Contact has a very strong and unique visual identity, but sadly the game underneath those nice-looking graphics is a rather throwaway affair with a story and cast that are too rudimentary to ever feel interesting and truly horrendous auto-battler gameplay that allows for very little player input. A shame, since you can't help but shake the feeling that Contact's interesting premise and world could have made for a true cult classic, but in its execution there's just very little to actually like. There are a couple of memorable scenes and some people point towards its ending in particular, but while the ending was nicely made, it also ultimately fell rather flat to me: The thing that makes the player go "Huh, this is pretty messed up" in the beginning and that the game unsubtly allures to as being "huh, pretty messed up" throughout the game is finally revealed to be indeed "huh, pretty messed up" in the end. But by merely confirming what was obvious from the start without offering any additional layer to it, this reveal just didn't feel particularly clever or interesting to me.

(If you give Contact a try, I'd recommend the use of cheat codes to skip its gameplay - cuts the tedium without losing anything of worth.)

É certamente um jogo único para sua época, com ideias e mecânicas deveras ambiciosas para um RPG, mas falha ao tentar torna-las realmente interessantes, o que ao invés de serem imersivas só se tornam inconvenientes em prática. Como o combate ser um Action RPG, mas você só espera seu personagem atacar e esperar o inimigo falecer, e as vezes usar uma habilidade especial para agilizar um pouco este entediante processo, e para cada mecânica interessante no papel há uma série de pequenos detalhes inconvenientes que atrapalham a execução, como por exemplo o sistema de roupas, com cada uma lhe oferecendo novas skills e habilidades únicas, como a roupa de cozinheiro te possibilitando cozinhar os itens e comidas que você encontra pelo caminho, a roupa de Ladrão que faz você abrir baús e portas, uma de pescador para pescar e etc, mas você só consegue as trocar na nave do Professor, te fazendo ou usar as figurinhas de teletransporte ou voltar o caminho inteiro, com isso te desmotivando muito a explorar o jogo, e teve um puzzle específico que envolvia ativar signos no chão com determinadas roupas e isso foi torturantemente chato. O fato de você evoluir seu status por meio de atividades específicas relacionadas a elas, o que realmente muda algumas coisas como por exemplo o status de carma e popularidade que afetam como os NPCs olham para o protagonista, e o jogo tem uma incrível variedade deles, porém da metade do jogo para o final eu parei de me importar com eles completamente.

Porém, mesmo com isso tudo, eu digo que não é um tipo de jogo que se vê todo dia sendo lançado, só talvez no cenário indie, e é nessa do jogo se arriscar em coisas diferentes sem muito medo que o torna algo único. Tudo que acompanha este jogo é cercado por um incrível charme e carisma, desde de sua arte simplesmente incrível nos cenários e design bem legal de personagens, trilha sonora excepcional, a história pode ser um pouco confusa, mas é instigante o bastante para lhe motivar a ver o que vai acontecer, só acho que os CosmoNOTs poderiam receber algum tipo a mais de desenvolvimento, e até mesmo o MANUAL do jogo consegue ser divertido de ler.
As quebras de 4° parede são bem especiais aqui, e mesmo que este recurso pareça desgastante hoje em dia com os inúmeros jogos indies metalinguísticos, o jeito que Contact realiza isso é de uma maneira bem carismática, com o Professor que fica no topo da tela interagindo diretamente com você e fazendo comentários com as informações que você preenche sobre você no começo, e com isso sendo desenvolvido de uma forma bem interessante no final do jogo, sendo certamente o ápice do jogo.
Então se eu recomendo o jogo é um sim, mas com vários poréns no meio, então é entendível se você não curtir a experiência e achar só um saco.



MOCHI IS LOVE!

One thing I don't make any particular secret of is that I think the Nintendo DS may be the best piece of video game hardware ever released. It was weird and experimental and its design resulted in a lot of weird, experimental games. But no matter how weird it might have been, it was still so superb. Dual displays, touch screen, clamshell design, microphone, GBA compatibility, Wi-Fi capability, etc... Titles like Ghost Trick, Cooking Mama, Rhythm Heaven, Trace Memory, Trauma Center, The World Ends With You, Warioware: Touched!, and so many more - it really brought out the creative strengths of developers, and even more traditional series like Pokémon or Animal Crossing got a lot of mileage out of the system's quirks. For as much as I love my Nintendo 64, my Saturn, my Playstation, so on... I think if I could only pick one to keep, it may very well be the DS. Its library is positively drowning in classics.

And then there's Contact.

Contact is a game masterminded by the brilliant Akira Ueda (who also brings along his talents in background design), composed by the ever-so-talented Masafumi Takada (with support from Jun Fukuda), developed by the quintessentially quirky Grasshopper Manufacture, and produced by one Goichi Suda. Together they all set out to craft an adorably offbeat RPG for the DS.

Honestly, it sounds like a dream come true. So what’s the catch? Well, the problem is that they were so busy coming up with ideas for this game that they forgot to actually design it. It saddens me to report that Contact has some of the dumbest mechanics I’ve ever seen in a video game. Allow me to elaborate on some of its shortcomings:

- For starters, it’s an auto-battler. You walk up to enemies and engage with them. Terry will trade blows with his foe until somebody runs away or gets knocked out. You can execute special skills or move around but otherwise you attack on a timer and that's it. Whatever, I've played plenty of Runescape. Usually it's a one-on-one affair and you just smack each other around and it's okay. Issues arise when you realize your own attacks can be interrupted if the enemy attacks you at the right time, which can make a battle very frustrating if they happen to be faster than you or use status effects that deal damage over time, which can totally lock Terry down. And don't even get me started on when you have to face more than one foe at once. This scenario is thankfully rare, but if you get surrounded (or even just have one extra baddie pummeling you that you can't avoid) you might not be able to act at all. It even just feels a little jank at times, like if you don't shove Terry right into the enemy's face he might not properly attack, or if you don't deliberately switch him into his battle stance with B he'll just sit there and not retaliate when he's actively being slapped silly. It's clunky and overly passive and isn't a lot of fun to interact with.

- On the topic of those special skills I mentioned... You have a meter that you must spend to execute the skills. Most skills use one or two points of meter to perform. Your meter maxes out at five with no way to increase that limit. On top of that, the only way to restore meter is by defeating enemies. You gain one point of meter for every two enemies defeated... Unless you use an active skill at any point during combat against an enemy, in which case their defeat doesn't reward any meter. It makes spending meter feel like something you'll only ever want to do for tough enemies, or at least just to burn a point or two to make sure you're still gaining meter when you defeat lesser foes. Maybe if the game rewarded you with meter for successfully finishing off a foe with an ability or something like that it would be a bit more palatable, but for being the only other meaningful way you can interact with combat, it feels painfully limited and tacked on.

- Stats are improved by performing the related task, as per a game like SaGa or The Elder Scrolls. Nothing wrong with that on paper. But the implementation is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, both due to the process itself and the lack of incentive to grind it out. For starters, growth is hilariously slow. It’s ostensibly scaled off of your character’s overall power relative to the foes you're facing, but taking on endgame foes was rewarding a trickle of experience to any stats I had that were in the 30-50 range. Likewise for largely combat-independent skills like cooking or fishing. New abilities are still being unlocked all the way up to 100. You're unlikely to see even half of the of the unlocks on your first playthrough, and there's no particular reason to go for a second, as with the exception of a few minor changes nothing new comes of you completing the game.

- To further elaborate on cooking: Higher-tier recipes are locked behind stat thresholds, meaning that a good segment of the meals can’t be made until your cooking reaches 55 or higher, and the last chunk can’t be made until 85. From what I can tell, more difficult recipes do typically outstrip the lower-tier ones in terms of efficacy, but the lowest unlockable tier starts at 10. There’s plenty of meals you can make from that pool which can carry you through to the end of the game. As such, there’s really no good reason to grind it out – not even for fun because of how many meals you have to cook to raise those numbers. That's before getting into how having higher tier recipes locked out means there's not much point in experimentation, as even if you can intuit what ingredients should make a new recipe, you might just be disallowed from making it ("He can't make that yet."). And finally - me just bellyaching at this point - some aspects of it are just plain silly. You can cook a burger patty starting at cooking level 10, but to learn how to put it on some bread to make a proper burger, you need to be level 55... I don't know, dude. The real zinger is that this entire system is largely pointless, and I'll tell you why in a bit.

- There’s several outfits in the game that change Terry’s stats and abilities. Some simply give him new skills or elemental affinities while others allow him to perform tasks he wouldn’t be able to otherwise (for example, he can’t cook without the chef’s outfit or fish without the fishing outfit). Again, no real harm with that in and of itself. The issue is that you can’t just switch between these on the fly – the only way you can change outfits is by returning to your ship. That means if you found an interesting fishing spot and wanted to check it out, you’d need to go all the way back to your room and change, and that would mean you wouldn’t be able to pick locks anymore if you decided to resume exploring. I know it probably doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but it becomes a major pain in the ass when you want to interact with the game on its own terms, and I can’t think of a single way being able to change at will would break anything. It's just another chore in a game that already feels like a chore to play.

- And just to briefly tie in to the previous, you get things like the fishing outfit way late into the game. Way too late to care. Even if the fishing minigame here isn't great, it's still a fishing minigame. Why the in the absolute funky phil would you lock it behind an obtuse sidequest halfway towards the end?

- One final tidbit here - the game makes use of touch controls, because of course it does, but they're seldom ever utilized in a clever way. At one point you're told you can tap fruit on a tree to shake it loose. Neat. There were very few other touch-interactive elements in the game outside of decals, save for one boss fight that nearly made me snap my 3DS in two when I realized you were actually supposed to tap some buttons to make it less miserable. How are you going to barely use that touch screen and then make it the central mechanic of a fight out of nowhere??? Okay, I'm over it.

It’s funny because some other mechanics do seem to at least have some real thought behind them but still manage to undermine themselves in the end. Touching on cooking again; you have a "hunger meter" which fills when you eat, and more potent meals generally fill this meter faster. When it fills up, you can't eat anymore until what's already there has been properly "digested". This is actually a pretty solid concept overall, as it would prevent you from constantly cramming your face with food to keep Terry alive, forcing you to use them more strategically. Here's the problem: You face a lot of enemies in this game. They will inevitably whittle down your health and you can't really ingest a ton of healing items before you run out of stomach space. A lot of the worthwhile healing items take minutes to digest. It takes long enough that in a lot of cases you'd be better off walking all the way back to a healing point if you were low on HP. It feels very arbitrary and just reduces the amount of time you can spend out in the open grinding - which, again, you're expected to do a lot of. Oh, and remember how I said before the cooking system is ultimately pointless? Once you can make potions, the game is over. They heal 80HP (roughly a third of my health bar by the final boss), are cheap as hell to make, and digest in ten seconds. If you're hurt, slam these. You are virtually immortal as long as you have a stack in your pocket. Then there's decals, which are these little randomized stickers that confer stat boosts. You can apply up to four to Terry at one time and once he's full up, you have to discard one to apply another. There's a few different types and you can mix and match them to get a good array of bonuses going. Or at least that's what I would say if they gave any meaningful boosts to your stats, but they largely don't. It's still better to have them than not, but some stats are just flatly more helpful to boost than others and I eventually reached a point where I didn't feel any need to replace them. There's other stuff too, but I really need to stop somewhere so boooooo.

So that's a lot of talk about how the game plays, but I've struggled through some real butt-breakers before and still found myself pleased by the end. I could disregard a lot of these shortcomings if I found Contact to be particularly compelling in other ways, but I just can't say in good faith that I did. It starts off fairly strong, with a Professor and his pet cat Mochi approaching you (yes, you, the player) and asking for your assistance in retrieving some stolen goods. The next thing you know you're abducting some poor kid named Terry from the riverside and making him late for dinner while you drag him through this fiasco. Space terrorists are involved. Whatever, it's cute, it's fun. The central conceit regarding the juxtaposition of the realistic world Terry lives in and the more simple, cartoonish world of the Professor is charming at first, but they just... Don't really do much of anything with that. He hangs out on the top screen and constantly barks unhelpful information at you (with a somewhat irritating sound bite to boot), and the only time you ever see top and bottom interact is when you enter the Professor's room or when you summon Mochi to help you. The story itself is very confusing, and not in a interesting Killer7 kind of way but more of a "everybody is saying a lot of things and not bothering to explain why I should care" kind of way. No, that is not the same as Killer7, shut up. The cast of characters that are here don't get much development and so it was hard for me to be particularly attached to anybody except the main trio of the Professor, Mochi and Terry. And even then, Terry is an avatar of the player, so he doesn't really get too much development of his own, either... Or does he?

Well, I won't get into it here in case you decide to give it a try, but Contact's main claim to fame is surely that it does play with some rather interesting concepts towards the end. I did find the finale to be surprisingly touching, and thematically it even seems to have some overlap with the likes of Moon: Remix. I did enjoy it... But I can probably attribute not feeling too put out to the game's relatively short runtime. Had I realized how little I actually needed to interact with its systems to succeed, it might have been even shorter. I really appreciate the handful of things that Contact does right, but none of it is enough to elevate it to "must-play" status. I'm kind of tempted to suggest that you shouldn't. It's a bunch of cool ideas thrown into a pot and then taken off the burner far too quickly. It's lukewarm and thin and the texture is crap. But there are some good flavors in here if you're willing to try and finish the bowl anyways.

So now, in the spirit of fairness, I shall list off the things I do appreciate about Contact:

- Akira Ueda's absolutely stellar background work. Surprised?

- Masafumi Takada's predictably excellent soundtrack.

- The general silliness of the game, which I couldn't really help but find endearing.

- Its dedication to breaking a lot of RPG conventions, even if it rarely worked out.

- Its use of all of the DS's features, even if some felt a little more shoehorned in than others.

- Its ending, which did tug at my heartstrings a bit more than I anticipated.

- Mochi.

For all of the sorely undervalued work Grasshopper Manufacture has put out, I feel like Contact's more middling reception is reasonably well-deserved. But I really wanted to adore this game. It has a lot going for it and I think it really just needed a bit more refinement. Well, maybe a lot more, but still. It's rough around the edges and it isn't very fun to play, but it is unquestionably unique and I am happy to have experienced it. If I could only pick one DS game to get a proper remake or sequel, I think it might be this one. It's just a shame those halcyon days are long behind us, now.

So long, Professor. Maybe we'll see each other again one day.