Car Battler Joe
- October 31, 2002 14:39 PM PST
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If Mad Max was a Saturday morning Japanese cartoon, then Car Battler Joe would be the licensed video game version. Despite this, it's still a blast to play. Go figure.
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The hero of the game is Joe Todoroki, a spiky haired 16-year-old who's just received his very own set of wheels from his mother. His father, Jim Todoroki, was a legendary car battler on the Grand Prix circuit, but he's gone missing and rumors going around the local villages say he's hooked up with some road bandits. With the help of Mama Todoroki and driving mentor Takah, Joe speeds off on a journey to find himself and figure out what his old man's really up to.
Natsume's PR department has taken to calling Car Battler Joe a "car-PG" in its press releases, but the game's balance is tipped more toward action than straight-up RPG. The world is divided into 20 or so towns and locations, connected by a series of roads that you must run through once, then can skip past later. This being a generic sort of postapocalyptic world, the roads are crawling with enemy cars and gun turrets, which you can destroy with an astonishing variety of lasers, cannons, bombs, and regular old machine gun fire.
As in any RPG, Joe gains experience and levels by blowing up enemies and completing quests and plot events. Instead of buying swords and shields, though, he has to build up a small army of cars, parts, weapons, and other battle necessities. GBA fans who never quite got over their Pok?mon collecting blaze can spend hours upgrading their garage and collecting every part in the game; a lot of them can only be found under rocks and in odd corners of the world.
Doesn't sound like anything special so far, right? The thing is, Car Battler Joe doesn't excel in what it does?it's all in how it does it. Control during battle starts out a little frustrating but quickly becomes smooth and tight once you upgrade your car a little bit. The anime-style graphics are colorful and well drawn, although the 3D battle scenes are plain and look straight out of an early-era SNES racing game. The soundtrack, done by ex-Sega music giant Yuzo Koshiro, is brassy and spectacular; it's a shame that the GBA doesn't have enough bass in its audio output to do it full justice.
In its heart of hearts, Car Battler Joe really doesn't do anything new or original with either of the genres it combines. The story's admittedly pretty weak, and if you're tired of the typical stilted-conversation, characters-walking-in-place style of Japanese console RPGs, Joe will probably do nothing for you. It'll be easy for most others to forgive its flaws, though, because it's easily one of the most fun action RPGs on the portable system. Anyone can make a weird game?it's far more rare for a game to be both this strange and this good.
[NOTE: Just like what they did with Pocky & Rocky with Becky, Natsume ended up delaying Car Battler Joe for several months, making our review of the game in the September issue of GamePro look pretty silly in the process. The game's out now, only available at the GameStop family of stores, and--get this--it's only $19.99 brand new. The review above is just as true as it was this summer--Joe's a great wheelbarrow full of fun and it'd be worth buying for ten dollars more than this price. Get it before it disappears from store shelves forever.]
