Have you ever played a Zelda game? Do you remember the neat little trading side quests that have been in almost every game since The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening? Remember how fun it was figuring out just what item would go to what person? Yeah, The Island of Dr. Frankenstein is nothing like that. What it is, is a 20+ hour long version of that one little side quest in the Zelda games. One thing I’ve noticed from following industry news is that more and more developers out there are trying to find different methods of padding game play hours without involving the need of having too many fetch quests. Not Dr. Frankenstein though, it embraces the idea and forces you to do it over and over. They aren’t fetch quests like most games though, no. In most games a fetch quest could require you to go from city to city trading all sorts of items. Dr. Frankenstein realized how silly that is and changed it up so most of the time you are only going from point A to point B. It makes the quest move fast so you can get to the other 19 hours and 45 minutes of the game.
To be fair, the game plays more or less the way it’s supposed to with no real jarring flaws. Occasionally the main character, Frankie, the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein, will get stuck on a corner or will get confused by basic concepts as “turn to the right” but it’s never that bad that it makes you want to turn the game off. I had absolutely no trouble playing the game. Sometimes, that’s the best thing you can say about a game. On the Wii especially where there is so much “shovelware” that you could swim in a pool full of it, it can be hard to find a low budget game such as this that even controls the way it is supposed to. So good job on doing at least that.
Let’s talk about the music however. The game claims to be at least 20 hours. If that is true why is there only 3 minutes of music that repeats over and over throughout the entire game? This isn’t the old days of gaming here, this is the most advanced generation of games we’ve ever had. So why is there only 3 minutes of music? After completing the first few trades of the main quest, right after receiving my vacuum thing that lets me suck up little white doo-dads named “vaporites”, I had to turn the music off and turn on something more soothing to calm my rage over how annoying the looping track was. Once I had rid myself of a song that hopefully wouldn’t be stuck in my head the rest of my life, I found the game to be fairly pleasant. If I was a toddler or someone under the age of 12, I wouldn’t have minded playing the game. The puzzles that appear every now and then to break the pace of the main fetch quest we’re simple but just hard enough to give me some what of a challenge.
I do feel the need to mention that the writing for the game is… well, bad. The game reads like a 6th graders attempt at a fantasy story. They give the character a persona of a lazy, disrespectful, good-for-nothing, and then have him talk to people like a polite gentleman. Not all the time, mind you, randomly, like someone had put it in as a joke and forgot to change it back.
It’s hard to find something nice to say about this game, it really is. I’m a gamer who regularly plays adventure games with at their core are nothing more than glorified fetch quests, but I just can’t bring myself to call this game an “adventure” because it isn’t an “adventure.” A better word to use is “job” because it is work to have to play this game.
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