Has anyone else tried this game? It's pretty good.
On the tropical Vivosaur island, the Richmond archaeological foundation has built a fantastic resort. Using the brilliance of Dr. Diggums, they have developed a process to revive dead animals from fossil fragments. As a side-effect of this process, the dead animals are not complete copies of the creatures they originally were in life - they gain unusual appearances and best of all - superpowers. Vivosaur Island has become a playground for the rich where wealthy young dinosaur fanatics can revive extinct animals in the form of superpowered monsters and fight them against each other for glory and fame.
A (another!) Mons series from Nintendo, Fossil Fighters is a collection Mon RPG/paleontology sim for the DS. It is Nintendo's answer to Spectrobes and Dinosaur King.
The overworld is a lot like Custom Robo Arena. There is a single town that expands a bit as you play. There seems to be about 5 adventure fields that you revisit and that expand as you progress in the story as you get new items. At a dig site, you can fight NPCs, dig up Fossils, and go on story-related quests.
The gameplay flow consists of:
* Digging up a Fossil. Simple enough - use the radar to find the blips, hit the ground, and you get a fossil. Occasionally enemies will challenge you to a fight for a Fossil. Digging may get you a plain old rock (junk), a Gem Rock (sold for high value if cleaned), and one of four types of Fossil Rock (Head, Torso, Arms, Legs).
* Cleaning - a very intense minigame. You have about less than a minute to excavate the fossil. You get points for clearing away debris, and lose points for damaging the fossil. You only have one type of each Vivosaur in the game. Improvements on Fossil cleaning the same type of fossil add stats to already dug-up Vivosaurs. Completing Vivosaur skeletons unlocks new moves. Fossils that don't beat high scores are donated for points which can be exchanged for rare Fossil Parts.
* Battle - Battle plays a lot like a TCG. You have Fossil Points, which are you mana. You get a set ammount for each turn that you can build up for more powerful attacks, or spend on weaker attacks. There are four slots on the battle field - the leader, which does the most damage, can target all of the enemy slots except the escape slot, but also takes the most damage. Two support slots - they can target the leader, but not the enemy's support slots. Their damage taken is reduced, as well as their damage output (unless they're a ranged attacker like a flying Pterosaur-type or a charging Pachychepalasaurus type.) Each Vivosaur has 4 attacks that can be unlocked with each new piece of their skeleton. You gain levels via either battling or improving on excavating fossils. There's a simple elemental battle system in place, ala Pokemon. You can cause the Leader retreat to an escape zone for a few turns, which renders it unable to do anything, but it won't take any damage - and one of your Support Vivosaurs can be switched in.
The story is crap, the same old "Three Evil Goons want to steal monsters to commit crimes and you have to stop them and become a Vivosaur Master" that Pokemon has beaten into the ground, which is a shame because they could have had you fighting against evil humanoid Dinosaurs, or evil Cavemen, or time-traveling or anything more interesting. I'm told it gets better, though, and culminates with a fight against a giant robot in outerspace . . . somehow.
Oh, also, while you battle, two of the game's creators run commentary on the top screen that is VERY, VERY funny, don't miss it. They have some of the best dialogue I've ever seen in a videogame.
There's a shop where you can sell Jewels and fossil rocks to buy upgrades to your tools, but it's very, very expensive. There's also a museum mode that lets you view information on all the dinosaurs and prehistoric animals the Vivosaurs used to be.
All in all, I'm really loving this game, although I'm getting a bit tired of all of the T-Rex like carnivorous dinosaurs that dominate much of the early game. You'll find more carnivorous dinosaur parts early on than any other kind, which doesn't really make any sense (the prey should be more numerous than the predators) and all of the T-rex style dinosaurs like Shamshamsaurus (Sp?) kind of blur together.
All in all, a pretty good game and I'd really like to see a sequel with an expanded array of dinosaurs and more prehistoric and extinct creatures (I was a little dissapointed to find that you couldn't raise Trilobites, Anomalocaris, Dodos, or early hominids).
The battle system plays much more like the Pokemon TCG than the Pokemon video games, though.
I love extinct animals, though. I hope they continue this series and stuff in pretty much any animal that was ever in those "Walking With Prehistoric Animals" BBC CGI documentaries.
On the plus side, Andrewsarchus is in it. It is an ancient predatory mammal that is a relative of dolphins and was one of the largest terrestrial predators ever. And it had hooves. It was basically a dolphin-wolf-horse thing. Awesome.
Also, the writing, story, and dialogue are noticeably better than any of the Pokemon games (but it's still not exactly Final Fantasy or something).