Game #942: Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles

  Continuing the trend of games based off series' I haven't seen yet....

 I first learned about Zatch Bell! through the GBA games, back in my Emulation days, and it was a quirky fighter in which people used... marionettes, what they looked like at the time, to fight each other. I'd learn more about the franchise as years went by, but due to my memories with the GBA original I have a sort of soft spot for the license, which is why here I am play Zatch Bell!: Mamodo Battles.

 It's not very good.... You can immediately tell it was made by Eighting because it feels like their other fighters, like Bloody Roar, Bleach: Heat the Soul or the Naruto Clash of the Ninja series. While it does feel like those, it's much simplified. You get a single attack button that performs a single attack string, as well as a special move button that you can pair up with different directions for different results. To be fair, the basic attack can be coupled with a direction to sometimes get a different attack, but it's still not much to play around with.

 There's a Story Mode, but it's not very good. It doesn't tell the story of the series, although there are some character interactions that I think that are based on the ones from the original show though. In this mode you must visit different locations hoping to trigger a battle, hoping, because you just might trigger a 'There's nobody here' waste of time event. Once you get bored with that you've got Time Attack, Practice and VS. And that's it. You can use points obtained in these modes to 'develop' a character and raise its parameters, but why would you if you need these points to unlock other characters?

 Oof, unlocking characters is a mess. You can unlock most of them through Zatch's story mode, but afterwards you'll be missing five. One randomly appears when going through Time Attack, and you must defeat it to unlock it. The other four.... are unlocked by collecting every card in the game. Look, I managed to do it in about 3 hours, but it wasn't fun. I had to repeat Time Attack over and over again to amass points and then use points to RANDOMLY collect cards... cards of which you might get repeats, just to pad the game further. And all in all, there's a measly 14 playable characters, with two of them being clones. And if you're mean enough, you could consider Zatch and Zeno clones, but at least they have a different basic Attack string and their human/mamodo team-up attack is different. Their Specials and Supers are the same though. The worst part about this endeavor is that so few people care about this game that there's erroneous information on how to unlock things. Supposedly getting cards unlocks stages, but in practice I randomly unlocked a few by going through Time Attack, and even after collecting every card I didn't get new stages through them.

 Eighting's fighting games tend to be very simple, and I'm OK with that because they are button-mashing fun. But Mamodo Battles feels so limited that it just isn't fun. Coupled with just how insanely boring it was to unlock every character.... Yeah, I'll stick with the GBA cart.

 3.0