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Monster Lab
Wii
A Monstrous Hybrid of Awesome and Terrible
3.5/5 stars
“Monster Lab” for Wii is a port of the PlayStation 2 game of the same name. A quirky game combining mini-games and turn-based battles seems like it would be a perfect match for Nintendo’s casual-friendly console. Yet “Monster Lab” has languished in near complete obscurity. Is “Monster Lab” a bad game deserving of its obscurity? Or is it a hidden gem suffering, like so many other third-party games, from customer perception that only Nintendo’s first-party games are worth buying? I took the plunge on this bargain-priced game with the aim of finding out.
Presentation
Like the Frankenstein-style monsters it’s based around, “Monster Lab” is a mismatched amalgam of ill-fitting parts. This mishmash nature permeates every aspect of the game, including the presentation. The graphics engine uses two completely different styles for the two main gameplay modes. Battles are fully polygonal 3D affairs that actually look pretty good, despite the Wii’s inability to output a high-resolution picture, and are well-animated. Many part-construction experiments (and all resource-gathering), however, are completely 2D, and not in a good way. Instead, the 2D portions of the game resemble primitive Flash games, with little-to-no animation and a minimal number of flat objects layered on top of other flat objects. It is extremely rare that I prefer polygons to sprites, but the 2D graphics in “Monster Lab” feel incredibly cheap.
The cutscenes, thankfully, utilize the game’s 3D engine, which gives them a lot of character and personality. The handful of characters the player can interact with look great and have a characteristic ‘steampunk’ style that complements the game’s theme of mad science.
The game’s audio is solid all-around. While the soundtrack is relatively small, the tracks are well-suited to the game’s themes and setting, and at least one of them (the Haunted Organ) is pretty catchy. The voiceacting is also quite well-done, despite using a cast of unknowns.
There are two other small things of note that negatively impact “Monster Lab’s” presentation. First, there is the technical issue of long load times. Every battle or mini-game has a painfully long load screen before AND after it. Second, “Monster Lab” has some of the WORST box art I have seen since the 8-bit days. A disembodied green head licking an enormous snot bubble coming out of a disembodied monkey head? Yeah, that’s appealing.
Story
“Monster Lab” opens with a cheesy, 1940’s newsreel-styled CG movie inviting the player to join the ‘Mad Science Alliance.’ What is the goal of the MSA? To create monsters, of course!
Upon arriving at the MSA mansion, however, our nameless protagonist discovers that the MSA fell to infighting and dispersed. A power-grab by Baron Mharti, an Englishman with an enormous chin, caused all of the members to go their separate ways. Now, the MSA mansion is occupied solely by Fuseless (rhymes with ‘useless’), a short, bald, hunchbacked, Russian mechanic with a mechanical third arm mounted on one shoulder. Impressed by the protagonist’s mad science potential, Fuseless makes the player his Apprentice, and insists this new Apprentice shows off his/her talents to the other members of the MSA, with the ultimate aim of constructing a monster powerful enough to defeat Baron Mharti and return the MSA to its glory days of cooperative monster construction.
Thus the Apprentice is sent on a variety of missions, both to defeat Baron Mharti’s monsters and minions that are wrecking havoc all around the countryside, and to gather better resources to build stronger monsters. In the process, the Apprentice must gain the confidence of both Sondebar, a curvaceous German biologist with a fishbowl on her head, and De La Sombre, a crazed Spanish alchemist who always refers to himself in the third-person. Befriending these two colorful characters not only reunites the Mad Science Alliance, but provides the Apprentice with more monster-construction options.
Overall, “Monster Lab” has a minimal and straight-forward story. The characters have some humorous dialog and a variety of silly situations arise, but the narrative is ultimately not very deep. It’s entertaining for what it is, and gives the player a steady forward pull from the game’s beginning to end, but it just isn’t enough to drive an epic-scale RPG. Fortunately, “Monster Lab” is an extremely short RPG, clocking in at around 15 hours for players who don’t waste a lot of time.
Gameplay
The mishmash nature of “Monster Lab” is most strongly evident in the disconnect between the two main gameplay modes. “Monster Lab” is both an old-school turn-based RPG and a completely modern mini-game collection. These two genres appeal to completely different audiences, with turn-based RPGs revolving around nerdy, strategic number-crunching and mini-games revolving around short burst of inane action. Combining the two is a good way to ensure that neither audience is happy.
The RPG part of “Monster Lab” consists of the battle system and exploration. After assembling a monster from 5 parts (torso, head, legs, right arm, left arm), the player can explore the game’s top-down environments and fight an endless stream of enemy monsters in one-on-one battles. Each monster part has its own statistics and takes damage independently, allowing two different victory conditions: either destroy the torso or knock off all the limbs (these apply to both enemy monsters and the player’s monster). The torso part has an energy statistic that determines what parts can be attached and how many attacks a monster can perform before needing to recharge (which is just skipping a turn to refill the energy meter) or dodge (which is attempting to evade attacks while partially refilling the energy meter). There are dozens of different monster parts, each with different attacks that target different parts of the enemy’s body, consume different amounts of energy, and deal different amounts of damage. Constructing an efficient and powerful monster is fun and requires careful planning to maximize combat potential. Should a monster have attacks that are strong, but only target limited areas? Should a monster have the ability to flee random battles? Should a monster go all-offense, or should it have the ability to block incoming attacks? There are numerous different strategic options available, which are supplemented further by a Rock-Paper-Scissors-style system of strengths and weaknesses in which mechanical parts are strong against biological parts, which are strong against alchemical parts, which are strong against mechanical parts. While it is possible to craft a monster that is fully mechanical, biological, or alchemical, it is also possible to craft a hybrid monster that includes one or more parts of each type. I found it was best to craft three pure monsters (one of each type), as each location on the map is dominated by one particular type of monster. Even the final boss fell to a well-made, single-type monster.
The mini-game part of “Monster Lab” consists of resource-gathering and monster part-construction. It’s impossible to build a monster without parts, and it’s impossible to build parts without resources. Thus the player must spend a disproportionate amount of time in these repetitive and time-consuming mini-games. While defeated monsters do drop a few resources, the only way to get enough resources and high-quality resources is to play the mini-games, which provide higher-quality rewards as the player’s Mad Science Rank increases (by earning Mad Science Points through quests, battles, and experiments).
The resource-gathering mini-games are essentially boring Flash games scattered around the game’s environments. After playing one, it takes a while for it to ‘refill,’ requiring the player’s monster to run around the map and fight battles to kill time. While there are a lot of these games, none of them are very interesting and all of them are pathetically easy… unless the Wiimote or Nunchuck decides to throw a fit and stop responding, as all of these mini-games rely heavily on motion controls. The resources granted by these mini-games can also be completely nonsensical (Why did I get a pair of Clown Shoes by shaking a tree?), making it difficult to determine which mini-games to play to get which resources.
The part-construction mini-games are slightly more interesting than the resource-gathering mini-games, and they are more challenging (but still heavily motion-controlled). Part-construction games are all located in the MSA mansion and can be played over and over with no delay, provided the player has plenty of ingredients. To construct a part, it is necessary to combine a key ingredient with a secondary ingredient. While there are dozens of different key ingredients, secondary ingredients all fall into a handful of subtypes, each with four different quality levels. The quality of the secondary ingredient determines both the quality-potential of the constructed part and the difficulty of the mini-game required to construct the part (level 4 difficulty is nearly impossible in most construction mini-games). Player performance in the mini-games determines the final quality of the part, anywhere from 1%-100% (though anything less than 80% should just be thrown out). The problem with these part construction mini-games is that each part recipe has exactly one secondary ingredient that will provide an extra bonus ability to the part, while other secondary ingredients will rarely result in no extra ability and frequently result in an extra penalty (and thus a useless part to be thrown out). Many of the recipes rewarded in the course of the game’s story do provide the correct secondary ingredient for the bonus ability, but the vast majority of parts need to be made via random experimentation. While experimentation fits the theme of mad science just fine, it’s also incredibly tedious to play the same mini-game over and over and over again, using different secondary ingredient until hitting on the correct combination. Mercifully, the game does keep track of correct recipes, so the player doesn’t have to worry about remembering all of them.
Overall
“Monster Lab” is decent fun for a budget title that was ported to the Wii from a previous-generation console. While the mini-games are somewhat poor and tedious, the RPG battle system at the heart of the game is shockingly good. If part-creation and resource-gathering had been streamlined, “Monster Lab” could have been significantly better (Perhaps the PS2 version, with its lack of motion controls is better?). As it is, “Monster Lab” is still enjoyable, though much improved with the addition of a monster part recipe list downloaded from the Internet. This is a quirky, niche RPG that offers the most appeal to gamers who liked Taito’s doodle-based games, “Magic Pengel,” and “Graffiti Kingdom,” on the PS2.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: Battles 5/5; Item Creation 2/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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