Review HiSpace 2/5 · Sep 11, 2023
Nostalgia can be really cruel
I don't think there was anything cooler as a kid than Bakugan. Gormiti had tried but failed, Pokémon was cool in videogames but no so much in toys, Beyblade became stale after a few days. But Bakugan? As a kid, that was the shit.
After school, many kids would get together and play some Bakugan while our parents spoke …
I don't think there was anything cooler as a kid than Bakugan. Gormiti had tried but failed, Pokémon was cool in videogames but no so much in toys, Beyblade became stale after a few days. But Bakugan? As a kid, that was the shit.
After school, many kids would get together and play some Bakugan while our parents spoke with each other. We would also exchange them and try to lead our own rankings.
So, when the game released, it was an obvious Christmast choice, and you can bet I did have fun as a kid, but even my youth didn't prevent me from seeing the flaws of the game, starting with its nonexistant difficulty or its repetitive gameplay core.
The way the game plays is similar to the series: You and your rival play a card, throw a Bakugan, and when you find each other on the same card, it is revealed and the one with more points win.
The developers probably thought (rightly) that the game needed something else, so they added controlling the Bakugan when you throw it and minigames to add more points before each fight. Both of these things ended up being radically problematic:
- At first, controlling your Bakugan as a ball to move it to where you want feels like a fun gimmick, but as you advance, it becomes more and more important, and you end up going around for minutes around the battlefield to get all the boosters.
- Then, in case you didn't have enough points to win the fight (which would already be unlikely) a short minigame (where you press buttons or move the joystick's sticks) appears allowing you to get many more points than your rival, that will always fail a few times.
The game ends up being a repetition of the same three actions throught the entirity of it.
A fun game to play as a kid, but a terrible choice to replay as an adult.
