Contact was one of my most anticipated games of the year and I beat it last night.  I beat it, but I didn't actually finish it.  I beat it as in, I saw the credits roll, but I'm not finished because I didn't do many of the optional side quests and I didn't get most of the skills offered in the game.  As you can tell, Contact is complicated.

For those not in the know, Contact is an RPG on the Nintendo DS developed by Suda51's grasshopper studio. You know, the same guy who brought you Killer 7. You play yourself, but you have to control Terry, the boy who lives in another world.  You have to control Terry to help the Professor, who must obtain some gems that broke into a couple pieces and is now scattered throughout some islands.  In the typical RPG fashion, it's up to Terry to fetch these gem fragments, but the CosmoNOTs, who are also after the gems, poses as opposition.

Impressions after the jump.

Yes, the plot is pretty drab and cliched, but what kept me going was the dialog.  It's quirky and modern. The in-game version of MySpace is called MySpot.  There's a parody of the band Muse.  Overall, the localization was perfect.  It's a good thing the plot is so cliched because the quirky dialog made it difficult to actually know what was going on in a scene sometimes.  I think it would have been clearer if they designated who was talking during the scenes a little better.

There have been complaints about the battle system.  You press a button to initiate battle and Terry will automatically attack the nearest enemy. Press the same button to stop fighting.  Press another button to use a special attack technique.  A lot of people have said this makes the battle boring, but I don't really mind. It's the same thing as a the early Final Fantasies or Diablo, only you don't have to press a button each time. The computer does it for you. There's still strategy involved because weapons could be switched in and out of battles, which become important when you acquire weapons with attack bonuses against certain types of enemies.

While the game may seem daunting at first, with Terry's highly customizable skills and traits (think: Oblivion), I thought the game was too simple.  Terry can change "class" by wearing different outfits, but most of the outfits didn't give that big of an advantage. The only two outfits I used much was the cook's outfit (to cook food) and the digging outfit (it was the strongest).  The player can find decals dropped by monsters and use them to boost their stats, but even those didn't seem to make too much of a difference with how battles went. I felt like the developers added a lot of neat concepts, but didn't really follow through.

Maybe I had expectations that were too high for this game, but when I beat it, I was disappointed by how simple the story was.  I enjoyed the time I spent with the game, but it just left me feeling empty inside, and not even the, "Oooh, I want more" kind of empty either.