Bakugan: Battle Brawlers Review

It would hardly be fair to give Bakugan: Battle Brawlers a fair shake without first understanding the source material, so firstI sought to uncover the mystery: what is Bakugan?  In short, Bakugan is the perfect children’s marketing machine: a cartoon show that depicts kids playing a game that your kids can play in real life by buying cards and toys.  So, unlike Pokémon that treated the cards,toys, games and show as separate entities, connected through portraits of adorable animal cruelty, Bakugan’s TV show, toys and games are all inter-connected and reliant on one another.  In short: Bakugan is pure, concentrated, evil genius.

The real-life game of Bakugan is very simple: up to 4 players, each with 3 marbles called “Bakugan,” place metal cards in the middle of the table.  The players take turns throwing their Bakugan in the center of the table, and if it lands on a card, a magnet will cause the marble to transform into a robot/monster and it will fight the next Bakugan that lands on the card, through the awesome power of basic math.  The video game incarnation stays true to that formula, to make the experience a little more grandiose and interactive.  For starters, instead of placing a card on a table,players place their cards in lava pits, fountains, cloud palaces and other elementally-themed playing fields.  The Bakugan are not simply hurled toward a card, but can be influenced, post-chuck, by the playerin order to collect power-ups and/or fall off cliffs.  Battles are won not only by virtue of having a stronger monster, but also with the help of simple mini-games, but other than all of that, the core game concept of “throw marbles at cards so monsters pop out” is more or less untarnished.

The story of the game is fairly straight forward:you find a mysterious Bakugan and decide he’s your best friend, you compete in tournaments to gain acceptance, only to discover that you and your Bakugan pal are the world’s only hope of survival against some other evil tournament participant, and through the power of friendship you manage to become the most powerful Battle Brawler there ever was. If you think that it would be hard to stretch that story across an entire game, you would be absolutely correct, and the developers would seem to agree with you, since the “story” ends halfway through the game.  After the ending credits, there are still several tournaments left to finish before the game is over – the only difference is you no longer have a cut-scene waiting for you before and after each

If I had to guess, I would guess that the Wii version of Battle Brawlers was intended to be the lead SKU, because they managed to translate the shoe-horned waggle into the PlayStation 3 version of the game as well. One of the three battle mini-games has players performing “Red Light/Green Light” by shaking the controller until prompted to stay absolutely still, while another mini game sees you shaking while pressing buttons in time, vis-à-vis Guitar Hero without the music.  The player can also steer using the accelerometer, but the lack of precision makes gestures feel more like suggestions than actual commands.