Although Metal Walker is a console RPG, battles are fought in a pinball or billiards-like atmosphere in a top-down perspective arena. As each turn of the battle starts, players decide which direction a Metal Walker will move and how hard they will move. Players are encouraged to form strategies that allow Metal Walkers to hit a single enemy, bounce off a wall, and then hit another enemy, all in a single turn. On the battlefield, players can throw several different types of items onto the field. The items are used when a Metal Walker hits them. Capsules and healing items strengthen and heal Metal Walkers, whereas attack items, such as Napalm, are only useful when the enemy hits them. There also exist Analyzers, which provide the player with Scan Data for any Metal Walker that is bounced into them. Scrap metal won after the battle can then be used with the Scan Data to create new Metal Walkers or purchase items. When an enemy is destroyed, the player's Metal Walker will gain experience points and an item might be obtained. If the player's Metal Walker runs out of Hit points, the player will lose half of the carried scraps and have to start from the last save point. Outside of battle, players explore a top-down overworld where they can explore various towns and dungeons. Most battles occur as random encounters. The overworld has several interactable elements, such as water, which the player needs a certain number of Cores to cross. The player can only carry one Metal Walker at a time and it will follow the main character on the overworld. By defeating the game's bosses, players earn Core Units, which allow Metal Walkers to evolve into new, stronger forms.
Reviews View More
This is a game a friend told me about months back, and I couldn't help but be intrigued. I'm a sucker for Pokemon clones thrown together back during the original Poke-mania boom, and one I'd never heard of, released in English and by Capcom no less, was too tempting an offer to pass up! That said, in my usual fashion, I found a copy for 500 yen and then proceeded to sit on it and never get around to playing it for like half a year, but the important part is that I got to it eventually! XD. It took me around 12 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (via my GameCube GameBoy Player).
Metal Walker takes place on a secluded island called the Rusted Land. 50 years ago, there was some horrible experiment gone wrong that made a huge explosion and destroyed a ton of the island. Core Metal, the main focus of the island's research, is still very valuable though, and core hunters from all over come to the island hoping to make their fortune while avoiding the dangerous metal monsters, Metal Busters, that roam the island. You, the main character Tetto, are on the island with your core hunter father when you're suddenly separated by a metal buster attack. He draws the monster away, leaving you with only your robotic Metal Walker companion Meta Ball for protection and company. Upon waking up, you realize you've been rescued by some kindly folk on the island led by the eccentric Professor Hawke. With the aid of his Pokedex-like wrist watch device, you set out to the island with Meta Ball at your side to find your father and discover just what mysteries the Rusted Land still holds.
The writing is overall just Fine (TM). It's really nothing special, and though it's quite hilariously dark at times, it's still just a kids story at the end of the day. It feels very much like a copy of lots of other "boy goes on an adventure to do The Thing"-type stories that were EVERYWHERE in the 90's, Pokemon-clone or otherwise, and it's not a particularly inspired one of those. The dialogue writing is cute, and it the story does a fine enough job of setting up the action at hand, but it's nothing to care much about on its own.
The gameplay is a very weird thing, and it's what attracted me to the game in the first place. My friend described it as, "Pokemon meets billiards", which prompted the same confused response from me then as I imagine it's eliciting from you now XD. Basically, random battles take place with Meta Ball and from 1 to 3 metal busters on a board. There are various types of board that can spawn depending on where you are in the game, but they all have walls to bounce off of as well as an exit hole for you (or the enemy) to aim for if you want to flee. Much like a billiards (or golf game, to use a likely more familiar example), you pick a direction, gauge the power of your shot, and send Meta Ball pinging into your enemies. If he's the one to initiate the hit, they take damage, but if they're crashing into him, he takes damage, and getting knocked to 0 health means you lose.
There are some other side systems, like finding various core metal elements via boss fights that allow you to transform Meta Ball into new and stronger forms, and there are also items you can toggle on and off to spawn in battle. For your different forms, they're generally just stronger versions of what you already have, but there's also a rock-paper-scissors mechanics where water beats air, air beats land, and land beats water, which is also relatively important to take into consideration (especially for boss fights). Items range from power ups to traps that can hurt you, with both being clearly identified by the former being balls of the light and the latter being skulls. There are even terrain changing items as well to boost certain types of player. While your selected items deploy on your turn and your enemies on theirs, either of you can use items picked up (both power ups and traps), so caution is necessary to succeed if you wanna live, as some of those traps are super dangerous. Lastly, you have money you can use to buy items. Unlocking more items to buy is done by enemies getting scanned in battle, and to do that, you need to bring analyzer items into battle and bump enemies into them, and then take that scan data to shops to unlock the items. It's all a LOT to take in, admittedly, but it's ultimately a lot more straightforward than it seems at first blush.
Unfortunately, it's also a lot more clumsily put together than it might sound at first blush (or perhaps its exactly as clumsy as it sounds here, idk XD). While there are issues with encounter rate being too high and Meta Ball's world-map traversing powers being annoying to use, the game's biggest issue is that the balance is overall quite poor. What type an enemy is is often unclear and matters SO much that you're basically instantly dead in harder fights if you happen to have brought a bad type with you. Items are also really poorly balanced, with some like the attack dropping item or the "touch it and you lose several turns" item being SO overpowered that there's really no reason to consider using anything else in bosses. The game is also quite grindy, and I had to grind at the start for over an hour just to have a Meta Ball powerful enough that he could comfortably take on the enemies in the starting area without fear of dying after just one or two battles.
This all wraps around to the game's premise just not being a terribly strong concept for a video game. The Meta Ball transformations are a neat concept to mirror Pokemon's HM system, but there's too much direct power scaling, so there's really no reason aside from type disadvantage to not use a 3-tier Meta Ball as soon as you have him available (outside of drastic type disadvantage). Items are also generally not very useful for random battles, and so they become more of a chore avoiding the enemies' stuff than your own, especially with how long random battles can take with their lengthy power up and damage animations. Another really big problem is that the GameBoy's hardware just really can't handle the level of precision that you'd really want for a billiards game like this. You only have 16 different angles you can shoot your ball in, and that really severely limits how you can battle. Sure, depending on the weight and movement stats of your respective Meta Ball vs. your opponents', you can fly and ricochet further when struck, but the very low number of possible angles you can actually fire at makes battles start feeling very same-y very quickly. The mechanics are OK enough for a quick single-player RPG experience, I suppose, but they're a far cry from being anything possible to make something meaningfully better than Capcom already made with this.
The game's presentation is about what you'd expect for a GameBoy Color game by '99, but nothing really special. The top-down overworld is pretty and nice looking enough, and the music is fine but overall not terribly memorable. The real highlight of the game's aesthetics are the Metal Walker designs themselves, so if you're a fan of cool looking, very mechanical/non-humanoid robots, then this game will have a lot of fun art to look at for you at least.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't a bad game, as far as GBC RPGs go, but it's a decidedly quite flawed one. I wouldn't really stay it's particularly worth checking out unless you've got a deep curiosity for Pokemon-clone games like me and/or the strange nature of the gameplay makes it sound like something that worth picking up. For all the things you can say about Metal Walker, one thing I cannot deny is that it's a very novel premise for a game, and that's something that neither quality nor the passage of time can take away from it. How much that actually makes it worth playing, however, is gonna be up to you, at the end of the day.
Metal Walker takes place on a secluded island called the Rusted Land. 50 years ago, there was some horrible experiment gone wrong that made a huge explosion and destroyed a ton of the island. Core Metal, the main focus of the island's research, is still very valuable though, and core hunters from all over come to the island hoping to make their fortune while avoiding the dangerous metal monsters, Metal Busters, that roam the island. You, the main character Tetto, are on the island with your core hunter father when you're suddenly separated by a metal buster attack. He draws the monster away, leaving you with only your robotic Metal Walker companion Meta Ball for protection and company. Upon waking up, you realize you've been rescued by some kindly folk on the island led by the eccentric Professor Hawke. With the aid of his Pokedex-like wrist watch device, you set out to the island with Meta Ball at your side to find your father and discover just what mysteries the Rusted Land still holds.
The writing is overall just Fine (TM). It's really nothing special, and though it's quite hilariously dark at times, it's still just a kids story at the end of the day. It feels very much like a copy of lots of other "boy goes on an adventure to do The Thing"-type stories that were EVERYWHERE in the 90's, Pokemon-clone or otherwise, and it's not a particularly inspired one of those. The dialogue writing is cute, and it the story does a fine enough job of setting up the action at hand, but it's nothing to care much about on its own.
The gameplay is a very weird thing, and it's what attracted me to the game in the first place. My friend described it as, "Pokemon meets billiards", which prompted the same confused response from me then as I imagine it's eliciting from you now XD. Basically, random battles take place with Meta Ball and from 1 to 3 metal busters on a board. There are various types of board that can spawn depending on where you are in the game, but they all have walls to bounce off of as well as an exit hole for you (or the enemy) to aim for if you want to flee. Much like a billiards (or golf game, to use a likely more familiar example), you pick a direction, gauge the power of your shot, and send Meta Ball pinging into your enemies. If he's the one to initiate the hit, they take damage, but if they're crashing into him, he takes damage, and getting knocked to 0 health means you lose.
There are some other side systems, like finding various core metal elements via boss fights that allow you to transform Meta Ball into new and stronger forms, and there are also items you can toggle on and off to spawn in battle. For your different forms, they're generally just stronger versions of what you already have, but there's also a rock-paper-scissors mechanics where water beats air, air beats land, and land beats water, which is also relatively important to take into consideration (especially for boss fights). Items range from power ups to traps that can hurt you, with both being clearly identified by the former being balls of the light and the latter being skulls. There are even terrain changing items as well to boost certain types of player. While your selected items deploy on your turn and your enemies on theirs, either of you can use items picked up (both power ups and traps), so caution is necessary to succeed if you wanna live, as some of those traps are super dangerous. Lastly, you have money you can use to buy items. Unlocking more items to buy is done by enemies getting scanned in battle, and to do that, you need to bring analyzer items into battle and bump enemies into them, and then take that scan data to shops to unlock the items. It's all a LOT to take in, admittedly, but it's ultimately a lot more straightforward than it seems at first blush.
Unfortunately, it's also a lot more clumsily put together than it might sound at first blush (or perhaps its exactly as clumsy as it sounds here, idk XD). While there are issues with encounter rate being too high and Meta Ball's world-map traversing powers being annoying to use, the game's biggest issue is that the balance is overall quite poor. What type an enemy is is often unclear and matters SO much that you're basically instantly dead in harder fights if you happen to have brought a bad type with you. Items are also really poorly balanced, with some like the attack dropping item or the "touch it and you lose several turns" item being SO overpowered that there's really no reason to consider using anything else in bosses. The game is also quite grindy, and I had to grind at the start for over an hour just to have a Meta Ball powerful enough that he could comfortably take on the enemies in the starting area without fear of dying after just one or two battles.
This all wraps around to the game's premise just not being a terribly strong concept for a video game. The Meta Ball transformations are a neat concept to mirror Pokemon's HM system, but there's too much direct power scaling, so there's really no reason aside from type disadvantage to not use a 3-tier Meta Ball as soon as you have him available (outside of drastic type disadvantage). Items are also generally not very useful for random battles, and so they become more of a chore avoiding the enemies' stuff than your own, especially with how long random battles can take with their lengthy power up and damage animations. Another really big problem is that the GameBoy's hardware just really can't handle the level of precision that you'd really want for a billiards game like this. You only have 16 different angles you can shoot your ball in, and that really severely limits how you can battle. Sure, depending on the weight and movement stats of your respective Meta Ball vs. your opponents', you can fly and ricochet further when struck, but the very low number of possible angles you can actually fire at makes battles start feeling very same-y very quickly. The mechanics are OK enough for a quick single-player RPG experience, I suppose, but they're a far cry from being anything possible to make something meaningfully better than Capcom already made with this.
The game's presentation is about what you'd expect for a GameBoy Color game by '99, but nothing really special. The top-down overworld is pretty and nice looking enough, and the music is fine but overall not terribly memorable. The real highlight of the game's aesthetics are the Metal Walker designs themselves, so if you're a fan of cool looking, very mechanical/non-humanoid robots, then this game will have a lot of fun art to look at for you at least.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't a bad game, as far as GBC RPGs go, but it's a decidedly quite flawed one. I wouldn't really stay it's particularly worth checking out unless you've got a deep curiosity for Pokemon-clone games like me and/or the strange nature of the gameplay makes it sound like something that worth picking up. For all the things you can say about Metal Walker, one thing I cannot deny is that it's a very novel premise for a game, and that's something that neither quality nor the passage of time can take away from it. How much that actually makes it worth playing, however, is gonna be up to you, at the end of the day.
I beat this on a car ride home, the true handheld experience.
While not really playing much like Pokemon and not even involving actually collecting other robots, just their items, this is definitely a product of the Pokemon craze era. Aside from that, there's a clear environmental theming that feels distinctly 90s.
The concept of a billiards themed battle system (side note: lots of sites say this is pinball-esque, it isn't really) is neat, but this game does very little with it. Every battle winds up feeling similar. Even when items are added, the fact that they're used in a set order and you can't control where they're thrown makes them feel like an overall inconvenience. This game is at least the type where getting through the dungeon is the challenge rather than battles, but it's not hard to get money for items so that's not very engaging either. The high encounter rates just feel like na inconvenience, and the fact that escape is done by hitting a certain point on the map means that leaving battles you want to leave is annoying and there's always a risk enemies will either kick you out and you don't get experience for your kills, or you accidentally kick an enemy you want to kill out.
The story isn't particularly interesting either, but a clear environmental theme is nice at least. There's also a surprising amount of dialogue changes for returning to old areas even if the actual dialogue isn't so unique. There's a manga for this game but I can barely find any info on it, I feel like it would be nice to read.
The only other game that I can think of that plays like this is Monster Strike, and that's a gacha. Not just any gacha but the most lucrative mobile game in the world. Spawn of Demon Lord Mammon. Someone should make a game like this that isn't a service.
While not really playing much like Pokemon and not even involving actually collecting other robots, just their items, this is definitely a product of the Pokemon craze era. Aside from that, there's a clear environmental theming that feels distinctly 90s.
The concept of a billiards themed battle system (side note: lots of sites say this is pinball-esque, it isn't really) is neat, but this game does very little with it. Every battle winds up feeling similar. Even when items are added, the fact that they're used in a set order and you can't control where they're thrown makes them feel like an overall inconvenience. This game is at least the type where getting through the dungeon is the challenge rather than battles, but it's not hard to get money for items so that's not very engaging either. The high encounter rates just feel like na inconvenience, and the fact that escape is done by hitting a certain point on the map means that leaving battles you want to leave is annoying and there's always a risk enemies will either kick you out and you don't get experience for your kills, or you accidentally kick an enemy you want to kill out.
The story isn't particularly interesting either, but a clear environmental theme is nice at least. There's also a surprising amount of dialogue changes for returning to old areas even if the actual dialogue isn't so unique. There's a manga for this game but I can barely find any info on it, I feel like it would be nice to read.
The only other game that I can think of that plays like this is Monster Strike, and that's a gacha. Not just any gacha but the most lucrative mobile game in the world. Spawn of Demon Lord Mammon. Someone should make a game like this that isn't a service.
This is a strange take on a Pokémon style game from Capcom. On its surface it looks like it could be good, with a scrappy cyberpunk aesthetic and big fun sprites for its mech/mon equivalents, but what in the world is this battle system? It’s an almost Puzzle Bobble/billiards-like aiming and bouncing system, but with no sense of weight or physics to speak of. Would want to explore the world more if this battle system was at all pleasant.
Very important part of my childhood but I wouldn't know how it holds up nowadays