Contact (DS)
In most video games, the controller or console you play with is just a means of accessing the world created from code. Once you have a hang of the controls, it is meant to essentially melt away as you think more of the actions you’re performing than the device used to do them. Contact though has the Nintendo DS console actually factor into its plot and presentation, the player actually meant to be themselves in this role-playing game interacting with a world and characters that are explicitly said to be reached through your actual Nintendo DS.
This concept is presented at first as a somewhat interesting angle. When you begin you’ll contact a small old man called the Professor as he’s in the midst of a battle with the CosmoNOT group who want the cells that power his space ship. Damage from the fight causes the cells to shatter and spread across the world, the Professor’s space craft landing in front of a young man whose default name is Terry. This fairly normal boy ends up recruited as the main means of gathering the cells to keep them out of the CosmoNOT hands, although there are some weird elements to this plot once you start to make progress in it. The first is that the game starts you off with the framing device that you aren’t actually controlling the on-screen character but communicating with a device, only for that young man to become an almost completely silent character who responds to your button presses without question. Besides knocking coconuts out of trees on the touch screen and poking some characters, the idea that you aren’t actually Terry is practically irrelevant until the Professor remembers to address you instead at certain junctures. You do get some stickers that can be activated from a menu and placed on the targets on the touch screen, many of them either situational or simple damage sources and again not doing much to really make it seem like you’re the supposed outside force contacting the characters with the DS. You are for all intents and purposes Terry, and while this means you have a consistent feeling of control, it also wastes a framing device that could have been more intriguing.
CosmoNOT is a strange organization as well. At first they appear to be adversaries worthy of stopping, and they do a few things like torturing a kid that show they are quite bad people at heart. However, then you’ll get cutscenes that do a lot more to show the main CosmoNOT members as fairly human characters who are emotionally close. They do appear to be making a mostly typical bid for power even though at points it even seems to want you to find them endearing without ever adding in the necessary justifications to wipe away some of the worse things you saw them do during the story. Even stranger is the decision to top everything off with an injection of philosophy near the end that is in a contextual vacuum. It brings up an interesting concept it has neither the time to do anything with nor the actual set-up to make its inclusion feel a natural evolution of the game’s themes since it spends so little time on the layer of removal element involving your DS. A mishmash of ideas that could have worked in a game that devoted more time or effort to them makes for a story that only hits well if you excise pieces to interpret in isolation since it prefers to hit quick with an idea than to layer appropriate substance onto it.
It is unfortunate the game’s themes and core plot ideas are a muddled affair as the globe-trotting element does manage things better on a smaller scale. You’ll travel across a few different islands in the search for cells, meeting quirky characters and encountering places with strange situations effecting the populace. A military base where people had their memories taken away or a desert bazaar where people are being kept from communicating with outsiders by some secret oppressor have decent self-contained mysteries to follow, and the game can continue to surprise with its next choice of setting quite often. The desert area for example feels right out of a medieval fantasy story with the living dead patrolling pyramids and ruins scattered around… and then you find a woman whose race car needs repairs next to the bazaar. You can just as likely find a castle with wizards and monsters as you do the shopping district where cell phones and fridges serve as enemies and you hop into video games to progress, although even if it is a racing game you’ll still end up smacking around race cars instead of truly playing retro throwbacks. Were this a game exploring the strange relationships made when contacting people in isolated parts of the world it could have been a more compelling theme, especially since there are times you can return to an earlier island to romance a local girl or trade items from one culture to another.
Most of your activities though will be engaging in combat, and while Terry will ready himself for a fight whenever commanded by your button press, the battle system is about striking in intervals determined by your agility. You can move around freely during a battle to avoid some attacks and while you can’t activate an attack directly unless it’s a special technique, it can be essentially queued up so that the moment you’re close enough you’ll unleash a stored strike. Terry can acquire quite a range of weapons over the adventure that have different advantages and associated special techniques, but the game is incredibly stingy with energy for the techniques. Techniques will cost 1 or more points to execute and even later into the adventure you’ll be lucky to have five points stored up because earning them requires you to actually kill a few monsters per point. This means you often can’t utilize a power on a monster if you want to build them up for something tougher like a boss ahead but also in the boss fight you’ll only get to use a few techniques before you’re down to having only the normal strikes available. That means almost every battle will be activating battle mode, standing next to the enemy, and waiting for each attack from Terry to automatically execute. You can dodge to make it more interactive but some foes strike quickly enough that you’ll probably get hit anyways, and some bosses even have unavoidable attacks. The battle system ends up incredibly unengaging because it is most often just a waiting game where you wait to do enough damage to win or you have to run because you’re the one being outpaced in the damage race.
There are a few more layers to the fighting system, not that they improve them much. You can pause during battle to consume food to heal up and this is practically a necessity for boss battles due to some unavoidable damage. Different foods will heal you up different amounts and provide distinct boosts to your abilities for a bit, but there’s also a digestion system at play where you can’t eat too much since you’ll get full and be unable to eat until you’ve had time to digest. What this mostly does is make food a less preferred way of healing, potions that barely fill you up but heal you a good deal not hard to find and thus a quick way to top off without any risk of filling your gut too much. This is the only way to heal in a fight so if you get into a forced battle without enough to heal through the pain you can be in a bind, but a death only throws you back to the start of the island. It’s a long walk back to some places, but you lose nothing you gained, meaning you might have found better items or leveled up some stats. Things like agility, attack strength, proficiency with specific weapons, defenses, and more are all improved by participating in battle when those relevant stats come up, with things like your defense going up after taking a hit. This does mean you’ll likely spend a good deal of time fighting enemies to build your strength up to handle what lies ahead. The alternative is just stocking up on so many healing items you can force your way through, but that requires earning cash that ends up a long process of battle or work as well.
Working up to a sufficient strength for a new area isn’t the worst and even though it’s a bit weird narratively how the game includes the full heal bathtubs in the locations it does, there are at least a fair few well spaced so that you can find spots of safety in a dungeon and build your strength with a free heal nearby. A more interesting wrinkle to the battle system are the clothes your character can get, Terry having a few costumes he can put on to change his advantages and utilize unique abilities. The pilot suit will have wind magic to damage enemies with for example, but the chef outfit lets you cook food into better meals (or make your own potions which is ultimately the wiser route). Unfortunately you can only swap outfits back at the starting point for an island, meaning sometimes you’ll be in a dungeon and find you need the unique skill of a costume like digging through walls with the Knuckle Mole and have no choice but to backtrack. Being knocked back to start on death is better than the alternative of having to load a save, but sometimes the game will get a little absurd with how often you need to swap costumes to make progress like a pyramid where you need to retread the same ground with four different costumes just to stand on the right switch. This is likely meant to be a lock to ensure you grabbed the costumes along your way, only a few being optional like the thief who can pick certain treasure chest locks, but it is a tedious check and if old school bathtubs can be found in secret government testing facilities then having a changing closet doesn’t seem like a farfetched ask either.
Contact also make a fairly interesting choice in letting you engage in combat with most anyone. Not all wildlife is hostile but you can pick on poor critters for resources, but you can even attack important characters to try and steal any useful items they might have on them. They might not always drop it though and some can put up a good fight, and if you do this too often then people will hear about it and start attacking you on sight, but there are some little moments where you can break away from your heroism if you want to earn something an easier way. It’s not quite a liberating shortcut to skip some of the grind of building up your power, especially since the attacked innocents will fight back, but it’s an intriguing extra element for curious players to potentially explore.
THE VERDICT: Contact’s core concept feels like it barely impacts the action in a plot where ideas are presented poorly and without the right degree of build-up. The battle system often just involves waiting around because the points needed for using actual skills are delivered in a poor method and some battles are often best just handled by having abundant healing to offset the mostly hands-off fighting style on show. There are some ideas that can catch your interest for a bit and the settings do build a sense of adventure, but the considerable amount of time spent watching monsters get smacked feels hollow and lacking in input from the player in a way separate from the game’s intended form of detached presentation.
And so, I give Contact for Nintendo DS…
A BAD rating. A battle system where you watch Terry stand there and take a swing every now and then would perhaps be fairly close to the concept of only communicating with the world you see rather than controlling it if you weren’t also controlling his movement and the rare moments you can activate an ability, but that doesn’t make it a more compelling battle system even if you find it somewhat thematic. It’s a mostly uninteractive waiting game where the tougher fights involving popping open the menu from time to time to stuff Terry full of healing food or potions to offset the damage you can’t always reliably avoid and the skills are almost a non-factor since they’re often just a brief surge of higher damage numbers. Giving you some other reliable means of earning power for the special techniques would at least make the battling feel more involved but its insistence on being tied to monster kills means there are areas where it’s not really an option and taking down those monsters to earn them would just involve you standing there and waiting for the weapon smacks to play out anyway. If the plot held together better than maybe it would fade into the background more, but beyond some fun personalities who don’t stick around long, you’re mostly given a look at your enemies who feel like they could be the heroes of the tale due to the flickers of depth if they weren’t doing some undeniably bad things. The diverse scenarios and small civilizations on the islands you visit end up carrying things better than the main plot since you’re at least getting some open and shut stories with clear direction, and while it might not attempt anything too ambitious with these smaller plots, they’re at least not throwing concepts at the wall and hoping they pique your interest enough to forget they tie to very little in the overall experience. The sloppy missed opportunities and puttering through themes it can’t execute on well mean you do find yourself focusing a bit too much on those boring battles, but you can train yourself up enough that at least they won’t drag on too much and you can continue to see what new lies ahead.
Calling Contact inventive or innovative for its framing feels like the idea alone enamors the speaker rather than the substance. You aren’t really feeling like the detached viewer using your device to communicate with the world, you just have a few moments you can poke it or plop a sticker on a quirky but rather unexciting and sometimes confused RPG. There is a bit of a feeling that the game doesn’t have the room to explore its themes but it also bloats itself with ideas like the optional fishing costume when it could have better explained the CosmoNOTs so you can form a proper opinion on whether their actions were justified. Feeling more like some experimental ideas that didn’t give the desired results, Contact needed more commitment to what it was toying with if it wanted to be more intriguing but also likely needed firmer groundwork in its battle system so you can better engage with the themes it chases rather than spending your time watching battles slowly unfold.