Zool: Majou Tsukai Densetsu

"Zool almost manages to be an enjoyable experience, but it lacks personality, originality and the most important, fun."

Playing Zool is an experience that leads to mixed emotions. If you are often bored by long dialogues, sub par visuals and a "silly" story, then Zool is definitely not for you. The game sports an absolutely huge amount of text, the characters are childish.... and there are... hmm.... "cute" monsters. Looks like Pokemon, right? Yes... almost. Think Monster Rancher... but more colorful. Zool was designed for a young Japanese audience and in order to "enjoy" Zool, you have to bear in mind that the game was not designed to be the next Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. Besides, Zool looks ugly, the musics are irritating after a couple of hours and the game moves in a very... veeeeerrrryyyy slow pace outside of battles.

By now, you should already be turned off by the game... right? Well, don't give up yet. Of course Zool is loaded with problems. But it also proves to be a somewhat enjoyable Role Playing Game if you decide to spend some time with it. What saves Zool from being an absolutely worthless experience is its fast paced battle system and, I must confess, the gotta-catch-'em-all feeling, thanks to the several monsters the game forces you to capture.

Probably many people who are reading this review will never actually play Zool. Maybe because it is an obscure game, maybe because it is "another" Japanese RPG with incomprehensible text, or maybe because there are much better games out there... in English. But the fact is that, for those who decide to play Zool, they will find quite a lot of similarities with all of the "monster" games from the mid-90's. Zool is one more of these "monster" games trying to capitalize on Pokemon's success. The story is about a young boy named Leo who finds a little monster and uses his new "friend" to battle against other monsters and save the world from evil guys. Eh, how original...

Graphics: 3.5/10 - Audio: 2.5/10
The visuals in Zool are, in a word, ugly. The game tries to combine 2D characters with 3D backgrounds, but the result is absolutely pathetic. The 2D characters are small and blurred and the textures in the backgrounds are repetitive and really bad. The audio is even worse than the visuals, with MIDI quality tunes, most of them quite irritating. The sound effects are terrible as well, Zool sounds like a game on the Atari 2600 rather than the Nintendo 64 (and, believe me, this was not an euphemism).

Gameplay: 6.0/10
The gameplay, outside of battles, is slow and clumsy. At the world map and inside dungeons, Leo moves in a very slow pace. However, you can't explore the towns properly, since you can not move freely around town. The towns are presented in a top down view. The houses, inns, bars, dungeons and shops are just fixed points you can put a cursor over and press the A button to visit. Once you get into a battle, however, things change. Battles are quick, simple and... fun. Yes, believe me, battling is fun. You can have up to four monsters in your group. With the analog stick you select one of the four monsters, and with the C buttons you assign a command to a monster. You can use attack, magic, run away or defense, but you can't use items in battle. At the bottom of the screen there is a bar with some musical notes. Every time you assign a command to a monster, you use up some musical notes, but the bar regenerates slowly as the battle progresses. So, you have to take care not to empty the bar and run out of musical notes. This is a very simple system, and it makes for fast paced, fun battles.

Replay: 4.0/10
In short, Zool is one more Japanese Role Playing Game. It is generic, boring, slow paced and childish. The only redeeming point of the game are the quick battles, but there are so many problems overall that it is really hard to enjoy Zool.

Final Average - 4.0/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/13/06