After Pokemania took the entire world by storm with its massive merchandising empire of video game, anime, card game, plushies, and more, companies started to look for ways to copy that success. They managed to come up with a very basic formula that has ruled toy stores for the past decade: TV show for hype, toys for the kids to play, and finally a video game to keep them interested while the new toy line rolls out.
Activision is pleased to announce today the fall release of Bakugan Battle Brawlers: Defenders of the Core for the DS, Wii, PSP, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
Building a team of creatures and ability cards, you take on genero-anime opponents in battles that are a mix of touchscreen minigames, stylus-swiping ball-steering and tiresome animations. The story behind all this may hold some appeal for Bakugan fans but the repetitive scraps will bore most gamers, not least because you don't do much – aside from a few screen taps, things seem to happen around you, making the whole thing incredibly boring. For non-Bakugan followers this is, quite literally, balls.
Crispy Gamerr writes: "0:00 The back of the box promises that "This is Bakugan like never before." That's highly accurate for me, since I'd never heard of Bakugan before receiving this game in the mail. But I like to keep up with the "youth culture" with its "Internet" and its "sexting" and its "industrials" and so forth, so I figured I'd see what this was all about."