A game from Shigesato Itoi is quirky and fun in a way most games can only dream of being. A game from Suda51 is bizarre, twisty, and amazing in much the same way. If Itoi and Suda51 were to giant robot combine and form a video game, the result would easily be something so goddamned brilliant that my reaction to its mere announcement would be rather NSFW. Contact, for the Nintendo DS, meets me halfway on this and has Suda51 playing producer to an Itoi game not being made by Itoi. Suda51 isn’t as involved in the production as he should be, and Itoi isn’t there to make sure the gameplay is a giant Dragon Quest handjob. In spite of this, Contact is still sufficient to confirm the accuracy my prediction, assuming said Super Game is ever made.

The game starts off with a title screen that made me laugh like a giddy child. Bottom screen is a computer keyboard. Top screen is a blue screen with F1 – New Game and F2 – Continue. It was a good title screen, and the idea of a title screen that is cool in its own right is enough to make me excited to play a game. Before I can even settle in, the game lets me know that there is no fourth wall. This is not an instance of the fourth wall being broken. It’s that there is no fourth wall to break. You, the player, are as much a character in this game as many of the other major set-pieces.

You, the player, whose default name is Steve, control Terry, the “main” character. Well, duh. Except that you are controlling him is a plot point. Another one of the primary characters is the Professor, no relation to the Doctor, and he talks to you, the player, throughout the entire game. In fact, after the end credits roll, and the words “The End” disappear, you get to read a letter he’s left you, not Terry. I know I seem to be needlessly reiterating the difference between you and Terry, but this is one of the few games that has really taken an advantage of that separation, the others being Earthbound and Mother 3. Even then, this game does it better than the Mother franchise.

One of the reasons I feel it did it better, besides it being more of a plot point, is a little thing I can’t even describe as a minigame. It’s more of a metagame, and I call it “giving a damn about the NPCs.” You save the game by having Terry go to sleep in a bed, and while he sleeps the touchscreen focuses on the lab where the Professor and his pet cat, Mochi, are. Tap on the Professor and he’ll talk to you about stuff. “I love this book.” “Don’t tell Terry I know about you, okay?” “I feel bad using Terry like this.”

Nothing he says during these moments reveal anything plot relevant. He’s just making conversation, and, much like party chat in Dragon Quest V, I made use of it every chance I got. You can play with Mochi during these moments as well, much like Travis played with his cat in No More Heroes, except in Contact there is a tangible gameplay benefit to doing so, in that Mochi can act as your own personal summon, to deal massive damage to all the enemies on screen. Still, as useful as that was, and cool, it was just ‘talking’ to the Professor that really made these moments for me.

The thing is, as much as you can give a character all these nifty traits throughout the story, that can only do so much. As undercharacterized as the Professor might feel, his simply talking to you, almost like a friend, makes me feel like I’m on those sort of terms with him. When you talk to somebody in real life, it isn’t always revealing some major trait of their personality. Sometimes it’s just talking; just making conversation. I might not know a whole lot about what sort of person the Professor is, but I know that, despite looking like a Dr. Andonuts in Mother 3, he felt more real to me than a lot of other characters in other games.

The ending of the game is the crowning moment of the game using the lack of fourth wall, and, assuming you aren’t a heartless bastard, it’ll make you think about your normal gaming experience. Few games try to make you question yourself, and that alone makes this game worth playing. It would be no lie to say that the ending justifies the entire experience on its own.

If the ending is this good, the overall plot should be pretty great, too! Right? Wrong. Contact has a very generic plot, even moreso than Dragon Quest V, because DQV flipped some tropes around. Contact doesn’t experiment with the story itself. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the beginning hadn’t been great, and the ending simply stellar. Compared with how the game starts and stops, the middle leaves me with a big feeling of meh that is only redeemed by a handful of great moments during your adventure.

The story is that the Professor, shortly after speaking with the player, crash lands his ship near Terry, and a green crystal goes flying. Terry picks it up, and when he goes aboard to give it back to the Professor, the ship flies off, trying to escape from the CosmoNOTs, a terrorist organization collecting the pieces so they can wake a dragon. Pieces of the ships power source, the aforementioned crystals, get scattered on islands all across the planet, and Terry has to help the Professor sail around and collect them so he can take Terry back home. It’s no different than the Legendary Armor fetch quest present in other jRPGs, and actually worse because you don’t get any combat benefits from collecting them.

The plot isn’t going to exactly draw you in, and many of the little details, like who the CosmoNOTs and the Professor are, are only explained in little files that you find in various areas. I’d make the same complaint about these that I did about the books in Bayonetta, but Contact’s aren’t half as bad, because they probably amount to four paragraphs in total, and are spread evenly throughout the game. That said, even after reading the files, these plot points aren’t explained very well. With the Professor, this makes sense. You are supposed to question his motives at times, and his unknown past aids this. You don’t know why he needs those pieces other than to fly his ship, and there are more than a few things that make you wonder if he’s using you, the player. This is all resolved with the delightful ending I keep talking up.

This does not work for the CosmoNOTs. Even after reading the files, talking with someone else who played the game, and seeing the whole thing in its entirety, I still don’t know what their goals were, other than TERRORISM. I could pass them off as generic bad guys who have no motive beyond being evil, and that might almost work within the context of the game, but then it tries to portray them as likable characters, and indeed they are. Not knowing why a group of seemingly nice people, among them a young music idol, want to be terrorists is irritating, and I can’t fathom why they didn’t go into more detail with this.

Yet these complaints about the plot are made negligible by some really well done scenes, as I brought up earlier. Sometimes, without warning, you’ll lose control of Terry and he’ll just start doing his own thing. “Yes. That’s called a cutscene, NonCon. You’ve seen them before.” Shut up. Shut up nine times. In a game where a lot of the focus is on the fact that you are controlling this character, losing control is a big deal. It’s an even bigger deal when the Professor is telling you to stop Terry from doing something, and you tap the screen repeatedly and mash buttons but you can’t figure out what to do and Terry is just straight-up ignoring your orders. He’s not supposed to disobey you. He’s a character in a game. He’s nothing more than lines of code. That he goes against his prime directive as a character and disobeys you, the player, is against the rules.

Obviously, he’s coded to do this, but that also brings up an interesting thought. As a video game character, his free will is nothing more than an illusion. Even were he to question it, the very act of questioning it is something that’s programmed into him. This is arguably a reflection on ourselves as well, because what differentiates us from Terry, except that our programming is a bit more complex. Contact is pretty much a philosophical analysis of video games in video game form, and honestly, what more do you need to know than that to know you should play it?

The main thing that separates that event from being another “arguing with the game” moment like I mentioned in my FFVIII review is that while Contact causes you to have a completely different agenda than Terry, it capitalizes on this. The fact that you and Terry are basically arguing works as a plot point. Terry is fighting you for control. At the end of the game, it brings this into play in just one of the things that makes the ending genius. The game really takes apart the whole relation between player and character, looks at all the parts, and builds something completely new.

With all this in mind, little moments that were great before become even better in retrospect. One in particular I’d like to bring up is from pretty early on, where Terry’s mother sends him an email. In that email, we see a glimpse of Terry’s home life. He has parents that love him, and they miss him. His mother isn’t mad at him for being gone, she just wants him to come home. It’s only a short email, and it doesn’t tell much, but when seen within the context of what the game is about, you can really pity Terry. The Professor is using him to collect those fuel cells, and you, the player, are treating him like a puppet. The whole time, he’s away from home and the people he loves and cares about. It’s not exactly a bring you to tears moment, but it’s sad, and you can really feel for him. Did I mention that Terry is a silent protagonist?

Don’t think the plot is serious business, though. While there are a lot of sad moments, there are also plenty of things to make you laugh. The description for the first weapon you get is “A plain old stick. You can, um… swing it.” That’s some Earthbound humor right there. The game doesn’t have quite the constant level of humor as Earthbound, but when it does, it works. There are no awkward, “Am I supposed to laugh now?” moments. Hell, one dungeon is basically an anime/video game/electronics store ripped straight out of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, complete with a healthy selection of nerds for you to talk to. In fact, in this dungeon, Terry plays two separate arcade games. At this point, the player is a character controlling another character in the game who is in turn controlling a character within yet another game. It’s a matroshka doll of pure meta.

Gameplay is hardly the focus of the Contact, and it shows. Remember how I said that DQV was as simple as the combat could get without being attack attack cure attack? Well, Contact is simpler. Much simpler. I honestly didn’t think that a real time jRPG could be simpler than a turn based one, let alone simpler than Dragon Quest, but Contact sure showed me! There are maybe two or three buffs in the ENTIRE game, and I never used one. The game puts in a hunger mechanic to keep you from spamming healing items, and with most of them you can only eat three before you’re full. Once you’re full, that’s it. This pretty much cuts out the “cure” part of attack attack cure attack, and, well, you can see what’s left.

You’ve got special attacks that use up a meter, and that meter builds as you kill enemies, but even after that, the combat is some of the most bland I’ve ever seen. You actually are able to buy a ridiculous amount of healing potions later, healing potions differing from other healing items in that they don’t fill you up, but this doesn’t really change much except make the game a little easier. I really can’t think of much to say about the combat one way or another because there is almost nothing there.

My complaints about how the combat is the greatest detractor from the story and the experience might seem reminiscent of Mirai’s review of Silent Hill 2. I like Silent Hill 2 more than Mirai, and his complaints about the combat impairing the story, while valid, didn’t really bother me. If you didn’t want to fight, a lot of the time you could just run. It only became a “fight or die” situation during boss fights and near the end, but during these times you could just empty out all the ammo you’d saved up until this point. Contact, being an RPG, requires you to fight everything. Even were you able to avoid the fights, you’d have to level enough to defeat the bosses throughout. Combat is not an option in Contact. It is most of the time in Silent Hill 2.

Now, this is going to sound downright bizarre coming from me, but Contact is too hard. Before you all start throwing rocks, let me explain why I think that. Contact is so extremely simple, that you don’t really have enough options to combat the difficulty. In action games, platformers, or first person shooters, you adapt to the difficulty by developing a faster reaction time to everything that happens and learning patterns. In most jRPGs, you make strategies using the tools the game gives you. In Contact… you grind. That is all you do. It is the only solution. I mean, you can make a valid argument for doing poorly in other jRPGs being on account of not knowing how to use and/or break the system, but not in Contact. There is no system. The system is sword stuff until it dies, heal when your health is low, and try again when you die. I like difficulty when it feels rewarding. In this game, it feels more like an inconvenience getting between me and seeing what happens next.

The game tries to make dying less of an inconvenience by using the Dragon Quest method of you keeping any experience or levels you’ve gained in the process, and just respawning you back at the ship. This takes a lot of the potential frustration of dying all the time. Except, pay attention to that last little bit. “Respawning you back at the ship.” There are other save points, but if you die, you go all the way back to the ship and have to battle all the way back to where you were. More than once I ragequit the game just because I didn’t want to march all the way back to where I’d gotten earlier. It is a very odd experience to have talking to NPCs be more rewarding than the combat, outside of Persona 3 or 4 that is.

The leveling system is something akin to the love child of Oblivion and Final Fantasy 3. The more you do a certain thing, the more it levels up. You walk a whole bunch? You can walk faster now. Hit a ton of stuff with a sword? Damage deal with swords goes up. There’s these sorts of things for all your standard jRPG stats. In addition to this, you’ve seven different jobs, which is jRPG speak for classes you can swap between more or less whenever you want. Four of these are basic elemental choices. Nitro is fire, Aquashot is water, Flyboy is wind, and Monk is earth. The remaining three are far less combat oriented. You’ve got Shadow Thief, so you can open those pesky locked chests without difficulty, Chef for preparing food so you can heal during battle, and Fisherman, because you can never have enough sushi. All of these jobs are leveled up by grinding their respective skills, either the elemental attacks or non-combat abilities of the job. The more food you make the better you get at preparing it and so on.

I actually kind of liked the leveling system, and my only complaint against it was that it took too long to level each thing, especially near the end. Alternatively, if the game had a combat system that felt less like eating a gallon bucket of original flavor oatmeal, the existing system for getting stronger would have been a nice compliment to it. Instead, what we have is a game where you fight the same enemies over and over for at least twice as long as you should be reasonably expected to put up with.

I can’t help but get the impression that they felt they had to make the game reach a minimum length for people to be willing to buy it, and made that the reason for all the grinding. Instead, the grinding prolonged length is the biggest reason not to get it. If the game had been about half as long because the combat were made that much quicker or easier, the game would be better as a whole, even if you think only being as long as Merry Gear Solid 2 would somehow be a bad thing.

The sidequests in the game further confirm my suspicion that they were just padding for length. When you take the boat from island to island, you have to sit there and wait for the boat to arrive. The best way to spend this time is to have Terry go to bed, and spend the time playing with Mochi and talking to the professor. Still, when obtaining some of the jobs require traveling to multiple islands and then back again, and all the while you just sit there and wait for the boat to get there, you can’t help but feel that the game is just wasting your time.

One of the greatest things about this game is the music. It easily ranks amongst my favorite video game soundtracks, losing to only a few. Much of it has a fun, peppy bounce to it, and when you hear it you can’t help but smile. Yet it can, without a moments notice, go from cheerful to dark, and even the gentle sad songs and rockin’ boss music work brilliantly. “I better go get that soundtrack right now!” you say? Too bad. No soundtrack was ever officially released. However, I am nothing if not gracious, so here is a rip of all the music from the game. Sound effects, too! Download Here

Visually, the game is about as good as I’ve come to expect from DS games featuring sprites, which is to say, great. The Professor, his pet, and his lab are all GBA era graphics, yet everything else has a lovely hand drawn feel to it. Some of the backgrounds in certain parts look like watercolor paintings. It’s not on the same level as TWEWY or the monster sprites in Dragon Quest V, yet it all looks great, and, most importantly of all, just plain works. Seeing the DS resolution Terry in the Professor’s GBA resolution lab, and the two worlds shown in separate screens when you’re exploring, contrasts nicely, and just seems to make sense.

Contact is, in the end, held back by grinding, the greatest flaw of jRPGs, and a poorly explained, overly simple plot. Still, the game is worth playing simply for experiencing the beginning and end, and the great moments in between make the trek to the finish line worthwhile. Part of me wants to give it a better score, on account of what’s great about this game, but the combat just gets too much in the way.

Two Mochis Out of Five