Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles (PlayStation 2)

CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
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Overall score: 5.0 (2.5 stars)
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Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Ryan Davis
• Reviewed on: 01/04/2006
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 10/19/2005

If you're finding yourself asking questions like whether it's really pronounced "Zack," or what a mamodo is, then you need not read any further. Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles quite simply isn't for you. This dumbed-down anime-inspired fighter--which bears a striking resemblance to One Piece: Grand Battle and Inuyasha: Feudal Combat, two other dumbed-down anime fighters from Bandai--exists solely for the sake of those already smitten with Zatch Bell!, though that still doesn't fully excuse the game's short and clumsy story mode or its shallow and unbalanced gameplay.

Translated from Japanese, mamodo roughly means 'merchandising opportunity.'

Zatch Bell! easily could have come from the same cut-rate anime factory responsible for Yu-Gi-Oh!--both are saddled with weirdly high-concept premises, and both teem with spiky-haired youths who like to kick it with strange and often grating extradimensional beings and who like to fight a lot. If you want more specific details than that, you'd better go read a FAQ or something, because you're not going to get much from Mamodo Battles. To a point it seems unfair to expect the game to be completely choked with exposition, but there's a soap opera quality to Zatch Bell! that makes it nearly impenetrable to outsiders.

Then again, you don't have to care about character motivations when you're just kicking the crap out of everyone you meet, which is the crux of the "story" mode in Mamodo Battles. Playing as a pair of characters, one human and one otherworldly "mamodo," you hop around 10 different locales, running into and throwing down with other couples. Each stage is supposedly set in either Japan or England, but the menu that you select stages from doesn't give you much sense of place, and most are generic-looking enough to have been set anywhere. In a halfhearted bid to pad out the six incredibly short stories, the game sometimes has you go to a location to find points, which you can use to buy character enhancements or replicas of Zatch Bell!-branded collectible cards; sometimes you'll go to a location and find nothing at all. Still, it won't take you more than 20 minutes to tear through each of the six scenarios.

Once you've wrung the two or three hours of gameplay from the story mode, your options in Mamodo Battles are limited. You can test your might in the time attack mode, which challenges you to beat a series of opponents in the least amount of time; you can square off with the AI or player two for one-off fights; and that's about it. That the actual combat is rather mindless doesn't help the game's case, either. Though you'll play as a team of two characters, they effectively act as one, with the secondary character only occasionally becoming active for special team moves--and, realistically, there's only half a character's worth of moves in any given team.

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