Bakugan: Champions of Vestroia

Alex95

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Alex95
So, this is a thing now. Apparently, WayForward is working on a new Bakugan game. Admittedly, having grown up with the original TV series and card game, I was a little excited to see Bakugan return. ...Except it's not Bakugan at all.

For those of you who do not know what Bakugan is, you have these little ball creatures that you throw out onto a battlefield and see them transform to do battle with each other. You place down Gate Cards or Trap Cards that can offer various effects, such as boosting the power level of your Bakugan or making it so your opponent can't swap out, among other things. You also have Ability Cards that do various things. You can send out three Bakugan at a time, and a battle occurs when two Bakugan meet on one Gate Card.

Yeah, so scrap all of that exciting stuff and you get this new game. You still send out Bakugan, but only one at a time, and they exchange slaps while you run around the field collecting energy tiles. These tiles power-up your Bakugan and allow you to use one of their abilities, but it looks pretty... boring and slow. The only returning Bakugan I've seen so far is Dragonoid, and he looks terrible, though there is one other returning Bakugan announced that I don't know the name of. The kid running around and trying not to get stepped on by their three-story tall monster is hilarious, though.

The field play of this game also seems sloppy, at least from what was shown so far. The animation framerate is choppy, loading takes a longer time than it should (a good three seconds before the game tells you you got an item after getting it), and it seems mostly like a "do this" scenario where you complete quests to progress. While nothing's really been shown for the story, I don't have high hopes for the base game play.

This may very well be based on the newer series of Bakugan cartoons, which bored me five minutes into the first episode because so many things felt way too out of place. This is apparent with the game's artstyle, and Dan Kuso returns as a tutorial character in the game rather than his role as the main lead in the show. Runo? Julie? Marucho? Shun? Nah, don't need them anymore.

Sure, we've only seen a small chunk of the game so there's a lot we don't know. But we have a Bakugan DS game that looks like it plays better than this, so I don't feel like this game will be exciting. And before you say this game is meant for kids, so was the original concept, and it was far better.

Trailer, btw:
 
I kinda fell off Bakugan after New Vestroia, but I remember enjoying the DS game when I was younger. Leonidas was a pretty cool character.

Not sure how I feel about this, though. I feel like it might've been better just to adapt and modernize the gameplay of Battle Brawlers instead of whatever this is.
 
it kinda feels like what they did with pokemon unite. they hyped it up more than they should've. i mean they didn't really hype it, but they made fans think wayforward was gonna make a sonic game or something. now granted, it definitely made some people really happy and hyped, but the majority of people watching the presentation left right after the announcement (including myself just because i have no bakugan knowledge). i sure hope the next time they hype up something it'll actually be worth the wait.
 
it kinda feels like what they did with pokemon unite. they hyped it up more than they should've. i mean they didn't really hype it, but they made fans think wayforward was gonna make a sonic game or something. now granted, it definitely made some people really happy and hyped, but the majority of people watching the presentation left right after the announcement (including myself just because i have no bakugan knowledge). i sure hope the next time they hype up something it'll actually be worth the wait.

i have no investment in bakugan but i just want to say nintendo didn't "hype it up" and they definitely didnt say it was gonna be sonic or anything in particular at all. if anything, they actually made efforts to downplay any hype people had by tweeting out that it wasn't a nintendo title so people weren't endlessly speculating about. i know people are starved for information from nintendo but ive noticed a lot that nintendo fans just seem to stir themselves up into a frenzy over nothing and then blame nintendo for not meeting their ridiculous expectations and i think it is, quite honestly, kinda dumb. it wasnt even a nintendo direct this time, it was a freaking treehouse stream. even during e3 nintendo only ever really uses treehouse to announce smaller stuff that most people dont care about (which became synonymous with 3ds games in the past few years), or just not announce anything at all and have gameplay from the main presentation, so theres no precedent for people setting their expectations so high

anyway rant aside, i dont really have much to say about this, since as i said i dont really have any investment in bakugan, although it has served as a good reminder to me that, despite the fact that wayforward got it's reputation from shantae, they do still make middling licensed games like this to pay the bills, and i guess i've always found it interesting that such a well-liked studio who has become synonymous with good indies still has to do this kind of stuff
 
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