So, I’ve done a little bit of writing on this website. And my style has changed a bit over the years. I enjoy all of my work to varying degrees but there are pieces that I think suck more than others. One such article is this one: an old review of Custom Robo from 2018 that I enthusiastically spat out right at the inception of this website. I was so eager to write things that I never even considered making the writing good. But I think that I’m a little better nowadays and I’d like to give this game the effort that I think it’s due. So let’s try this again from the top.
I have a history with Custom Robo on the Gamecube. I’ve loved this game for a long time. I’ve been playing it for years. Decades. When the bell to quit work sounded, I would slide down the tail of my brontosaurus and head home to play some Custom Robo. It’s been with me for a while. But my original review of the game is pretty lacking in some areas. I hadn’t played the title in a while at that point, so most of my points were founded on then-years-old memories. And there are some things that I sort of wince at when I go back and read it. But, fresh off a completed save file, I’m ready to actually dig into what this game has to offer. So follow along, reader, and feel safe trusting that I have the authority and knowledge now to tell you that Bubble Gun is still dogshit.
A New Journey
So, story’s up first. Custom Robo casts you as a young man waking up to head out to a job interview at a bounty hunter agency. This bounty hunter agency, along with the rest of the world, uses custom robos as weapons, which are little personalized combative robots. Once you get to work, you meet your boss Ernest and your new best friend Harry, who takes you out on your first job. From there, you get access to your very own robo dude and the story picks up steam. New threats are introduced, twists are revealed, the main character has a mysterious destiny, you know the deal.
The story of Custom Robo is pretty standard, shonen fluff. That being said, it’s enjoyable fluff. There’s a comfort in the way that the game sets out to tell its especially simple story without trying to overstep its bounds. Although the plot points are standard fare and the “twists” in the story are obvious to anyone who’s even accidentally seen any form of media, there’s no point where the game feels hollow. Compared to today, where games try to tackle every issue all at once, it’s sort of refreshing to see such a simple take with simple themes. And there are themes here. The need for family, both blood and found, drive the story. The drive to prove to yourself that you belong. It’s oftentimes not very focused, but these elements are welcome additions all the same. Not every beat is perfect. The game’s crusade against strategically withholding information from the public probably could have been done better. And while I can understand the point that the game is making, the way this is incorporated into the story puts me to sleep. Towards the end of the game, as the stakes should be raised, the game plops you down for a good seven-minute sermon on the drawbacks of mediated public obliviousness. There’s no real flow in or out of the story to make this point. The characters don’t really put up much argument. They just let this blue-haired anime husbando lecture them on the globalist cabal, then go “Welp, time to go beat the final boss.” It’s not great and it kneecaps the otherwise-consistent pace of the story. Still, despite a few hiccups, the story here does its job and I ultimately think it’s pretty good pulp videogame fare. It’s not going to change you in any profound way but you might have fun guessing the plot points as they cycle through.
The thing that really gives this game some meat is in regard to the writing. Some of this stuff is pretty sharp. You have to sift through a lot of bland banter and some seriously mustache-twirling villains, but every so often, Custom Robo surprises with its wit. This game can be straight-up funny when it hits the right note. And the developing relationship between you and your two coworkers is done really well with a good balance between light-hearted ribbing and tender heart-to-hearts. A lot of the time, the most interesting bits of writing are purely coincidental. The game gives you the option to immediately retire to your room at the end of every day once all the story bits are done, but if you choose to wander around a bit before heading home, every interactable character has unique dialogue that you can only catch on that one day. So many cute moments, like catching Ernest konked out at the bar, kicking his feet in his sleep, or the ongoing trend of people at the park trying to guess what the “Z” in Z-Syndicate stands for can be easily missed, which is a shame because it adds a lot of charm and life to the world.
They’re Called Action Figures
Gameplay in Custom Robo is all-in-all, pretty solid. You control a little robo in a virtual holostadium, zipping around, trying to blow up another robo. Slowly throughout the game, you’ll accumulate new parts that are used to customize your robot, ranging from guns to entire new bodies. You have your gun, which provides the most immediate damage you can dish out. Pods can get shot out to patrol around the battlefield and try to catch lazy movements. If your opponent is hiding or running away, bombs can be launched to try and catch them or funnel them somewhere else. And then you have your legs, which make you run good and maybe jump good as well also. But the real star of the customization feature comes in the multiple bodies available. All bodies fall into different classes, with differing abilities and uses. Some are all-arounders, but some have special abilites like being able to fly around the arena for a period of time or being able to disappear whenever they air-dash. The game is pretty good about spacing unlocks out as well. You’ll very rarely get two guns in a row, the game will always give you an opportunity to try out a new toy before giving you a replacement. There are more options than most people will ever try, but every build is able to be optimized. There’s a bit of magic in the fact that so many options are given that you can truly play any way that you want. This freedom of choice is probably Custom Robo’s greatest accomplishment and probably the reason that anyone remembers this series at all.
In my initial review of this game, I talked a lot about how the game doesn’t really challenge you, despite giving you so many options to break it. And on this point, I have to give it up to past me. Kinda. It’s true that you barely get any resistance throughout the story. Besides literally one encounter, there’s a good chance that you just breeze through not taking any losses. In this recent playthrough, I purposely went through and tried out different weapons and bodies that I had never touched before. But whether it be the gun that materializes swords above enemies or just a straight-up flame-thrower, you can’t help but stumble into really dominating strategies left and right. To be fair, this whole process was really fun. It’s a testament to the game’s mechanics that you can take virtually any weapon in the game and build out from that point to create an oppressive monster of a robo. However, all this runs the risk of boring the player when they have nothing worthwhile to test it on. And, cards on the table, the battles can get kind of boring. That is, until the post-game.
But Wait, There’s More
Once the post-game hits, Custom Robo becomes a different animal. Now, it’s battles all the time. And not only are the CPU smarter this go around, but they have special rules in place now too. You spend the post-game going from tournament to tournament, with each tourney spouting different conditions. In one, you can only use a part once, then need to pick a new one for the next battle. For another, you get pitted against two opponents at once. Some of the battles get seriously brutal. And it’s a welcome change after the relative snoozefest that a lot of the base story battles could be. The genuine challenge forces you to employ more strategy and in turn drives you back into your collection to see what part would be best for this situation. It’s great fun and much closer to what the entire experience should have been like. Although I think that the game could have done with spreading its difficulty out a little more, I can’t complain that the game is too easy once I find myself in space getting spit-roasted by two illegal robos at once.
You also unlock arcade mode, where you can fight through eight rounds, finishing up with the big bad, classic arcade fighter style. The parts that you win with are then unlocked in a model viewer, but there really isn’t any compelling reward to play arcade mode. This is just an option to sate a quick burst of Custom Robo craving. Honestly, the fact that this mode wasn’t available from the very start confuses me. I get that the point of this game is to unlock parts for and fine-tune your own robo dude. But the fact that the game doesn’t have a casual mode for people to just hop in is baffling. You don’t even unlock the ability to fight CPU in the Vs. mode until you beat the game for the first time. It’s story mode or bust. It seems like the developers were so committed to making you earn your own parts that they gutted the experience just to serve it to you later. And I don’t know if that was the right move. Invested players who beat the story mode and want to get more use out of their builds will enjoy arcade mode, but how many people have the patience to go through an eight-hour story just to be given the option? You even unlock the option to fight your battles in first-person mode after beating the story. I never went for this personally, I don’t like the idea of getting jump-scared by a Drill Gun peaking around a corner, but this is admittedly a sick addition that most people won’t experience. It’s pretty baffling. Coincidentally, the game’s content issue mirrors its difficulty issue. Everything gets better after ten hours, but are you willing to wait that long?
It’s Like Geometric Heaven
As far as the presentation goes, I’m not afraid to say it: I’m biased. I can’t say Custom Robo looks bad. The models may be chunky and stiff; this is true. And the outfits that people wear can get really outrageous; this is also true. But god dammit, if that isn’t my shit. If I could will it, I’d make every game in the Pokemon Colosseum engine. Some of the artistic decisions are actually pretty cool, no irony needed. The digital-wireframe look a lot of the combat environments have is an interesting take and it really taps into that “mysterious internet” vibe that was really prevalent in the early Aughts. There’s just a vibe to this game that transports me back to the days of watching 4Kids and having non-receded gums. My only serious gripe would be with the aforementioned costumes. Some of them work, but there are also a few examples that are plain incongruous with the character that they’re painted on. There’s no good reason that the cautious and overly-sensitive Marcia, who is so cagey and reserved that you can barely even talk to her for a good third of the story, should be wearing a see-through vinyl skirt. And then some just look stupid. Oboro straight-up looks like a Digimon-ized human. Again, this is also part of the aesthetic, rule of cool was all that mattered back in the day. But there has to be a line. I think that Custom Robo breaks me in this aspect. I can feel my objective brain clawing at the walls. I can hear it groaning every time Sergio comes on screen. But my subjective brain is just fist-pumping at the endearing crappiness of it all. So I can’t say one way or the other if this game has good presentation or not. All I can say is that if more games looked like this, we’d have fewer wars.
The music in Custom Robo is also much better than I gave it credit for. In my previous article, I made a joke about how it wasn’t music that you would listen to on your iPod. I don’t know why I said that. At the time I wrote that, I had the entire soundtrack on my iPod and very pointedly would play it just driving around from time to time. The fact is that this game has some bops. Early-aughts electronica is the flavor on tap here with a focus on catchy melody lines and a few drum-and-bass leanings. The soundtrack is pretty versatile as well, with lots of area being covered by the soundscape. Generally, the tone of the game is one of spring-summer, with the music being pretty, passive, lazy, and warm. But when it needs to, the soundscape can turn hectic or ominous on a dime. The sounds of the later parts of the game are almost entirely ambient with swirls of electronic fading in and out, almost like the last bits of human life, snuffing themselves out within the void. The battle themes are also appropriately energizing and do exactly what they need to, keeping the tempo up and never letting the action drop too low. All in all, I highly suggest putting these songs on your iPod. You might as well because I’m almost 100% positive Nintendo forgot they own this franchise and will never bother uploading this soundtrack to Spotify.
The Grand Battle
So that’s all folks. Take two done. Like I said before, Custom Robo is not a perfect game. But if you can get in the right headspace for it and have the patience for its idiosyncrasies, it can be very good. It’s a game that means a lot to me personally, just not in a very profound way. I love this game the same way that I love a Wonka candy. Although I can hear the argument that this is a title that only gets good after the ten-hour mark, once the story mode is beaten, I can’t necessarily agree. The little moments along the way were too charming for me to ignore. There’s an understated charm to this game that just taps into something pure and dumb and fun. And I think that’s good enough for me to keep in my memories.
If you want to play this game, please don’t use this link for Amazon. Prices are pretty nutty, you’re better off checking out what they’ve got on eBay and praying for a good day.