Contact plays like Akira Ueda’s previous Shining Soul series, but with a bulkier, clumsier MMO combat system and a truly bizarre premise: the player as a middleman and liaison between a cutesy, pixelated space scientist on the run and Terry, a normal modern-day boy thrown into the mix a la Secret of Evermore.

Unfortunately, the game is littered with pointless skill systems, necessitates an outrageous amount of grind, and, disappointingly, its trademark contrast between the three parties goes nowhere, serving no meaningful thematic or mechanical function. Contact wants to subvert and confuse like Earthbound, but it lacks the focus, polish, and purpose.

I dunno. This is sort of cute and quirky but it feels like the whole of the game is just an excuse to get to the eventual twist ending.

It could have been a more nuanced exploration of identity and determinism or whatever, but it really just feels like they had this random idea for an ending, never thought about it further than that, and just made a weird rpg to get to that point.

I know it was directed by one of the Love De Lic dudes, but it definitely lacks the warmth and substance of something like Moon.

That said the skill system sort of reminds me of the SaGa games which is, like, sort of funny but also sort of appropriate.

This game mostly reminded me that I still have to play Michigan: Report From Hell (also directed by Akira Ueda). As a kid I always used to see ads for it on TV but could never actually find the game in stores.

One of those weird hidden gems we stumble by accident.

Once again i come back to this game, i never finished it but i'm writting this review just in case i finally do after so many attempts, so i'll just edit it in the future.

Contact is certainly one of a kind, this game leaks originality and passion, the atmosphere is great, the setting is comfy yet so strange , the music is just beautiful and set's the mood perfectly. This game presents itself quite well, it's just aestheticaly pleasing and really set's itself apart from pretty much anything that has ever came out before, even from the franchise it obviously draws inspiration from which is the Mother/Earthbound series.
Aside from all the positive aspects from this game there's always an elephant in the room when we talk about experimental video games, which is the gameplay. Contact's battle system can be very clunky at times, you basically wait for the main protagonist to hit the enemy, which leads to confusion since action RPG's usually are more fast-paced experiences. The battles can be also very though, even more with the diggestion gimmick, the character heals by eating but he has a limit of how much he can eat for a period of time (besides it's not that easy to farm heal items). The level up system is also a bit unusual, your stats level up as you use them, so attack levels up as you manage to strike enemies in battle, and vitality goes up as you take enemy attacks and so on, i'm not a fan of this since it's basically what FF2 does and can be very annnoying when grinding and also very broken in long terms.

To sum it up, Contact is one hell of a unique experience held back by it's gameplay's flaws, not really huge flaws but little ones that keep stacking up until the problem get's big enough to make most of those who play it end up dropping the game. But being honest, it's one of those things that require patience to get used to, because once you get used to it the game get's much smoother. Keep in mind that this game is hard and sometimes just not fair, so if you're really having trouble just use save states and grind a bit. Enjoy.

Supremely weird game. I don't know if I'd call it "good," but it isn't exactly bad either. It's that Love-de-Lic phenotype mixed with some GHM sensibilites. Surprisingly great soundtrack (though not a surprise coming from Masafumi Takada)!

Combat system is semi turn based but also not really. Leveling up stats requires grinding for that specific stat (ie. getting hit by a physical attack to level physical defense), which takes about as long as you would expect (very). Using skills depletes an SP bar that is only occasionally refilled after defeating enemies. This makes them impractical for most situations you'd want to use them in.

There are a number of outfits the protagonist can wear, each with specific skillsets and statistical advantages. This is a fun idea, but stupefyingly there is only one location in the entire game where you can change between them, meaning you can't actually strategize around having access to more than one at a time. As you can imagine this also makes grinding even worse.

You can cook different foods for use as HP recovery items, but most of them don't restore a lot, and you'll eventually end up just relying on the out of place generic video game potions anyways. Some better dishes can be made at cooking level 55 (fifty five), which requires grinding (with the chef outfit only, of course) for who knows how long. At the end of my playthrough I had this stat leveled to 27. Most other skills have similarly high barriers, why? Well, at least they aren't terribly useful in the first place.

On another topic, the story is beyond explanation partially because there isn't really much of an explanation given. Rather it seems like the product of the devs fucking around and making something they like, which I heavily respect. At one point you travel to Akihabara and some of the televisions there seem to be showing ads for Killer7. In the depths of a(n implied) US Military base you can find images of the GHM devs and some cats (presumably theirs). Playing reminded me of playing games as a young kid because there's so little information about the game both in it and online that it feels like anything can happen.

For as frankly low quality as it feels, there's as much of an unshakeable feeling that it was a human project. That doesn't necessarily redeem it's faults but tinges my experience of it with a strange joy.

Idk man just listen to this

Sinceramente , que jogo interessante ...
É um misto de Earthbound com influências do escritor Murakami ( os famosos sonhos febris).
Adorei os gráficos e o design no geral, a história é muito curiosa, a quebra da quarta parede o tempo inteiro, principalmente porque o protag não sabe que você está sendo controlado, mas o Doutor que dá suporte sabe e está constantemente falando com você ( jogador ) e pedindo para que o Terry não saiba que você o controla.
No geral foi uma bela aventura porém deixa a desejar em alguns quesitos, dá pra perceber que a lapidação do game não foi lá a das melhores, o nível de dificuldade escala absurdamente em algumas etapas do jogo, mas mesmo assim achei uma boa idéia e foi um jogo bem inusitado, marcou e mantém um espaço na minha memória com carinho ao lado de Earthbound e de Lisa.

akira ueda is a guy with quite a resume. at square he would do background/map design for secret of mana and super mario rpg, then at love-de-lic in the same capacity on moon (contact gets understandably compared to earthbound/mother alot but this is perhaps the most relevant 4th wall breaking rpg to talk about with respect to it) and ufo: a day in the life, and then grasshopper manufacture in varied roles on games like flower sun and rain, the shining soul series, no more heroes 2, michigan report from hell, and this. his mixing of charming, plasticky 3d renders and richly detailed 2d art all baked by sunlight for his backgrounds is his distinctive touch, easy to spot in most of these games.

he directed both shining souls and michigan before it, but contact is without a doubt more representative of a total style he has developed. it injects "retro" pixel art into his own more "photoreal" style in a way that mustve been incredibly fresh for 2006 and still looks really slick. the battle system is essentially automatic turn-based like in mmos, with player positioning, item use, and deploying of special skills being the only real tactics on your part. levelling up happens not through winning battles or quests by itself but by simply practicing; use blades to raise your blade stat, cook alot to raise cooking, just run around and your running stat increases, etc. its also full of quirks like a digestion system, in which you cant eat too much food items at once until a set time passes for food items to digest.

the game itself is.... unfortunately kind of a mess with all these elements in it? a bunch of nice ideas that dont add up to much. i dont mind the auto battling itself but you wind up only ever caring about a few stats most of the time and ignoring the majority of the rest, making it feel one note and not encouraging much experimentation. digestion is bypassed almost entirely by buying or cooking potions (which you will rely on a LOT of for bosses and late game areas). side quests are also kinda boring, and areas only allowing one quest at a time made them too annoying to deal with after a certain point (on this note, once you get the core at ft eagle do NOT talk to the guy and girl that appear at the campfire near the start until youre sure theres nothing left in the area to do). id be ok with a lot of this if the story was compelling but it wasnt really...things feel too disconnected and i left it not really understanding the urgency of much of what happens.

i dont think i liked it but it is interesting in certain ways. the music is the best part i think, very underrated work from masafumi takada & jun fukuda and maybe my favorite from the former outside of his suda collabs--if only the battle/sneaking/running away music didnt constantly interrupt the area music. if nothing else contact is intriguing enough that i badly want to try sakura note, the last and only game ueda directed after leaving grasshopper. especially since nobuo uematsu and kazushige nojima were involved too!! but idk if it will ever be translated : (

My favorite JRPG of all time. A bizarrely structured and designed game from top to bottom. The story of which is you (yes, you sitting there) and the player character work in tandem to recover gems for a curiously 8-bit professor.

Beyond the story, there's so many weird little parts of this game like the weapons, food items, cooking, lockpicking, fishing, romancing, and even just petting the dog on your freetime that just require you to just...do the same tasks a lot.

It's an unconventional, grindy game that strives more to look and sound wonderful and it definitely stands in an interesting spot with its very rough game design. It often focuses on combat, which is mostly automated and works with you applying stickers for your stats and just having a better weapon/buff set up.

The main draw to me was the story which, I won't spoil, but definitely has some twist and turns that made me wonder if I even did the right thing or what you do through the entire ordeal was actually correct.

A strange enigma of a game that I adored but recommend with much caution.

Ambitious and ultimately flawed, but I still enjoyed playing Contact.

It's certainly one of the most engaging meta-narrative games I've played since IMSCARED, but it also doesn't quite feel like it achieves everything it wants to do with its bridging the gap between Terry, the Professor, and you/me. Very brave and even thought-provoking, but perhaps just a biiiiit surface level?

The gameplay is easily the most divisive part of the game and for good reason. In some aspects, it feels undercooked. A lot of it is tedious and unengaging by design; it doesn't make for a good-feeling game, but it at least has a reason being the way it is. Experience being divided up into over a dozen stats that level up on gameplay context is very cool, but level grinding is very slow and monotonous due in part to large XP gates and the passive combat.

Still, the charm of games like moon and Chulip do exist in Contact, albeit in a less overt way in favor of playing more like a typical RPG. Dialogue is cute, character designs and art style(s) are mostly pleasing to look at, and the environments are genuinely very well-composed for the DS.

I dunno, I think this is just a good, solid game, and I deeply appreciate its ambition. The ending even tugged at my heart just a bit.

Gameplay is horrible and the story is unfinished. I completely adore what it tries to do but it isn't nearly well built enough to pull off even half its ideas.

Combat is nonexistent and you just walk up to enemies and auto attack unless using specials manually. You will need to backtrack to the ship you use as a base to change around anything, which is a massive chore. Several things just feel tacked on without being fleshed out, like optional dating or special sticker abilities, or cooking/fishing.