Growing up in the 2000s, Pokemon was everywhere. It was hard to escape the toys, the video games, the anime/movies or the trading cards just because of how dominant it was on route to be the highest grossing media franchise of all time, before a brief dip in the 2010s that rose again with Pokemon GO. But with how popular it was then, there were naturally other contenders in the “toy advertisement/real life game/monster collecting” niche fighting for attention and most kids probably clung to at least one other one. There were a lot of these, be it a version of Yu-Gi Oh, Beyblade, Digimon or even extremely late contenders like Monsuno.
The main Pokemon alternate I grew up with was Bakugan, which I’ll talk more about on a future date, but for a few weirdos it might’ve been Chaotic, that Danish monster card game anime but not really anime show produced by 4Kids that aired at around 6 AM on Cartoon Network and probably other places maybe. In being curious how well that first Bakugan game held up, I also bought this game under the same game publishing brand for around $10 to see how it compared to that vague curiosity I had of this series’ existence.
And holy hell it is awful! A lot of the more obvious bad licensed games in the 6th and 7th gen like the Charlies Angels game or Aquaman game or Simpsons Skateboarding or DBZ Sagas have been made known elsewhere, but sometimes you see a game maybe nine other people had played and you’re shocked was even allowed to market in the limited, barely held together state that it’s in, the unexpected kind of shovelware that struggles to have ideas held back in any possible way it could be.
First off, you only play as the one main human character, Tom, voiced by Jason Griffith Sonic. This was confusing to me, since my vague memories of the show involved numerous human characters good and bad associated with different tribes of monsters possibly even building ideological reasons about why one character vibed with one side the most but nope, more than one human model was clearly too much for this game considering even his plain grey shirt has warping textures and his face looks like this.
https://i.imgur.com/hWYzqJH.jpg
The gameplay of Chaotic Shadow Warriors alternates between two styles, barely functional asset flip tier in the overworld, and ungodly bland and sluggish when inside of the monster fights.
The asset flip overworld parts highlight maybe the most obvious issue with the game; it runs like dogwater. When people think of the negative stereotype of 7th gen games and their obsession with bloom creating barely running experiences, this hits the dot right there. In the many worlds it almost never felt like Tom wasn’t running at maximum 15 frames per second, occasionally even lower, with it almost creating the sensation that you kept going from a run to a slow walk over and over despite the animation remaining the same. The very few bits of shoddy platforming thrown in are crippled by not only a hilariously stiff jump, but the terrible frame pacing making it an active struggle to meaningfully aim yourself in midair when going for a bigger leap. Tom isn’t given any sort of ambient lighting in the darker caverns to stand out from the environments, and the lava world is on par with Lost Izalith in Dark Souls 1 for how heavy the contrast between overly dark ground and overly bright lava is. And it’s not like the worlds in their ugly barely functional bloominess had anything in them beyond random objects to scan for plot progression. Almost all the time the only other characters are tiny bugs that die instantly just by spamming RT of a gun you’ll never run out of ammo for, and monsters to engage in the turn-based battles. And even those aren’t handled consistently. Sometimes running into them triggers an awkward zoom in of the monster’s unblinking model, sometimes you just see the static model and a battle initiates without a zoom, and sometimes a battle initiates without seeing a monster at all. It genuinely feels like the state of this was unfinished.
On top of this, most of the zones have zero actual connection to each other. Oftentimes finishing an area will immediately incur a laggy load screen, and Tom will instantly warp to another entirely separated part of the world. There was one section in a jungle level where you open a gate and can see more level on the other side, but it still triggers a loading screen as you're about to go through. This also happens when entering a window inside a castle with a load screen midway through some steps to load the rest of the level. If you turn around to go back outside the castle or on the other side of the open gate, that also incurs a loading screen without even disguising it by something as simple as going through a big door with a black void on the other side. This non-existent seamlessness really feels like they were struggling to find any way to tie together the loose collection of poorly lit assets they whipped up. And the weird thing is that the game has a fast travel system! It could easily just tell you to travel to a new location on your map when you have a reason to go to a particular place, but they couldn’t get THAT right. It makes for a consistently bizarre experience in seeing just how barely held together every single aspect of this world and this gameplay loop is being stretched for over 6 hours.
And this is WITHOUT talking about the monster battles, which are the supposed draw of a game like this. While not AS much of a barely running asset flip as the overworld stuff, it falters for different reasons, namely being boring, unintuitive and limited.
In concept it’s your typical RPG party system, up to 5 monsters on the field, a front and back row, defeating enemy forces that pile up to the same amount. You activate attacks via timing button presses for every single attack the exact same way when they line up with a shape, manage a resource based on how powerful certain attacks have potential to be and use spells for various effects, most of which are useless beyond heals and damage dealing attacks. There’s a somewhat neat risk/reward mechanic regarding whether you want to block an attack or scan a monster to add it to your team, with three of one monster in the same grade being able to be refined into a higher grade (higher grade monsters having better stats and more powerful attacks), but that’s really all the battles have going for them beside type effectiveness only notable a handful of times. Once you’ve balanced out which monsters you want to capture, it really does just come down to dealing damage with choppy canned animations, using magic to strike monsters in the opponent back rows, or taunting to gain more Attack Points at the cost of not moving.
And man, does the menuing to prepare for battles make trying to do ANY of this incredibly unintuitive. Selecting a monster for your team and their equippable item is done entirely through a row that only fully shows the information of one monster and non-descriptive pictures of two others. You can skip to the beginning or the end of your collected monsters but nowhere in the middle of the row to find a particular monster. You have no way of organizing the rows, meaning certain monster types will always be together and forcing slow scrolling to reach different types. If you try to scroll through equippable items too fast, the description for them won’t even load on time, forcing you to wait around for the text description of what the item does to eventually appear onscreen!
On top of this, you only have one slot to have a party equipped in, discouraging the use of different teams for different situations. A big part of why this game system discourages experimentation is because of what the game in context considers to be racist monsters. These are particularly strong monsters that will refuse to join any party that isn’t solely of their kind. Imagine in Pokemon once you acquired a Pokemon like Mewtwo or Lucario, you couldn’t include them in any party unless it entirely comprised of Psychic Type or Fighting Type Pokemon respectively. It’s that level of annoyance and it won’t even let you quickly swap out the other race monster for one of its race. Instead, you must find the other race’s monster, enter a menu and swap it out for one that’s the same race as the racist monster you want on your team. Lastly, the game bafflingly doesn’t even let you heal the monsters you capture unless you win a battle with them in your party or fuse it into a new monster. To continue the Pokémon metaphor, imagine if once you capture a Pokémon at 1 HP, you had to have it win a battle against a trainer to heal it for future encounters. It’s bizarre.
Once you get to the end of this game’s lousy excuse for a plot, which does nothing of worth beyond saving random monsters from corruption by winning battles and collecting pieces of a seven sided shape that has no tangible point by the end, you find out some evil gargoyle was behind it, he says “This isn’t a game”, Tom says “Let’s get chaotic” and you can handily defeat him via the exact same turn based “chess” match you’ve been slogging through all game (you can add him to your party against him despite never capturing him via gameplay). Then you talk to a concept art render on Tom’s cellphone and then the game ends. The credits speed by in less than a minute, as if the entire development team were ashamed, they had to ship this travesty of a product in the shape it was in.
I feel bad for any actual fans of this incredibly niche card game kids show because this game is the exact kind of thing you would get for Christmas and then either immediately hate or play through gritted teeth trying to say it desperately wasn’t a mistake. THIS is the worst game Jason Griffith had ever been strung along for, more than any Sonic title. But sometimes it helps to appreciate just how intricately terrible a product can get both as a game and a license representation, when seeing the range of many more concerted efforts almost anywhere else.
The main Pokemon alternate I grew up with was Bakugan, which I’ll talk more about on a future date, but for a few weirdos it might’ve been Chaotic, that Danish monster card game anime but not really anime show produced by 4Kids that aired at around 6 AM on Cartoon Network and probably other places maybe. In being curious how well that first Bakugan game held up, I also bought this game under the same game publishing brand for around $10 to see how it compared to that vague curiosity I had of this series’ existence.
And holy hell it is awful! A lot of the more obvious bad licensed games in the 6th and 7th gen like the Charlies Angels game or Aquaman game or Simpsons Skateboarding or DBZ Sagas have been made known elsewhere, but sometimes you see a game maybe nine other people had played and you’re shocked was even allowed to market in the limited, barely held together state that it’s in, the unexpected kind of shovelware that struggles to have ideas held back in any possible way it could be.
First off, you only play as the one main human character, Tom, voiced by Jason Griffith Sonic. This was confusing to me, since my vague memories of the show involved numerous human characters good and bad associated with different tribes of monsters possibly even building ideological reasons about why one character vibed with one side the most but nope, more than one human model was clearly too much for this game considering even his plain grey shirt has warping textures and his face looks like this.
https://i.imgur.com/hWYzqJH.jpg
The gameplay of Chaotic Shadow Warriors alternates between two styles, barely functional asset flip tier in the overworld, and ungodly bland and sluggish when inside of the monster fights.
The asset flip overworld parts highlight maybe the most obvious issue with the game; it runs like dogwater. When people think of the negative stereotype of 7th gen games and their obsession with bloom creating barely running experiences, this hits the dot right there. In the many worlds it almost never felt like Tom wasn’t running at maximum 15 frames per second, occasionally even lower, with it almost creating the sensation that you kept going from a run to a slow walk over and over despite the animation remaining the same. The very few bits of shoddy platforming thrown in are crippled by not only a hilariously stiff jump, but the terrible frame pacing making it an active struggle to meaningfully aim yourself in midair when going for a bigger leap. Tom isn’t given any sort of ambient lighting in the darker caverns to stand out from the environments, and the lava world is on par with Lost Izalith in Dark Souls 1 for how heavy the contrast between overly dark ground and overly bright lava is. And it’s not like the worlds in their ugly barely functional bloominess had anything in them beyond random objects to scan for plot progression. Almost all the time the only other characters are tiny bugs that die instantly just by spamming RT of a gun you’ll never run out of ammo for, and monsters to engage in the turn-based battles. And even those aren’t handled consistently. Sometimes running into them triggers an awkward zoom in of the monster’s unblinking model, sometimes you just see the static model and a battle initiates without a zoom, and sometimes a battle initiates without seeing a monster at all. It genuinely feels like the state of this was unfinished.
On top of this, most of the zones have zero actual connection to each other. Oftentimes finishing an area will immediately incur a laggy load screen, and Tom will instantly warp to another entirely separated part of the world. There was one section in a jungle level where you open a gate and can see more level on the other side, but it still triggers a loading screen as you're about to go through. This also happens when entering a window inside a castle with a load screen midway through some steps to load the rest of the level. If you turn around to go back outside the castle or on the other side of the open gate, that also incurs a loading screen without even disguising it by something as simple as going through a big door with a black void on the other side. This non-existent seamlessness really feels like they were struggling to find any way to tie together the loose collection of poorly lit assets they whipped up. And the weird thing is that the game has a fast travel system! It could easily just tell you to travel to a new location on your map when you have a reason to go to a particular place, but they couldn’t get THAT right. It makes for a consistently bizarre experience in seeing just how barely held together every single aspect of this world and this gameplay loop is being stretched for over 6 hours.
And this is WITHOUT talking about the monster battles, which are the supposed draw of a game like this. While not AS much of a barely running asset flip as the overworld stuff, it falters for different reasons, namely being boring, unintuitive and limited.
In concept it’s your typical RPG party system, up to 5 monsters on the field, a front and back row, defeating enemy forces that pile up to the same amount. You activate attacks via timing button presses for every single attack the exact same way when they line up with a shape, manage a resource based on how powerful certain attacks have potential to be and use spells for various effects, most of which are useless beyond heals and damage dealing attacks. There’s a somewhat neat risk/reward mechanic regarding whether you want to block an attack or scan a monster to add it to your team, with three of one monster in the same grade being able to be refined into a higher grade (higher grade monsters having better stats and more powerful attacks), but that’s really all the battles have going for them beside type effectiveness only notable a handful of times. Once you’ve balanced out which monsters you want to capture, it really does just come down to dealing damage with choppy canned animations, using magic to strike monsters in the opponent back rows, or taunting to gain more Attack Points at the cost of not moving.
And man, does the menuing to prepare for battles make trying to do ANY of this incredibly unintuitive. Selecting a monster for your team and their equippable item is done entirely through a row that only fully shows the information of one monster and non-descriptive pictures of two others. You can skip to the beginning or the end of your collected monsters but nowhere in the middle of the row to find a particular monster. You have no way of organizing the rows, meaning certain monster types will always be together and forcing slow scrolling to reach different types. If you try to scroll through equippable items too fast, the description for them won’t even load on time, forcing you to wait around for the text description of what the item does to eventually appear onscreen!
On top of this, you only have one slot to have a party equipped in, discouraging the use of different teams for different situations. A big part of why this game system discourages experimentation is because of what the game in context considers to be racist monsters. These are particularly strong monsters that will refuse to join any party that isn’t solely of their kind. Imagine in Pokemon once you acquired a Pokemon like Mewtwo or Lucario, you couldn’t include them in any party unless it entirely comprised of Psychic Type or Fighting Type Pokemon respectively. It’s that level of annoyance and it won’t even let you quickly swap out the other race monster for one of its race. Instead, you must find the other race’s monster, enter a menu and swap it out for one that’s the same race as the racist monster you want on your team. Lastly, the game bafflingly doesn’t even let you heal the monsters you capture unless you win a battle with them in your party or fuse it into a new monster. To continue the Pokémon metaphor, imagine if once you capture a Pokémon at 1 HP, you had to have it win a battle against a trainer to heal it for future encounters. It’s bizarre.
Once you get to the end of this game’s lousy excuse for a plot, which does nothing of worth beyond saving random monsters from corruption by winning battles and collecting pieces of a seven sided shape that has no tangible point by the end, you find out some evil gargoyle was behind it, he says “This isn’t a game”, Tom says “Let’s get chaotic” and you can handily defeat him via the exact same turn based “chess” match you’ve been slogging through all game (you can add him to your party against him despite never capturing him via gameplay). Then you talk to a concept art render on Tom’s cellphone and then the game ends. The credits speed by in less than a minute, as if the entire development team were ashamed, they had to ship this travesty of a product in the shape it was in.
I feel bad for any actual fans of this incredibly niche card game kids show because this game is the exact kind of thing you would get for Christmas and then either immediately hate or play through gritted teeth trying to say it desperately wasn’t a mistake. THIS is the worst game Jason Griffith had ever been strung along for, more than any Sonic title. But sometimes it helps to appreciate just how intricately terrible a product can get both as a game and a license representation, when seeing the range of many more concerted efforts almost anywhere else.