Beyblade
Playstation
Reviewed: 3/3/03
Some people get rich by way of their talents, abilities, or great ideas.
Professional athletes, inventors, and certain musicians are some examples
of these people. The guy that came up with Beyblade, however, needs
a swift beating and his money should be given away in an essay contest
about copyright law. Why? Because Beyblade is a blatant rip-off
of Pokemon, Digimon, Yugi-Oh, and Robopon combined.
Seriously, the originality here would be LUCKY to be described as "lacking!"
It uses the all-too-familiar concept of taking your creatures around to
different areas, leveling up, and strengthening the characters in that
special kid-type way. And, again in similarity to the aforementioned
series, the story is quite half-assed. It’s more of an excuse to
have the game/cartoon.
Where the small difference lies between this and others of the same genre
(you know, the "mon" genre) is in the stupid battles. You’ll be spending
the bulk of your time just watching your spinning top whirl around a ring
and bumping into the enemy’s every now and then. All you do is sit
and hope to Heaven that you can move your poorly-controlled top in the
right direction. Oh, oh, and once in a while, you get to take a defensive.
And if you’re a VERY good boy, you’ll be able to pull off a special maneuver...
but don’t let that excite you, for it happens about once in a blue moon.
And while all this is going on, you have tin-canny sounds overlapping a
hokey announcer shouting a recycled handful of stupid phrases to NO END!
Argh! In my personal dictionary, this game’s fight announcer will
be used as an example definition of “irritating.”
To conclude, the TV show isn’t anything special, and the game proves similar
in quality (or lack thereof). At only $10, it may be tempting to
die-hard fans (are there any?), but even some of them may be turned off
by the inhuman amount of patience required to play this crap.