Game:

Custom Robo (2004)

Duration: 10:45

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Original Air Date: January 17th, 2010

Custom Robo is one of those GameCube titles that I just "don't get". While I don't take any offense to the opinions of others, I'm calling it how I see it. This section contains my opinion, while the secondary segment contains general information. This is one of the most boring GC titles I've played in some time, and I have a reasonably sized GC collection. The fact that you have to play a Story Mode which is largely one giant tutorial throughout (seriously... when people tell you common sense stuff like stand and press "A" or go to a parts generator at the end of the game, you kinda wanna punch something) just to unlock Arcade Mode and free battles against the CPU is an absurd concept to me. The action and customization is somewhat akin to some of your "favorite" mech action games like Armored Core.

While you assemble a large variety of robos, some items are just impractical to use in a serious battle and others are rendered obsolete by more effective items in the same group. Additionally, why they thought throwing up to four players in arenas roughly the size of a cubicle would be great fun is anyone's guess, but even the slow robots can reach one end of the arena within a second or two, so you have little room to fight and not get blown up by friendly fire. The arenas themselves don't have enough variety.

Add to that a series of walls, obstacles, and traps, and it just seems like too much going on in areas with too little and many of the strategies presented in the game fall flat on their face. If it had the same great arenas as, say, Gotcha Force (fuuuuuuun game that I'd play over this), this wouldn't even be an issue. The story itself is relatively uneventful and at times a bit ridiculous, though it poses a few surprises here and there...even going as far as to pull an "Xenogears" portion with like an hour and a half of talking in an attempt to fill in all the plot holes.

The audio is mostly unremarkable. The game has strange "auto-save" points, but you can't save manually from my understanding, but it doesn't matter as the CPU is pretty dumb and rarely requires you to change your default weapons in order to win (until you start 2-on-2 battles and fight some late opponents), even in spite of the controls being so loose.

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Custom Robo is a multiplayer action game where characters assemble the "perfect" robo and fight in arenas know as "Holosseums", miniature arenas where miniature robots do battle. Besides fighting with robos, they are very important to the game's story and the livelihood of the characters in Custom Robo. Robos are also used to stop criminals and enforce law through a series of sessions known as "Dives", where characters do battle with robots and suffer mentally in the physical world depending on the outcome.

The game is about a nameless hero who becomes a "commander" (of Custom Robos) due to his little-known father's last wish. You have become of age, have lost both your parents, and you are running out of money that your father has given you to live, so you go out to get a job as a commander for the agency known as "Steel Hearts", a group of bounty hunters (also called bottom-feeders) who take any job they can to help people and put their name on the map.

Steel Hearts is comprised of Ernest (your boss), Harry (a loveable goofball and womanizer who can't shut up when it comes to giving battle tips), Marcia (a beautiful but strange, weak-willed and "distant" girl with the unusual ability to "Half-Dive", which has made some call her a freak), and yourself, the star with amazing raw talent but is largely looked at as a rookie throughout the game. The story expands as you take different jobs and begin to get involved in affairs that are "too big for Steel Hearts to handle", but ultimately make Steel Hearts the best agency for solving problems and become allies with the police force.

The goal of the game is to battle as many people as you can find to gain battle experience and acquire new parts. You start with very few and won't have too many even after completing the initial story, so you must continue to battle during the game's "Grand Battle" after-story. Doing so gives you more options for customization and ultimately makes multi-player more fun.

Battles take place in small arenas where robos emerge from cubes and grow to around 30 centimeters tall to do battle. The arenas you fight in are pre-installed into a robo or are generated based on memories of the robo-user. There are various kinds of robos that can be tweaked and customized to your personal play style and many parts to collect as well as various battle rules, so you can make interesting battle set-ups and strategies.

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