Gamertell

I’d never had the opportunity to play Irem and Atlus’ PS2 Steambot Chronicles, but had heard good things. So when given the chance to test drive the portable Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament, I looked forward to an interesting experience.

Adventures in Orion City began after I’d named my character and Trotmobile. (I went with Jenni for me and Shiva for my Trotmobile.) The game begins dark, with a sailor telling you to wake up and arrive. Immediately I was given the opportunity to choose how to react to the announcement. After asking for a few more minutes to sleep, I was informed that we’re in Orion City and it’s time to get off the ship!

Right away, familiar voices greeted me. Laura Bailey (Rise from Persona 4) voices the female heroine, and Tracey Rooney (Chie from Persona 4) provides the voice for your personal mechanic Venus. After helping Venus deal with an arrogant Trotmobile driver, she took an interest in my Trotmobile. She offered to fix it up for free at her Pola Motors repair shop. After that, we decided to team up to work towards competing in Trotmobile championships.

Since I then was given freedom to do what I liked, I decided to take a closer look at the Trotmobile customization options. First, I decided that the Trotmobile emblem needed some customizing. I decided to draw a blue fairy character on there. There were four open custom emblem spots, and it really didn’t take all that long to complete a design. There are only four palette options, but there is an image preview and lots of brush and copying options to make things easier. I also customized my Trotmobile’s color scheme to shades of pastel blue, picked up a better grill, a roll bar windshield and an attachment for carrying liquids. Since I didn’t really have much extra money, I decided to put off upgrading or adding elements to my Trotmobile’s existing parts.

Then, I decided to take the advice of Venus and head to the Employment Agency to pick up some assignments designed to help Orion City citizens, earn some extra cash and make me famous. After all, the city itself features a pretty straightforward layout and I’d already walked around and talked to everyone. Only one job’s available initially, and it acts as a tutorial to get introduce players to fetch quests throughout the game Basically, you help out Jupiter Construction by retrieving some wood from the local forest. You can use the Trotmobile’s arms and basic attacks to take down trees, and the lumber will automatically be loaded onto the flatbed.

I had invested in a better grill with headlights before heading off on the assignment, which was good because the sky had suddenly darkened and night had fallen. I don’t think the headlights made any impact on what I could or couldn’t see, but it was kind of neat to see the lights on the front of my Trotmobile. It added a sense of realism.

As I entered the Maffei Woods, Venus alerted me to the presence of many bandits. Fortunately, all said bandits’ Trotmobiles were equipped with long distance guns. So they’d shoot slow moving bullets at me that were easy to dodge. The tree I needed to cut down was in a small clearing in the first area. So that meant I had to take out three bandits, then attack the tree to complete the mission. I also found that, if I desired, I could pick up a smaller tree in each arm and wield it as a weapon against the bandits. The mission took all of five minutes to complete, and once I was done I had to report back to Zeus at Jupiter Construction to deliver the wood, then report back to Galatea at the Agency to claim my reward.

After I reported in and received my reward, I saw new jobs were available. I decided just to peek at them, to get an idea of what’s next. One sounded interesting. It was an Interview Request from the Orion Sun Times, and it stated that no Trotmobile was necessary. I decided to take on one more mission that day, just to see how the ones that didn’t require any kind of battling worked.

When I reported in to the Orion Sun Times’ Ceres, she told me that she needed me to interview Chef Sol at Flavor Nebula. I had to ask him about his cooking A-Z’s. Or something like that. I kind of have the bad habit of occasionally skipping over dialogue very quickly, and didn’t realize I would be receiving an actual assignment. Thankfully, I caught the A-Z part and hoped there wouldn’t be two options that mentioned it. I quickly ran over to Flavor Nebula. Once I began talking with Sol, three dialogue options came up and (lucky me) only one mentioned A-Z. Sol talked about his cooking and such, and once his tirade was done I had received Sol Notes. I ran back to Ceres, delivered them, was praised for my hard work and told I could pick up my reward with Galatea.

So far, it seems like Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament has quite a bit of customization to it. Whenever NPCs consulted with my character, I’d be presented with at least three options to choice. Depending on how you answer, the characters you’re talking to respond differently. There’s also been quite a bit of voice acting so far, which I didn’t expect. I’m looking forward to playing it over the next few weeks.

Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament will be in stores on June 30, 2009. It’ll cost $39.99 and carry a rating of Everyone 10+. Be sure to keep an eye on Gamertell for the forthcoming Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament review!

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