Amazing Island

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.5 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Ryan Davis
• Reviewed on: 08/30/2004
• Released on: 08/25/2004
• Originally published on GameSpot: Amazing Island Review

Sega's Amazing Island combines monster-raising with the traditional party game. Unfortunately, it doesn't carry on the tasks of either of those genres particularly well. Despite sporting plenty of cute characters, Amazing Island hardly lives up to its name--perhaps "OK Islet" would be more appropriate.

The plot puts you in the role of a little blue-haired moppet who is, under extremely vague circumstances, transported to the titular Amazing Island, where he or she is charged with fending off the Black Evil, which has been turning all the cute little Octorok-looking natives into cute little Octorok-looking natives who are kind of evil. By using a monster of your own design as an instrument of island justice, you'll engage in a series of minigames, with a set of special glowing orbs being the object of your desire.

The monster creation system is a welcome change of pace from the prefab oddballs that populate other Pokemon-knockoffs. The system itself is fairly unique--that is, if you missed out on Agetec's 2003 release of Magic Pengel for the PlayStation 2. And in all likelihood, you probably did. Anyway, in Amazing Island you're presented with the frame for the body, which gives you an idea of the general stature of your monster. You then give shape to the different body segments by drawing shapes over them. After you've built the basics for your monster, you can apply different color schemes and accessorize with horns, claws, eyeballs, and other monsterlike stuff.

At the start, your options for body frame and accessory options are pretty limited, and as a result, most of your monsters will look like freaky alien insect monsters--words like "thorax" and "mandible" will often come to mind. But as you progress, you'll regularly be rewarded with new body frames, more manipulation options, and a wider selection of accessories, which progressively get weirder and weirder. Decking out your monster with wings and sneakers has a definite aesthetic value, and certain accessories can also impact the actual abilities of your monster as well, though the nature of that impact is not always explicit. If you don't consider yourself much of an artist, or you simply want to cut past the monster-building mess, you have the option to answer a series of seemingly Freudian questions, such as "If you were traveling through a tunnel, what would be on the other end?" and "You wake up one day as a puppy. What do you do?" Based on your responses, the game will automatically generate and accessorize your monster for you.

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