Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament – The QJ.NET Review

Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament for the PSP is a spin-off of a PS2 game called Steambot Chronicles. Blending together a turn-of-the-century world with steampunk sensibilities, publisher Atlus and developer Irem task players with taking control of bipedal automobiles called Trotmobiles to try and reach the summit of Orion City’s Trotmobile tournaments. Does it live up to the underrated title that it was spawned from or does the PSP outing run out of steam? Let’s find out.

Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament for the PSP is a spin-off of a PS2 game called Steambot Chronicles. Blending together a turn-of-the-century world with steampunk sensibilities, publisher Atlus and developer Irem task players with taking control of bipedal automobiles called Trotmobiles to try and reach the summit of Orion City’s Trotmobile tournaments. Does it live up to the underrated title that it was spawned from or does the PSP outing run out of steam? Let’s find out.

At the beginning of Battle Tournament you can choose to play as a male or female character, name yourself, and then pick a name for your Trotmobile. It’s a whole lot less than what I expected in terms of character customization, but even if the character customization process boils down to picking a gender and name, Trotmobile customization is much more extensive. Further customization is also marginally possible via the dialogue choices given to your character at certain points. You can be a goody-two shoes or a lecherous maniac, but ultimately the choices don’t really affect the overarching story, or what passes for it at least.

After you’re done with the initial character customization, you run into a Trot mechanic named Venus. You are then given a brief tutorial in Trotmobile controls by fighting against another Trotmobile. Quick, simple, and straightforward. Just the way I like my tutorials. There was a bit of a jarring moment though when the first on-screen conversation came up and I was treated to the kiddy Flash game-like illustrations of the characters. The game world itself has some pretty nice semi-cel shaded graphics, but the difference between the world’s presentation and inexplicably simplistic character portraits makes for a jarring experience at first. The voice acting, on the other hand, is quite commendable.

Now that you’ve got a Trot and a mechanic, you may be thinking that it’s time to start kicking Trot ass in the tournament. Don’t bother. Well, not yet anyway. First you have to earn enough fame and money to even qualify for Rank D fights, the lowest tournament tier. You do this by doing jobs, and this is where Battle Tournament starts to break down.

The job selection is very repetitive — just one variation or another of your standard “go here get this” quest. In fact, practically all of the jobs in Battle Tournament is an errand where you bring something somewhere, although there are instances where jobs that are tied to the story appear. You may may be riding around a cool steam-powered robot with fists that pump out pure destruction, but in the face of the game you’re just a glorified messenger boy. Further adding to the tedium are the monotonous environments. Once you’ve cleared an area of enemies, they’ll have respawned again once you go back, and they’ll be in the exact same position every time.

Another thing wrong with the job system is the needlessly convoluted process involved in taking, doing, and completing a job. You have to go the Employment Agency which requires that you get out of your Trot, pick a mission, head back out to your Trot, talk to whoever initiated the job, head outside the city and fight the same enemies that you’ve fought every single time you went through those areas, get whatever it is you were supposed to get or do, go back to town and talk to the person who posted the job, and finally return to the Employment Agency to collect your reward. If Irem set out to simulate real life in the form of how tedious day-to-day jobs are, then congratulations to them. They’ve nailed it.

Job rewards come in both fame and money (sometimes you also get emblems). The latter is essentially the only important thing about it. You need money to upgrade your Trot and buy some parts necessary for certain jobs such as saw arms and passenger carriages. The former is meant to be a barometer for what tournament tier you can enter, but I found it quite useless to be honest. It doesn’t even make sense to me. You’d think that winning battles would result in more fame, but no. Errands do. Weird.

Once you’ve earned the required fame and entry fee, you can finally join in one of the game’s few bright spots: the tournament held in the coliseum in the middle of Orion City. You make your way up the rankings ladder from the lowest tournament tier, Class D. Battles take place in several types of arenas. There are flat-surfaced industrial areas with a lot of stuff to throw at your enemies. There are also more dynamic terrain such as a snow-filled arena with different elevations.

The battles themselves are between two steam-powered mechanical contraptions, so don’t expect any mad fast boosting action and bullet hell scenarios like Armored Core. It’s slow, it’s clunky, but it does a good job of integrating the game world’s technology into the fights. Controls are quite accessible — you move around with the analog stick, attack with the square and triangle buttons, jump with circle, trigger a short boost with cross, and use the D-pad to pick stuff up (including your enemies) and lock on to your targets — but the camera, controlled by the shoulder buttons, can get a bit frustrating at times, especially when you’re in the higher tiers. 

Trotmobile customization plays a huge part, as without new and upgraded parts you’ll be hard-pressed to advance at all in the tournament rankings. You have some level of freedom to set your Trotmobile up to your own personal play style, be it with long-range weapons, melee, or a combination of the two. The parts that make up your Trotmobile have a set number of times that they can be customized so you have to think hard about which upgrades to purchase else you’ll have to grind again to earn back the wasted money. Apart from the upgrades some superficial customization options such as custom color schemes are also available.

Clearing the tournament brings us to a bit of a quandary: What now? That’s where multiplayer comes in. It should be said that while Battle Tournament‘s single-player scenario suffers from the repetitive nature of everything from the jobs to the whole environment, it does come with a Game Sharing feature for easier multiplayer battles. Up to four people can fight it out in their own Trotmobiles using one UMD. This was a wise decision on the part of developer Irem, as it’s probably the only thing that adds a modicum of replayability to the game.

Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament is a decent enough game in its own right. The tournament battles can be exciting and give players enough strategic options to tweak their Trots to fit their own playing styles. The US$ 39.99 price tag is still too high however due to the lack of replayability, and the sheer tedium of the jobs that you have to do in order to enter the tournament and upgrade your Trot is frankly a blight upon whatever good points the game may have. It’s better to just rent it or wait until it gets a price cut.