ude, FistsofDeath rocks at Seaside Sparklies. The little hamster-framed pile of doom skips between tracks and collects all the wee gems in record time! Still, there’s at least a small part of me that wonders why this is so terribly much fun. The creatures you make aren’t always what you mean to, some of the minigames are beyond tedious, the graphics are a little primary color-happy, and the rewards (outside of new stuff for your monsters) are surprisingly uninspiring.
Amazing Island is a land possessed by evil, and its inhabitants sent out the call for help. You, as an inquisitive child, go to the island through a storybook and the surviving villagers place upon your shoulders a heavy burden – save their world by running monsters through obstacle courses of minigames. This part of the game isn’t "amazing" by any stretch of the imagination. But, to the game’s credit, it probably has a higher-than-party-game-genre average of good games to sucky ones.
The best thing about this quirky Sega title, though, is the monster creation. The idea is that you’re making the animals that you’ll use to win minigames and slowly bring the world back to its former glory. While the island doesn’t really change that much as you progress through the missions (which is a bummer), the monster creation opens up in a really comfortable way. New options and abilities are unlocked with nearly every successful action, which lets digital Gods get used to the things that they’ve got before loading on the complicated features.
It’s certainly true that the tools offered are powerful, and definitely more predictable in their output than, say, Magic Pengel’s are, but I still had problems really making the kind of shapes I was looking for. Despite changing the mouse speed and attempting to be really precise, the resulting head, body, or foot was never quite as I had imagined. Still, the results I got were certainly usable and, for most people, the accessory application process (which is much more precise) is where the newborn creature will really come to life.
In theory, the variables of body size, shape, and accouterment combine together to shape the attributes of each creature; but in my time, I still haven’t figured out which attributes are modified by which variable, making the whole system kind of moot. This, coupled with the occasional bad minigame and lack of village upgrades as the game progresses, make it a sometimes laborious road to 100 percent completion – these are the main things holding Amazing Island back from Animal Crossing-like fits of fandom, but many will still enjoy its very long legs.