This is the second time I grab one of these Neo Geo Pocket games on Switch, last time being the Capcom SNK card game which was a cool little game. Neo Geo Pocket is a set of platforms that were WAY out of my radar back in the day, so there’s a bunch of possibly-cool games I missed on that. This is one I never even heard about before it popped up on the Switch eshop, but I grabbed it not too long after it came out because it looked cool.

Let’s see if it’s good!

Developer: Yumekobo
Publisher: SNK
Release date: May 26th, 2022 on Switch, some time in 1999 on Neo Geo Pocket Color
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

There’s really not much of a story in this game. It takes place in a world where a meteor hit the planet, which provided cores to power robots called Unitrons. Some nation took over the entire supply and used the Unitrons to take over the world. 199 years later, the world is in a consistent state of peace. Unitrons are still used, but as tools rather than weapons of war, or to fight in gladiatorial combat. You play as a Unitron pilot, climbing up the ranks of the Arena. There’s a mild story by the very end, but until then it’s all about grinding money to buy better robot parts and shit. There’s a few characters in the town that have very little to say, though each time you go up a rank they do have new things to tell you (and some of them might have separate uses).

So the game functions basically as a bunch of menus for the main parts of it. The town has 4 places you can go. The Workshop is where you build up your robot. The shop is where you buy things. The Arena is where you fight things, and the square is where you go to different places to talk to people. In addition to that, the World Map is where you go to choose one of the 4 dungeons in the game.

Combat is fairly simple. Your Unitron has 2 arms equipped. At the beginning of a round, you choose your action for the round. This can be attacking, items, charging and fleeing. When you choose to attack, you get select one of your 2 arms to attack with, as they each have their own attack stat and elemental attribute. Elemental attributes are important because there’s actually a pretty big effect if you hit an enemy with a weakness, and same for resistances having a pretty large negative effect. Attacks take a certain amount of EP based on which arm you attack with, so the Charge command recovers 30% of your EP if you run out, though that does take a turn. Once you’ve chosen your action, you and the opponent attack in Speed order (the speed stat is called MP). You win the battle if you bring the opponent’s HP to zero, and vice versa. If you lose, that takes you out of the dungeon you were in and brings you back to the workshop. Generally combat is very simple, and essentially is based on how well-equipped you are. Combat in dungeons is how you grind, as you are rewarded with money and EXP. EXP is a bit of a weird thing. It levels up your pilot, which gives you “Control”. I believe Control is a very slight stat boost for all stats.

Each dungeon has 7 floors, ending on a boss battle. I’ve seen reviews saying the dungeons are procedurally-generated… they’re not. Each floor just has a selection of possible layouts they’ll be, and they’ll have treasure chests in the same spots for each layout. At first you’ll likely have some trouble even getting through the second floor since enemies tend to get too strong by that point, until you rank up enough in the arena and get access to better stuff. One annoyance with the dungeons is that you always start on floor 1, so once you’re really strong, going through the early parts of a dungeon sucks balls since the enemies are a joke, especially if you’ve prepared a good arm to deal with their element (each dungeon is based on one element, so every enemy in that dungeon is of that element I believe). But hey, you need to repeat these things a bunch because money is scarce and you need a shitload of it. Oh, and beating all the bosses in dungeons allows you to get a reward from an NPC… choose carefully, it can kinda just suck TBH.

How you power up the Unitron is by equipping new shit. You have 2 arm slots, one body slot (which is automatic don’t worry about it), one core slot and one leg slot, plus 2 accessory slots for very specific stat increases. A fun thing I like to do with arms is to have one main attacking arm, and for the other arm I just put one on that has a good SP stat (which is the defense stat), that way I can tank better and deal the most damage with the primary arm. The Core is just an EP increase unless you end up getting the one Core upgrade that has a bit more to it. The legs tend to be HP and RP/MP upgrades (RP being agility which is for accuracy and evasion I believe, and MV as mentioned before is Speed). There’s a lot of very similar legs, so you can select the balance you want there. Accessories also have a fun function of being able to change your elemental affinity, so if you start as a Mariner species, that gives you a water-based Unitron (each species has a different starting robot, gender changes nothing other than who maintains the workshop), but using accessories you can change your affinity (making it easier to go through the Wind dungeon). Fun!

Arms can be bought in the store, but they’re kinda awful, especially at first. Doing dungeons, killing enemies and opening chests can earn you materials, and the store does sell some too. Most weapons have the capability of being upgraded. You select an arm, add a material (which will give a certain chance of success for the transformation based on the quality of the resulting weapon and the level of your engineer) and use a tool which increases that percentage. If it fails, you lose both the arm and the material, which sucks, especially with certain extremely rare material. BUT you can just save before developing and reload if it fails, so yay. What sucks about this system is that you have no good way to know what you’re getting when you upgrade an arm. It may change the element, and some arms actually change into 2 different arms based on which material you use and shit… It’s a bit annoying and hard to find out what is good or not. I ended up using gamefaqs for some of them because it’s hard to know from which weapon you may need to start from to get, say, a pretty solid fire weapon to fight the wood dungeon.

Also, getting materials is a bit ass. A lot of the best material is deep in dungeons and tremendously rare drops (there’s some drops I legitimately never found), and there’s an NPC you can talk to that might sell you some for generally-ridiculous prices. And, while the store has some materials, they only have the basics. This means, if you really want to get a specific rare material, you gotta grind a good 200k gold, and then just keep talking to the NPC until it randomly decides to give you the material you want (it’s one material at a time, very annoying, at a random price each time too). A bit of a cumbersome system, especially when you’re me and you forget that you can just save-scum your way to build the arms you want. Basically, the arm development has the core of a good mechanic, but is brought down by annoying grinding and rare random drops. The final dungeon of the game does actually provide a bunch of decent materials, but it’s the final dungeon, you don’t really need them at that point.

Oh and hey there’s post-game content, I didn’t do it yet.

Overall

I feel like I should pick up those Neo Geo Pocket Color collections (that don’t include the games I got separately) because so far I’m actually impressed with the NGPC games I’ve played.

Specifically, Biomotor Unitron is very gameplay-focused, has a pretty decent gameplay loop, okay combat, and just overall is fun to play. It’s not gonna blow your mind, but it does the job. It certainly has some elements that need help, like the dungeons being kinda eh, and the arm development mechanic being very ass (though at least exploitable by save-scumming)… but I don’t care, I had fun with this and continue being surprised at the quality of the NGPC games I played thus far.

I’d recommend this one. I know there’s a japan-only sequel, I hope this pops up too at some point.