Contact - Beat the Game

There are some things Contact does really well, and others it does poorly. What it does well is entertain me with its story and dialgoue.

The basic plot is that the CosmoNOTs are attempting to acquire crystals of elements 117 to use for an unknown, but apparently nefarious purpose, and the mysterious professor is attempting to recover the crystals, which are apparently from his ship. The fact that there is a mystery as to peoples' motivations makes it interesting. The CosmoNOTs seem to be doing bad things, but perhaps nothing too awful. And the professor seems benevolent, but you never really know his motivations. At the end of the game, you don't really learn much more, so the game left me with some blue balls, but at least it didn't disappoint me like Chrono Cross. The ending was just kind of weird, and didn't make a ton of sense, but did leave me feeling sorry for Terry, the character whose actions you control (literally, you don't take the role of Terry, you are yourself, controlling him through a device known as the DS).

The excellent part of this game is the localization. This game was more than just translated, each piece of text was lovingly gone over by someone who understand both Japanese and English and modified to always make sense and often be funny. Yes, the humor in this game is quite high. From internet in-jokes ("I wish a base like this belonged to us" and "Hit its weak point for MASSIVE DAMAGE!") to clever uses of words ("He kept his eyes on the prize and used his thighs!"), it is hard for me to lavish much more praise on the localization of this game. This is the second game I've played recently (the other being Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime) that has had such an amazing localization.

The gameplay itself, unfortunately, is just mediocre. While changing costumes is a nice touch and I like the way you build up skills, actual combat is fairly boring. To build up job skills, you have to repeat a lot of boring tasks.

There are a bunch of side-quests and extra things to do after beating the game, and overall I enjoyed myself, but I think not enough to do them all. That means, unlike Metal Gear Solid 3, a review will probably shortly follow.