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jp's Igor: The Game (DS)

[January 17, 2022 02:46:09 PM]

What a strange game.

I think it's based on an animated movie and at least one of the game's listed creators (license holder?) is a film studio. The game also has a charming art style that, I would guess was developed for the animated film, with weird/interesting characters as well...a zombie rabbit, a brain in a jar, etc.

The game itself is really strange in this context. You're the titular Igor and you want revenge (and the girl) on your former master, so you create a new creature (Frankenstein's monster) from parts, and enter it into fighting tournaments. You start with freebie parts and you can later craft better parts from items you get from defeating random monsters that appear in different parts of the map.

Initially there are only like 3 places you can go, with two more serving as places to go to have a random encounter with a monster that'll hopefully net you some raw materials. You use the raw materials in your workshop and you have to buy plans from a shop in order to even make them. By my arithmetic, you'd need 4 wins against a random monster, plus another win elsewhere to have enough money (40 coins) and parts (16, 4 per fight). This seems quite a slog to me, especially since the fights aren't all that easy - and can take quite a bit of time even as they play out..well, mostly the same.

Fights are basically a match-3 style puzzle battle. Your monster is fighting another monster and as you match-3 you fill up jars, one for each body part. Then the jar reaches a threshold you can tap it, and trigger an attack using that body part. The more you fill it up, the stronger the attack.

That match-3 part I'm not sure entirely how it works (in terms of matches leading to how much of the jar fills up). You always get a two-part "pill" and each pill half can be in one of 4 colors (red, blue, yellow, green). However, the matches don't happen when you get three of a kind, but rather when a regular color part of a pill comes into contact with a "energy" pill of the same color. Sometimes half of the pill is an "energy" half. If it doesn't collide with it's same color (energy or regular), then nothing happens, it just sits there on the playfield and could presumably come into play via future combos.

So, combos are good - but in practice I never saw them result in a huge impact on the filling the jars side of things, so I was a bit disappointed by that. It turns out your monster also has a bunch of stats, so maybe that's playing some role in all of this? (a different monster might fill the jars more effectively from combos?)

So far I made 3% progress in the game - lost a few battles and was kind of underwhelmed by the prospect of having to play more battles, grind my way to better resources, but play effectively the same game over and over with little variation and...it just felt too slow to keep my interesting. I should take a look at youtube videos just to see if there's anything more to the game? There are at least 12 un-active locations on the map that I presume do something interesting, but who knows?