ver want to have a squad of robots unleash ultimate destruction at your command? No, this isn’t some kind of mech strategy simulator. In Tokobot you’ll hold hands with the cutest little robots since Megaman, and wipe out anything that gets in their way. We dusted off our PSP, gave the game a test drive, and interviewed the producer as well.  How could something so cuddly come from one of the minds behind Fatal Frame and Trapt?  Read on…

Players will control Bolt, a young archaeologist researching the lost technology of Tokobots. He’s joined by an old robot named Mr. Canewood and a sharp girl named Ruby. One day they found a set of six Tokobots in some ruins. For some reason Bolt is the only one who can communicate with the bots, so he is charged with exploring various sites for more artifacts and information.

Use the Tokobots for attacks and puzzles alike.

The Tokobots essentially follow Bolt around and help him with everything from attacks to puzzle solving. Hitting the triangle button will toggle between three different bot formations. Once you’re in a formation, the R trigger will cause everyone to link up and hold hands. Then you can press the square button to perform a joint action. The V formation lines all bots single file behind Bolt. From here you can swing the line of bots over your head like an axe to attack enemies, smash buttons, or hook onto a cliff edge and climb up their bodies. The U formation will line up bots on the right and left side of Bolt. This allows you to start a wide reaching cyclone move that can spin gears, take out a group of enemies, or help you float over a wide gap. The Circle formation groups bots all around you and allows for a jumping butt stomp to kill enemies the Mario way or hit switches.

As you collect more artifacts throughout the game, Bolt will be able to perform Karakuri Combinations. These cause all of your bots to meld into one giant structure Voltron style. Various forms range from a samurai bot to a crane to a train. These, combined with formation movements, add up to a total of thirteen different actions and allow for a surprising variety of puzzle and attack possibilities. In order to fuel the Karakuris you have to collect green, blue, and red parts from fallen enemies and busted pots and barrels.

Tokobot power! 

Puzzles in Tokobot are always changing and don’t seem to fall into stale patterns like they do in a lot of platformers. One minute you’re memorizing light patterns, the next you’re moving blocks in one room so that they’ll affect traps in another, and then you’re using a crane to drop circuits into a power grid. It seems like every time you think you’ve reached the end of the developer’s creativity they throw in something completely surprising and new. And that doesn’t even count the boss fights.

Some stages feature more than one miniboss and they usually end with one big final boss. No two bosses can be killed the same way, and they customarily require you to use several of your powers in tandem. In one battle you’ll have to power down the boss’s laser grid and attack it before the timer runs out and the lasers return. In another fight you’ll have to use the cyclone attack to spin the gear at the base of the boss while dodging his giant robot hand. After he’s dizzy you must close in and smack him in the face.

But for all of the things Tokobot does right, the game manages to shoot itself in the foot in several key areas – first and foremost being the camera. Controls are limited to a close and far away view and an automatic recenter. You can’t rotate it, target a specific enemy, or scope out an area in first person mode. This alone will cause a fair share of cheap deaths as you’re trying to line up a jump. And it’s quite annoying to not be able to look around a new puzzle room or see things above and below you.

In addition to this, the whole look of the game doesn’t really do it for me. All of the environments, characters, and enemies are all extremely plain. Most of the rooms are completely barren and repetitive, and the regular enemies couldn’t be more generic. A couple of them look like walking eggs and you have to be stupid enough to walk right into them to receive any kind of damage. Another enemy just hops around. Probably the laziest design is just a red ball with eyes and a set of spikes coming out of the sides. You can pretty much just run right past every single one of these guys unless the game requires you to kill them to open up a door or receive an artifact.

If the Tokobots get squished, hold R to summon them back.

And finally, the main character has absolutely zero personality. They try to use the common cop out of talking directly to the gamer so as not to put any work into the main character’s dialogue. So how come I can’t name my character “Bryan” or “Dillweed” or some other stupid name?

But there is a relatively decent platformer underneath this collection of annoyances. Plus, the music and sound effects are actually quite good, and load times are amazingly short for the PSP. So if you’re a platforming maniac, the sheer variety of gameplay experiences should satisfy. But it’s too bad a few wrenches made their way into Tokobot’s gears. It had the potential to really beef up the PSP’s sparse library of non-ported titles.

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Now on to Billy Berghammer's interview with Tokobot producer, Keisuke Kikuchi.

Game Informer:  This game is very different than the games you normally work on.  How did you come up with the design?

Keisuke Kikuchi:  This game is for all ages.  The game itself is taking advantage of the features of the system.  The game system itself was created for Fatal Frame and Trapt.

GI:  It’s funny, I was thinking about it and you work on horror-type games like Fatal Frame, and this is a very cute platformer.  Where did you come up with the idea for Tokobot?

Kikuchi:  The main concept of this game comes from Shibata-san, the director of Fatal Frame III who also works on Gallop Racer.  With Gallop Racer, you could recognize very cute characters.  The PSP is a very different market so when it came out, we came up with this concept.  The PSP can handle the many characters that are on screen at the same time.  I though it would be very interesting to control so many characters at once.

GI:  Can you tell me more about Bolt?  What is this character like?  Why is he the one who's chosen to find this energy source?

Kikuchi:  Why he’s chosen is sort of a mystery and must be uncovered while you play the game.  Bolt works for the laboratory, and is studying ancient culture.  He’s just exploring the ancient ruins, but there’s also an evil party that’s also in search of this power source.  On his adventures Bolt runs across these Tokobots in the ancient ruins.

GI:  The art style kind of reminds me of Castle in the Sky from Studio Ghibli.  Is that correct?

Kikuchi:  Yes, we also like Studio Ghibli.  We didn’t try to imitate, but we were influenced. (laughs)

GI:  Who created the music for Tokobot?

Kikuchi:  Okuda-san.  He also did the sound design for Fatal Frame.

GI:  This is such a different style game, what was it like for you to just switch gears like that?

Kikuchi:  I don’t need to really change my mind set when I create a new game.  I’m always looking for a new type of game to create so I don’t really need to change my thought process.  I also have many more different ideas for new games.  This is just one of them.  I just wanted to make a game specifically for PSP.  So far, there are several titles available for PSP, but many of them can be found on PlayStation 2.  Mostly, what I wanted to do was create a PSP specific game.

GI:  Are there any multiplayer modes in Tokobot?

Kikuchi:  No, this is only a one player game.  For multiplayer, you will have to wait for Tokobot 2. (laughs)

GI:  We have a silly question.  The Tokobot robots are very cute.  Do you think there will be any plans to release a toy that’s based on them?

Kikuchi:  It’s not a silly question at all.  We are planning on making some, yes.

GI:  How do you like developing for the PSP?

Kikuchi:  Technically speaking, in comparison to the PS2 it is much easier.  However, to get the maximum power out of the machine, it’s not that easy.

GI:  If the game is popular on PSP, would you be interested in doing a console version?

Kikuchi:  I had a lot of ambition to make a series, so maybe in the future I could do a port for the other consoles.  But for now I want to keep working with the PSP.  As of right now there are no plans to bring the title to other consoles.

GI:  Since there are fewer original titles on the PSP is it easier to do something creative and different?

Kikuchi:  Not only for PSP, but for every console it is very difficult to be creative.

GI:  Is that because there are so many different games out there?

Kikuchi:  I’m not trying to be different than other developers out there.  We just want to create the game that we want to make.  But during the course of this process, we were trying to make the game more fun.

GI:  Are you working on any Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 projects right now?

Kikuchi:  We obviously have an Xbox 360 development kit and we’ve received a PlayStation 3 development kit, and now I’m analyzing and studying both of them.  I’m not working on a specific project right now.

GI:  What do you think of the Nintendo Revolution controller?

Kikuchi:  The controller looks attractive, but Nintendo’s controllers always work on their own titles first.  That controller forces the creator to create a certain game for that system.  If I get some ideas for that controller, maybe I’ll try to create a game for it.  The idea comes first, and then I’ll try to materialize it.

GI:  Do you like the fact that this controller forces developers to think outside the box?

Kikuchi:  If you look at the games for the Nintendo DS, most of the third parties developed the game using the touch screen.  Most of them aren’t really creative at all by only utilizing the touch screen.  I don’t want to make such a game.  I want to create a game by creatively using the functions of the system.  Until that idea comes to me, I still don’t know.

GI:  What about making a Fatal Frame game using the Revolution controller?

Kikuchi:   My team members said the same thing.  (laughs)