Fossil Fighters (DS)
Fossils are a beautiful mystery. You never known when there might be a small window into our distant past buried deep beneath your feet. As fascinating as these fractions of creatures that lived ages ago might be, it’s hard not to wish we could see them walking among us once again. The turn-based role-playing game Fossil Fighters looks to provide the wonder of uncovering a surprising discovery as well as the fantasy of being able to bring the dinosaurs of the past back to life, this adventure all about finding the bones of prehistoric beasts so they can be resurrected as an incredible creature known as a Vivosaur.
Fossil Fighters’s Vivosaurs are mostly based on real world creatures, although the game is quick to tell you that a Vivosaur is not necessarily just a dinosaur. This isn’t just covering their bases so they can include pterosaurs and plesiosaurs, because amidst plentiful bones of reptiles you can find ancient mammals like a giant sloth or woolly rhinoceros as well. Vivosaurs are an interesting mix of real creatures and some fantasy elements to make them more exciting to battle. While the game already has a fair bit of fun adding feathers or coloration to the beasts that may not be true to life, the majority of the creatures are based on actual prehistoric animals. Sure, the Ouranosaurus is made to move like a martial artist to be a more exciting creature here, and the dinosaurs certainly didn’t have the ability to control the wind or water, but a fan of prehistoric fauna will likely be delighted to see how many are based fairly closely on reality with only the needed embellishment to help them fit into the battle system. They are given shortened names, many losing the “-saurus” part of their name or something similar. This does lead to a few awkward names like there being an S-Raptor, U-Raptor, and F-Raptor since they didn’t know how to shorten it better or a creature with a very simple name like Tro, but there are also Vivosaurs like Stego or Brachio where it’s easy to connect them to a well known dinosaur and some even come out with pretty decent new names like Goyle or the first dinosaur you’ll ever revive, the Spinax.
To resurrect a Vivosaur for battle though, you must first set out to dig sites across Vivosaur Island, your sonar able to help you locate where a rock that might contain a fossil could be hiding. Dig it up and take it back to the laboratory, and the first step in resurrection begins. You must break the rocky shell around the fossil quickly but carefully, a time limit adding pressure but your only tools are a hammer good for smashing through hard rock and a laser for breaking away the softer layers. The bones beneath can be damaged by sloppy cleaning and if you damage them too much the fossil is unsalvageable, but if you can get above at least a 50% exposed and intact fossil before time runs out, you’ll have yourself a Vivosaur piece. Only the head will actually allow you to bring them back to life, but finding their arms, legs, and body will boost the power of a Vivosaur and grant them new abilities. The touch screen minigame done to expose the fossils taps into that fun idea of unearthing some intriguing new discovery, and while you can attempt fossils of the same type to integrate fossils in better condition into your Vivosaurs for better boosts, the huge roster of over 100 Vivosaurs means even after you’ve completed the main adventure there will still be a lot of bones to uncover.
Once your Vivosaur is back to life, it is stored in a medal, your character able to carry a team of five with them and swap them out only when they find special machines around the island. A Vivosaur battle is actually a three-on-three contest to completely wipe out the opposition though, so before each match you can select which of the five you wish to bring. In a battle, one dinosaur takes point in the attack zone while two can be kept in the support zone, an escape zone also existing that lets you protect a dino while moving one into the attack position. Vivosaurs in the support zone can provide immediate boosts to the attacking Vivosaur’s power, but you can attack from the support zone as well just for less damage. Each turn a team gets a certain amount of Fossil Power to spend on abilities, any you didn’t spend saved for your next turn. Some dinosaurs can boost their own power or inflict status effects like excitement that prevents them from being swapped out of the attack zone, but for the most part, combat does feel like mostly a battle to deal as much damage as you can with a good central attacker. There is an element system in place where your alignment determines one weakness and one resistance, a fire Vivosaur for example taking extra damage from a water Vivosaur but they take less damage from an earth Vivosaur.
While the elements can impact which dinos you bring to a specific battle, it also is unfortunately a very basic system. Your air Vivosaur will only have moves that deal air damage, meaning it can’t try to cover its weaknesses. What’s more, every single creature in the game technically has unique moves. While they don’t often go beyond four attacks unless you start counting team attacks that likely won’t get used often due to their cost, each Vivosaur’s attacks are given fairly generic names like Snapping Jaws and Wing Cutter or very specific titles like Lambeo Combo and Megalo Bite. These can sometimes have unique effects but you’ll have to learn them on a case by case basis, it at least possible to see all the attacks every Vivosaur participating in a battle has but it also feels like the range of moves don’t come with much greater complexity. It’s often best to attack with whatever strongest moves you can afford, and while there’s room for some interesting strategy in multiplayer and some tougher fights in the story whip out neat maneuvers, that Spinax given to you at the start can likely stick on your team all the way through with its generally useful mix of decent attack and defense with no frills otherwise.
Fossil Fighters also incentivizes sticking with a small stable of Vivosaurs long term. Every battle, no matter how small, will give your team of five a few tiny boosts to their life points, and after enough experience they can rank up for bigger boosts to their abilities. You can still swap in new members as they come and the element system at least encourages you to diversify away from a few similar powerhouses, the support boosts also encouraging some team shapes that are technically still leaning on simple damaging moves but only after the thought was first put into constructing a conducive arrangement. One thing that can take some of the wind out of your sails when it comes to battling though is the potential frequency of fights with little substance. When you’re out digging, be it at a volcano, under the sea, or in a mine shaft, there will be people standing around looking for a scrap, but you don’t have to take them on if you don’t want to. However, dig up certain fossil rocks and a person can come demand a battle. If you refuse, they get the rock, and what’s more, if the rock you find contains a jewel instead of a fossil, you almost always must fight to keep it. Jewels are incredibly important as they are the only way to reasonably make money in Fossil Fighters, cash going towards upgrades like improving your fossil radar to find deeper and rarer rocks. Optional fights with pushover foes end up a bit too common and you heal after every battle so you don’t even need to play too safe, but the story encounters can at points put up a much stronger fight, especially since healing mid-fight is an incredibly rare skill for a Vivosaur to have.
Your adventure in Fossil Fighters starts off rather simply, you playing as a young boy you name yourself as he arrives at Vivosaur Island. Looking to join the Vivosaur fighting league where your rank will grant you access to new dig sites, you quickly find your efforts sidetracked by a group of troublemakers known as the BB Bandits. While they are out to steal Vivosaur medals and collect strange idols across the island, at first the eccentric bandits seem like rather small scale antagonists, only for the scope of the adventure to start to increase down the line. Far greater things than the safety of the locals end up at stake and you start to dig deeper into how a world where Vivosaurs exist could even come to be, and while you will go back to the league from time to time to compete in some occasionally close fights, there are far greater dangers you need to stop that demand more and more of your attention. While you are a voiceless protagonist, the surrounding small cast can grow on you over time, your friendly rival Rosie and some of the more inept BB Bandits like one that seems to be a dogman fun to see whether they’re getting into antics or trying to contribute to the more serious stakes the plot starts heading towards. The game never breaks you away from the core loop of finding fossils, cleaning them up, and then using them in battle, but a few later areas are more like dungeons where you have to find the right way to go or even solve a small puzzle like using your cleaning tools in a unique way. It certainly can build up a light fondness for the little world of Fossil Fighters, it even able to sustain the periods where you can’t engage much with the Vivosaur side of things without being too overbearing about it. The two commentators who yammer on in text boxes during battles feel like a touch that’s hard to appreciate though since they so often can’t finish a line of thought before they’re interrupted by a new action and don’t have the best understanding of what strategies are really at play anyway.
THE VERDICT: Fossil Fighters has a very enticing core. Digging up the rocks, breaking them apart to find out what fossil is inside, and then bringing some dinosaurs back to life to do battle has moments of excitement and mystery as you’re eager to keep finding new Vivosaur types and improve the ones you already have. The story guides the process well enough, but the actual battling feels like it is missing some of the needed depth, the system relying a great deal on simple ideas like the elemental weaknesses. Making an effective team composition even if you are going to be using the same basic moves to win means it’s not without some tactical considerations, but with the slow battles also appearing quite often if you just want to do something simple like earn some cash, the big payoff to all your fossil finding work does start to lose its charm the longer you play.
And so, I give Fossil Fighters for Nintendo DS…
An OKAY rating. Based on some of its sillier story elements and the young heroes at its center, Fossil Fighters is likely trying to be a turn-based RPG that even younger players can handle. This might be why the area that could have been the most complex, the battling, doesn’t overcomplicate itself. Running around a new area digging for fossils and taking them back to carefully clean them works even when it’s simple, and even the cleaning can have small complications like deceptively fragile rocks or the dark fossils where you can’t x-ray the rock to help guide your tools. It can get a bit repetitive once you’ve upgraded your case and you come back to the lab with quite a haul, although a helper robot can at least automate some of it once you’ve done it often enough. However, the fights are where it feels like the game slows a bit too often and without great effect. The range of moves a single Vivosaur can have feels so limited, everyone inevitably going to have their T-Rex fight the same essentially, but also if they didn’t that would possibly complicate things even more. Each dinosaur having a unique move list even if the attacks aren’t that different from what others have still means it’s hard to keep track of what both sides can do in a battle. At the same time, the broader considerations will likely be just what stat boosts a support Vivosaur brings and the damage output of the attacker, but it also feels like Fossil Fighters did have the room to make more battles like you encounter in boss fights or league battles. There’s clearly some room for clever strategizing, although the FP system also feels like it encourages constant aggression rather then trying to invest in something costly but more creative. If you don’t get too involved in fighting over jewel rocks the game can end up a bit cleaner and possibly more challenging since you won’t have the frequent boosts to your fighters, Fossil Fighters still encouraging curiosity about what you’ll find next even if the payoff for your work isn’t as exciting as the work itself.
Fossil Fighters can still pull you in for a while as that excitement of seeing what a fossil contains is hard to deny. The Vivosaur fighting can’t find the right spot between strategy and letting the dinosaurs run wild with strange new abilities, but you can still find those moments when you uncover a new piece of one of your go-to battlers or you actually end up stumbling into a great new addition to your team. Multiplayer can add some more life to the adventure and maybe even break you away from the reliable tactics that run rampant in single player, but Fossil Fighters feels like it’s currently a bit rough and in need of a careful clean-up to really realize its compelling concept.