Japan Gaming Guide

We got the chance to try out Otoda Master at the Hudson caravan tour in Osaka.

It looked pretty fun. You use the DS mike to summon Pokemon Otoda which you can then send into battle against another team of creatures. There are 3 ways to summon creatures – one is to make a noise into the mike, we tried this using bells and banging frying pans which worked fine. Another way is to speak into the mike. This worked pretty well, even our awful Japanese was sufficient to attract a few wee beasties. Thirdly you can summon them using melodies. This is where things went horribly wrong. The event staff presented us with a bright yellow recorder, but unfortunately the music we produced scared every damn Otoda into hiding, so she had to do it for us. It looks like musical people will be OK though, but not us, unfortunately. Having summoned a few creatures we took the chance to send them into battle. The battle we saw was a simple 3 on 3 affair, pretty standard RPG stuff, using the stylus to picking an attack option and target for each of our party, and then watching the results.

Although summoning the creatures was fun we didn’t get the chance to find out if there’s any plot element to speak of – although we can’t imagine this game is going to be as deep as Pokemon. It probably won’t appeal that much to adults the same way that Pokemon does. Having said that it was a lot of fun trying to summon the creatures, and we can see this being a hit in the playground.

We were told that the game won’t be heading to America or Japan anytime soon, because “if you say ‘hello’ not ‘konnichi wa’ no monsters will come”, so importers remember, you’ll need a phrasebook on hand if your gonna ‘catch em all.

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