>>41184426I played the GBA and Wonderswan Medabots and the concept was really interesting, and some of the actual game was pretty interesting. However, in the end the game was basically all trainer battles, all the time. Yes, they were multiple-bot teams, and there was a good amount of strategizing between which parts to use and which parts to target on the enemy. But the battles end up taking longer and longer the deeper into the game you get, so it turns into a slog.
Also, I've always thought that a lot of the game is quite ugly. There's something about the color palette and tileset that just disgusts me, which is a shame because the characters and Medabots look pretty good and distinguish the game's visually from other games of the period.
Medabots Girls Mission was certainly better looking, but I think it was a flop in Japan and I wasn't impressed with it. It was clunky and really sort of awkward to play, and it lacked the charm of the GBA game.
Other games I can't speak to.
One game that's very similar in theme to Medabots but much more Pokemon-like in gameplay is Zoids Legacy. It's very, very much lower-budget than Pokemon or Medabots, but it's got the same sort of
>Collect all the weapon parts>Collect all the Zoids speciesmechanic, and while some would say it got repetitive to try and collect them all when they had duplicate effects or strategies, you could say the same of Pokemon's roster. Zoids also had much more fleshed out NPCs because a lot of them were characters from the series that had been released up to that time and so had actual backgrounds and personalities to base their in-game interactions on.
