I finished custom robo arena last week, it's quite a great game for how obscure it is

the story is fairly engaging at first, but after a rather cliche villain reveal and a pretty rushed-feeling endgame, it kinda loses steam

there's quite a bit of sidecontent and postgame to enjoy in the form of battles with special objectives (like achieving combos with a given amount of damage) and rematches with like a dozen story characters, locked behind requirements that you're likely to satisfy without even realizing if you naturally experiment with a lot of parts during the main story

that said, the postgame doesn't really have much (in the way of story) beyond the new fights and the ability to buy illegal and military parts (which you can't use in many places but they're fun to collect regardless)

but while the plot doesn't always shine, the gameplay absolutely does, the battles are really a lot of fun thanks to both the solid gameplay mechanics and the sheer variety of different guns, bombs, robos and whatnot you can use

the controls are really streamlined, you don't need any more than 5 buttons excluding the d-pad, and it makes picking up the game really easy as a beginner (while mastering it remains quite hard cause the skill ceiling is driven WAY up thanks to mechanics like several different blast types for explosions, the plethora of combos exclusive to certain combinations of parts...)

oh yeah also you can pose your robos in like dozens of dioramas for each of your saved builds and I spent more time on that than I'd like to admit, it's surprisingly fun even if the touch controls are inherently imprecise

I actually liked the game enough to bother beginning to check out the rest of the franchise (expect me to write more about it)

#driftiniplays #customroboarena

I spent pretty much the entirety of yesterday starting a new playthrough of custom robo arena

I had been playing it as a kid but I never finished it, so a year or two ago I started a fresh save to try and actually finish the game, except I had dropped it again

now we're at the 3rd playthrough and I hope this is gonna be the one I'll finish

some of the dialogues are quite darker than I remember (one kid in particular mentioning he lives in a district crawling with criminality, and a few days later saying his dad got beat up and his mother is afraid of going out, ON A DS GAME)

#driftiniplays #customroboarena