Publisher: Disney Interactive
Developer: Genki
Genre: Action/RPG
Release date: Available now

Video-game consoles inspire a great deal of loyalty from fanboys ready to ignite flame wars at the mere sight of a message-board troll. Then there are the players who enlist alongside Master Chief or get to work freeing Warcraft from the Horde and settle down for a multiyear engagement with their game of choice, ignoring the lion’s share of competing releases. This loyalty seems to be an innate trait of the more mature gamer, though, and while the prime demographics have certainly skewed older in the last decade, there is still plenty of cash to be mined from the pre-tween set, who are less finicky about their game choices than they are about their veggies. Kids think nothing of pinballing from Pokemon to Bakugan and back again, allowing properties like Disney’s Spectrobes: Origins to make a serious run for the throne.

Spectrobes: Origins marks Disney’s attempt to transform their handheld hit into a console juggernaut. The series debuted on the Nintendo DS and attracted a loyal fanbase, thereby prompting a sequel. It’s a game that’s certainly cut from the same cloth as Pokemon, getting great mileage out of the mantra, “gotta catch them all.” In Spectrobes, your doe-eyed anime avatar and his team race throughout the galaxy hunting down the mystical Spectrobes, who can help you battle the villainous forces out to rip the galaxy a new one. It’s standard space-opera melodrama, the type of boilerplate anime that America has imported since the days of Force Five, and yet it works as a nice narrative hook to compel you to hunt down each elusive Spectrobe to customize your attacks and unlock the next world-shattering superpower.

At heart, Spectrobes: Origins is an action-RPG in which your character is set loose in a variety of interstellar environments looking to farm and battle mystical creatures while engaging in a series of missions and subquests to procure more weapons and gear. This leads to some strategic gameplay as players work to find the right balance of defensive armor, weapons and Spectrobes (based on their unique abilities) to help overcome an escalating series of foes. To that end, the game plays like a mash-up of Pokemon and Phantasy Star Universe, with much of the design work sharing a similar aesthetic to the latter. You split time between advancing the plot, hunting down new Spectrobes and seeking out new weapons and items that can be used to update your character and level-up your Spectrobes.

On a system virtually devoid of RPGs, Spectrobes stands as an oasis, offering a compelling battle system. While the anime trappings are fairly generic, with not much more than the standard shrill melodrama that we’ve seen far too often in this genre, the gameplay is the real hook here. The Pokemon allusions and inspiration are apt. Catching one Spectrobe compels you to seek out another to see what it can do, and drives you to build their abilities by searching for more loot and gear. This helps to build that addictive, “just one more hour” mentality that the best of these games offer. New Spectrobes often have the ability to unearth new fossils, which in turn can lead to more powerful Spectrobes, which adds to that addictiveness.

While the franchise design caters to a less mature anime fanbase, there’s no denying that developer Genki has built a crisp, colorful world. On a system rife with haphazard PS2 ports, it’s nice to see such care and craftsmanship go into building a game with this much depth. The visuals have that clean, Saturday morning cartoon vibe that the Kingdom Hearts series pioneered on the PS2, and they speak volumes about the importance of proper artwork when developing for a lesser-powered system.

Spectrobes: Origins is a real surprise. While the Spectrobes universe did nothing to hook me into its tired tale of good vs. evil spacefarers, the actual gameplay grabbed me hard. Genki took the blueprint laid out by Nintendo with the Pokemon series and applied enough of their own spin to make this game their own, producing one of the best RPGs for the Wii, and a genuinely engaging action game in its own right. Younger players will absolutely obsess over this world, and I sense some possible crossover appeal with the older crowd once they land that first Spectrobe and take it out for a ride. It will be interesting to see where these Origins take us in the future.

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