy and his sensible girl partner go on an adventure in outer space where they learn the importance of teamwork and friendship. If that strikes you as just the sort of original, powerful storyline you are craving, then you are just the ten-year-old the role-playing game Spectrobes: Origins is looking for.
And if that sounds mind-numbingly dull, then you’re me.
Story: Don't Get Me Started
Origins begins as two kids with funny names (Rallen and Jeena, if you must know) who work for some sort of space police organization head out on an assignment that somehow lands them far away from home. There they discover monsters called the Krawl are wreaking havoc on the local planets. Soon they are traveling from planet to planet killing Krawl and searching for ancient totems that will unleash a powerful force for good to battle a coming powerful force for evil.
The bland story and flat, tedious dialogue make the game’s alternating stretches of painful sincerity and witless comedy about as excruciating as possible. I was once a kid myself, and I know a lot of shows I loved would, through an adult’s eyes, be agonizing, but I can only speak as an adult, and as an adult, Origins came close to putting me in a boredom-induced coma.
The game doesn’t really explain what spectrobes are or where they came from or why a young boy can control them - things perhaps explained in previous games in the series - but in terms of this game, spectrobes are creatures that can be summoned forth for battle. Throughout the game, players will discover more and more varieties of spectrobes, all in their “baby form.” In this form they can be lead around like pets and sent ahead to find valuable items through some sort of sonar. Send your baby spectrobe towards a nearby glimmery object with a wave of the Wii remote and valuable gems will appear, along with cursed gems that bring packs of Krawl down upon you and spectrobe fossils.
Gameplay: Cool Creature Management
Fossils are the most interesting aspect of Origins. You begin with a square stone block, and you must uncover the fossil employing small explosives, a hammer, a drill and other devices that you wield using the Wii remote. You need to do this as quickly as possible with as little damage to the fossil as you can manage.
Once your fossil is revealed, you must then awaken it, which involves a rather pointless shaking of your remote and nunchuk. This gives you a baby spectrobe, cute and ready to help you find objects.
You also need spectrobes to fight the Krawl, but since babies are not battle-ready, you need to evolve your babies into big, warrior adults. The game has an interesting system in place to raise your spectrobes. The gems you find on your travels can be used to increase their experience level (and thus their strength), add defensive and offensive capabilities and most importantly evolve them into adults. Adults can be trained in a training area if you find special training equipment.
I found endlessly excavating new spectrobes could get very repetitive, but overall the system to care for and manage spectrobes is enjoyable and unusual, and easily the best part of the game.
Battle: Decent. That's It, Just Decent
While the story is awful, and spectrobe management is pretty good, battle falls somewhere in the middle; it’s okay but nothing special. When you encounter Krawl you can press a button to attack them with your weapon (you will gain many different weapons throughout the game, such as swords and guns, some of which have special powers like the ability to temporarily freeze enemies). You can also order your spectrobe to attack a specific monster with a flick of the remote. In boss battles it is sometimes possible to stand at a distance, sending your spectrobe in for an attack and then calling it back to best your foe while taking no damage at all. Other times bosses are more active and you must run around. A way to dodge charging Krawl monsters would have been a nice addition.
Spectrobes and Krawl both have elemental powers like water and fire, with each element strongest against one other element. This motivates players motivation to change the spectrobe they are using depending on the element of their attackers.
Conclusion: A Solid Kid's Game That Could Have Been More
Overall, Origins is a mixed bag. Graphically the game is pretty good, with a clean, crisp look and good variety in the worlds, which range from arid deserts to frozen wastelands. Puzzles are too simple to offer much challenge. Save points are spread annoyingly thin, and while there are more frequent checkpoints the game will return you to if you die, the system is imperfect; save right after a checkpoint and the game will return you to that checkpoint while ignoring anything you did between the checkpoint and the save. At one point this happened to me and I had to shut off and restart the Wii to load my save point, since there is no way to do so while playing the game. I could actually spend a considerable amount of time complaining about the quirks of the save system, but I don’t want to sound like a crotchety old man obsessed with niggling details.
No, I instead want to sound like a crotchety old man aggravated by the game’s agonizingly dull story sequences. There are so few real role playing games for the Wii (Spectrobe: Origins and Rune Factory Frontier are the only two Wii RPGs that don’t come across as dumbed-down casual games masquerading as RPGs) that it is frustrating to see a game with the potential to be really good brought down by lazy plotting.
Of course, if you’re ten years old, you may think I’m being unfair. All I can say in reply to that is, play the game again in 20 years and see how you like it.
