Fossil Fighters: Frontier

Back in 2008/2009 Nintendo released Fossil Fighters on the Nintendo DS.  You played as a young boy arriving on Vivosaur Island, a place where you can dig up fossils, revive them into vivosaurs, and use them to battle against other vivosaurs.  Think Pokemon meets Jurassic Park meets Monster Rancher of sorts.  A couple of years later Nintendo released Fossil Fighters Champions, and just recently they released the third game in the series; Fossil Fighters: Frontier.  Today we’ll be taking a look at Fossil Fighters: Frontier which is actually my first foray into the series.  However, as a fan of Pokemon and Monster Rancher I’m really looking forward to this one, so let’s head on out and see what we can dig up.

The beginning of the game serves as the tutorial for the game, but here we get a tutorial with a story.  You and a group of other kids arrive at what’s known as the Warden HQ in Asia in hopes of becoming official wardens.  You’re given several minor tasks which help serve as the game’s tutorial as you learn to drive around in Bone Buggies while looking for fossils to dig up and revive into vivosaurs, then use them in battles against rogue vivosaurs.  After progressing the story a bit you and your partner for the tutorial will ultimately make your way to Fossil Stadium in an attempt to obtain your warden licenses to become full-fledged wardens.  Once that occurs, the meat of the game begins.

Once you get your warden license you’ll be sent to other Warden HQs around the world to help take care of any issues they may be having.  When a new area opens up you’ll typically go to the HQ, explore a newly available dig site to search for vivosaur fossils in your bone buggy, report back to the warden in charge, learn about some problem they’re having, solve the problem, and repeat for the next area.  You’ll also get access to the Missionator 4000 where you can work on some miscellaneous missions to help earn some money and up your warden rank.  You can also just free roam a dig site in an attempt to dig up more vivosaur fossils.  After finishing up the main story part of a dig site you’ll have access to challenge areas that offer stronger vivosaurs to battle and rare fossils to dig up.  It’s recommended to take these on with a friend early on.

Similar to how one of Pokemon’s primary goals is to catch and battle with Pokemon, Fossil Fighter Frontier’s main mechanics include digging for fossils, reviving vivosaurs from them, and battling with them.  Once you dig up your first fossil for a vivosaur it’ll revive that vivosaur and give it an attack.  Each vivosaur can have up to four attacks at any one time, one for each fossil type found, and the strength of it all depends on how well you do on digging up the fossil.  The more you dig up and the less you damage the fossil while digging, the stronger the move will be.  Each vivosaur can also be one of four elements and each move it has can be useful against various stances a vivosaur can be in, such as downward or forward.  It makes for a lot to remember at first but also forces you to be a little strategic about which vivosaur to use in various situations.

During vivosaur battles you’ll typically have two “Paleo Pals” with you.  Paleo Pals are friends you meet in the game that can help you at dig sites and during vivosaur battles.  Since you can have two Paleo Pals with you at any time, most of your battles will be three-on-one, two, or three.  While battling you have what are called support shots which you can use on your own vivosaur or your partners’ to help give a temporary stat increase or help regain some lost HP.  However, you have a limited number of support shots to use until you have to either exit the park or find a service station to refill them.  Your Paleo Pals can also use their own support shots which will auto-refill after a battle.  Since it’s actually your character using the support shots, you can still use them if your own vivosaur was defeated in battle.

The more I played Fossil Fighters Frontier the more I liked it, but I also started to pick up on a few nuances here and there.  To start with, during vivosaur battles you’ll notice an FP gauge in the upper-left corner.  Each move has an FP cost and each turn you’ll gain a certain number of FP based on your warden rank.  As you use a move your FP gauge goes down based on the move you used and your boost gauge (under the FP gauge) may go up a notch or two.  That’s fine, but it took me a while to realize that you and your Paleo Pals actually share an FP gauge.  That makes little sense as you can’t use higher value moves unless your FP gauge is pretty high.  Granted I’ve rarely come across that issue but it also means you share a boost gauge.  Once a boost gauge is full the current turn’s vivosaur will execute a powerful boost attack, so sharing an FP/boost gauge does make it so things aren’t too easy.

Leveling your warden license can also be a pain.  I mentioned that doing missions can increase your warden rank.  However, you can only raise it so far depending on your license rank.  To increase your license rank you have to compete in tournaments.  There are two types of tournaments you can find in an HQ’s tournament center: Fossil Open and Seven Scramble, the latter of which will help you increase your license rank.  The catch though is that you can only compete in a tournament on the current day and you can only compete in advanced tournaments by clearing the earlier ones first.  To increase your license rank you have to win a certain number of tournaments at certain ranks, such as one one-star tournament, two two-star tournaments, and so on.

To put it better, let’s say I complete my first one-star tournament on Saturday, increasing my license rank.  Now I have access to Saturday’s level two tournament, but I need two level-two tournaments to up my license again but only have one available.  That means I have to finish Saturday’s level two tournament, then wait until Sunday to complete its level one tournament to unlock its level two tournament, complete that, get my new license, then repeat for a few more days.  In other words, unless you fiddle with the clock on the 3DS it’s going to take a few days to fully upgrade your license’s rank…and that’s provided you win those tournaments, and what does all of this accomplish?  Increased max FP and FP recharge rate for increasing your license rank and bonus parts for your Bone Buggy for winning the tournament…which you can also purchase with the cash that you’ll have plenty of throughout the game.

The difficulty of the vivosaur battles starts off pretty easy for a while as you can barrel right through opposing vivosaurs without too much hassle, even when it’s three-on-three.  However you’ll soon get to a point where it’s almost like hitting a brick wall and you’ll just get trashed if you choose the wrong vivosaur or Paleo Pals.  As mentioned earlier some moves are effective against certain stances but could also change your stance leaving you more open to damage.  Combine that with the fact that you can’t change your Paleo Pals’s vivosaurs (or yours once the battle starts) and you could easily find yourself in a situation where you’ll have to return to the park (the central hub for each area), re-choose your Paleo Pals, and try again.  Thankfully you can just teleport to any service station you’ve already activated so you won’t have to backtrack very far to retry story-based battles, but it can get annoying fast when you realize you don’t have the right combination of vivosaurs and Paleo Pals to even stand a chance of winning.

The other issue some people may have is that it gets kind of repetitive as you go on and once you get a decent selection of vivosaurs on your team you might not even care about digging up fossils and just progressing the story and tournaments.  This I didn’t mind too much as I’ll still dig up some fossils here and there but it does get kind of boring after a while.  Still, it is nice to get some stronger vivosaurs on your team other than the ones you find within the first couple of dig sites.  The fossils on the challenge routes are quite rare but the first time you come across them it’s very unlikely you’ll dig it up and the material it’s buried under is a lot tougher than the fossils you’ll typically find on the dig site.  You can eventually gain access to Fossil Marts that sell a couple of items to make the challenge route fossils possible by yourself, but they’re definitely meant to complete with a friend.

Overall, Fossil Fighters: Frontier can be a fun game, but it does have its nuances.  The difficulty can do a complete 180 from pretty easy to getting one-shotted at a moment’s notice, it can get a bit tedious trying to increase your warden license’s rank, the main plot of the story takes a while to actually start, and it can get a bit boring constantly digging for fossils when all you want to do is see dinosaurs battling it out.  The more I played the more it feels like the game is geared more towards younger children who might be looking for an alternative to Pokemon. 

Again, I’ve never played the first two Fossil Fighter games so I can’t really compare Frontier to them, but I did somewhat enjoy this one.  It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but the graphics and music are pretty good, the opening cinematic reminds me of something you’d see out of something like Digimon, and there is a bit of strategy to employ with the battles themselves.    If you’re a hardcore Fossil Fighter fan or someone looking for an easier alternative to Pokemon, you might want to give Fossil Fighter Frontier a shot, but overall you wouldn’t be missing much if you didn’t.