Steambot Chronicles (PS2)

This game will debut next year in America as "Steambot Chronicles," which is kind of a cool name. It is an action-adventure about a girl, a young boy with amnesia, and his giant robot.

Now, that sentence might describe a hundred thousand animes -- though please, stick around for a minute. There's more: your giant robot looks like a car with legs, the girl is the lead singer in a jazz-blues-rock band whose guitarist might be trying to kill her so he can raise the backup singer to the lead position, and the only possession found on the young boy with amnesia was a harmonica with his name engraved in it. Exciting, huh? The robot controls much like the ball in Katamari Damashii rolls -- that is, with both analog sticks. The range of attacks (the shoulder buttons) varies depending on what parts you've customized around, and the battles against giant bosses are blessed with immaculate spatial depth and collision detection.

What makes this game so great, and the most significant game of the year? Well, as our theme is "revision" (I mean, let's face it, the Xbox 360 is the newest thing this year, and pretty much all its launch games are sequels), it is clear to me that Bumpy Trot was made with more attention to and care for videogames than any other game this year.

By not trying to create a new genre, it succeeds in being completely original. It is an experience. It feels like the first time you played with a new action figure when you were a kid. It feels a lot like playing with Lego, even. The game doesn't chide its audience or jab us in the ribs. Its graphics aren't great, your travelling band's songs (in English) have really awful lyrics, and sometimes the camera doesn't rotate right. However, it doesn't matter. If you're ready to love a videogame, you can love Bumpy Trot.

Get this: there are virtually no numbers. You buy clothes at stores in the large-scale cities, and all they do is change your character's appearance. Sometimes you get hungry, and can't run anymore. At this time, eat some food at a restaurant or a bakery. If you need more money, try playing one of your various musical instruments at a pedestrian-heavy street corner, and seeing what kinds of donations you get. You get lots of opportunities to be mean to the girl, which you can do if you want, I suppose. I tried to be nice to her when I played. It's hard not to. You can give her presents -- like clothes -- and she'll be wearing them the next day. Soon, you join their band, and play at their concerts, and travel with them from major city to major city, getting involved in scuffles with bandits. One particular scene in the desert, when bandits attack, is especially memorable. The landscapes are wonderful.

The story isn't literature, though it evokes a kind of feeling that every Japanese game, lately, is trying to evoke and not succeeding, and it does it mostly by just being itself.

Nintendo re-releases Super Mario Bros. on Gameboy so many times because it allows them to run commercials wherein pop-stars get surprised at how tiny the Gameboy Micro is. The re-release of the Famicom Mini re-release of Super Mario Bros., first released in 2004, was the top-selling Japanese game released in 2005 for dubious reasons. It evoked cheap nostalgia for a game we played long ago.

Other games, like Square-Enix's failed, miserable mish-mash (though I actually, uh, kind of love it) Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, or the eventual mega-hit Kingdom Hearts II, use a name or familiar characters to cheat us into a purchase, to trick us into remembering the time when we liked these things.

What Bumpy Trot does, however shrewdly, is introduce us to something we can like as much as we used to like things like it. It's a remarkable feat. That it sold more than a hundred thousand copies in Japan following no publicity is a small miracle. If these words don't make you think I'm some kind of weirdo, then when it's released in English by the heroes at Atlus, do yourself a favor and pick it up. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

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By not trying to create a new genre, it succeeds in being completely original.

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Gwendo said:

It is an action-adventure about a girl, a young boy with amnesia, and his giant ...

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Vault Dweller said:

Gwendo said:

It is an action-adventure about a girl, a young boy with amnesia, and his giant ...

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Now THAT is a promising *action* adventure game.

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Nael said:

By not trying to create a new genre, it succeeds in being completely original.

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A Japanese import with a giant robot? How incredibly original!

I hope a race of aliens that look like giant robots really does exist, and I hope they wipe Japan off the face of the map some day. I'd laugh my ass off. Self fulfilling prophecies kick ass.

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Vault Dweller said:

Gwendo said:

It is an action-adventure about a girl, a young boy with amnesia, and his giant ...

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Now THAT is a promising *action* adventure game.

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Section8 said:

PS I hope this game has katanas, because they are the bestest sword ever, and can cut through robots.

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Saint_Proverbius said:

The Japanese suck.

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the girl is the lead singer in a jazz-blues-rock band

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the normal playtime is likely around 25-30 hours, while partaking in most of the bonus stuff will ramp that up to 35-40. Additionally, there are multiple paths to the game, based on dialogue choices and actions taken during the course of a playthrough. There's quite a lot of replay value here.

There's so much to Steambot Chronicles that it's hard to fit it all into a single review. From robots to women, from clothes to food, from mining to sheep ranching, there's a lot of activity in this one little quirky, humorous game. If you're at all into the sandbox game-style, then Steambot Chronicles is the sandbox for you. Just be careful not to get sand in your Trot's joints.

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Saint_Proverbius said:

Section8 said:

PS I hope this game has katanas, because they are the bestest sword ever, and can cut through robots.

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I brought that up to EvoG after he insisted I watch the Metal Gear movie about the new one coming out. You have a guy machine gunning these robots with no effect on them at all. None. He eventually has to hide from them with his stealth suit. Flash forward a few minutes and you have an effeminate looking ninja dude wiping out 5 to 10 of these robots with a katana.

The Japanese suck.

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sheek said:

Looking at the thread title I thought this was going to be a steampunk RPG and worth reading. Thanks for wasting my time.

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Saint_Proverbius said:

Section8 said:

PS I hope this game has katanas, because they are the bestest sword ever, and can cut through robots.

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I brought that up to EvoG after he insisted I watch the Metal Gear movie about the new one coming out. You have a guy machine gunning these robots with no effect on them at all. None. He eventually has to hide from them with his stealth suit. Flash forward a few minutes and you have an effeminate looking ninja dude wiping out 5 to 10 of these robots with a katana.

The Japanese suck.

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To be fair, American movies have the same sort of unrealistic glorification. Like Rambo using a machine gun to kill scores of professional soldiers. Or Chuck Norris uses karate to defeat a man twice his size in a fist fight. I think I remember a movie where the Rock beats a bunch of men armed with guns with a stick (or something like that). Its the glorification of a heroic archetype. The only difference is the effeminate part.

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but it's not quite the impossibility of a sword cutting up robots.

But my original jibe was against wapanese kiddies who believe everything they see in fucking cartoons.

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(...)Steambot Chronicles is a game with a lot of charm that sometimes gets hidden with control and performance issues. But if you get sucked into the world's crazy population and the variety of things to do, you can find yourself easily whittling away the hours. A voice at the game's title screen pegs it as "a relaxing nonlinear adventure," and there's definitely something to be said for being able to take on the job of a bus driver as you try to help a bandit king eventually land on the moon. If you're looking to spend upward of 25 hours on a wacky experience and you don't mind a few blemishes, consider giving Steambot Chronicles a try.

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