RPG Classics Capsule Reviews

Title	Robotrek
Developer	Enix
Year	1995
Platform	SNES
Capsule Rating

Capsule Review: Robotrek was Enix's highly mediocre 1995 attempt at making a "humor-RPG." Its plot is as ludicrous as one might expect (your father is kidnapped! By a bunch of guys called Hackers!), but is actually given unintentional hilarity by the utter atrocity that is the translation. (Grammatical errors? Incoherence? Overly literal translations from Japanese? Yep, the game's got them all.) The result is plenty of idiotic fun, but not, as you may have figured, anything of lasting value. That aside, the game does boast an innovative Combination System; you get to make all sorts of crud using The Invention Machine, from weapons to robots to weather-control machines; you read books to learn how to make stuff; and so on, and so forth. Obviously, with practically no plot pulling it together (oh, there are "characters" and "cutscenes," but the story is so poorly told you may as well give up on it), there shouldn't be much of a reason to do any of that, but again (this time in the game's favor), it's good clean idiotic fun. The graphics are average (or worse) for the time, and the soundtrack ranges from mediocre to bad, but on the plus side, the numerous dungeons are fairly complex, and bosses actually do require an amount of strategy to overcome (mostly through manipulation of weapons using the aforementioned machine). The game also has plenty of little secrets that somehow manage to be extremely engaging, but this is not something you're likely to come back to. It's not great (or let's be honest, even good) - but it isn't an absolute failure.