Hudson's just launched a two-sided revival of the dormant Beyblade franchise, bringing new editions of the dreidel-battling concept to both the DS and the Wii. I evaluated the handheld version first, ultimately deciding that all its visual flare and emotion were just masking a thin gameplay design. Here on the Wii, that fact remains -- there just isn't much you can do when your franchise is based entirely on the interaction of two plastic tops bumping into each other. But this edition does fare better elsewhere, making for an overall product that's not quite as cringe-inducing as its DS brother.
Beyblade: Metal Fusion -- Battle Fortress adds an extra subtitle on Wii, and that Battle Fortress turns out to be the thing that makes this game a bit more approachable. Our wild-haired anime hero Gingka is on more of a real adventure this time around, having been sucked up into the giant floating Fortress in the sky. There, his signature Pegasus Beyblade has gone missing and he's off on a mission to find and put it back together, piece by piece.
The storytelling is limited to low-quality dialogue sequences between barely animated character portraits, but it at least gives some context to why you're playing. There's also a rudimentary overall map screen that appears between character interactions and battles, offering you some choice of how to proceed and a general sense of how far you've made it into the Fortress.
Again, these aspects are flimsy and wouldn't be worth mentioning at all except that their inclusion makes this Wii version more accessible than the DS game, and Beyblade fans may be weighing out a purchasing decision of one over the other. The Wii game also compliments its main battles with a small variety of alternate battle types, including a survival mode that drops an endless amount of enemy blades into battle against you and boss fights against powerful "robot" tops that keep themselves locked to a circular track in the arena and can't be dislodged, only outlasted.
Unfortunately, for anything this Wii game does better on the big screen, its core battles are just as uninteresting as they were on DS.
The foundation of the Beyblade franchise is battles between two spinning tops. The small pieces of plastic are launched into little bowl-shaped, one-foot-diameter arenas by wrist-mounted ripcords, then they gyrate around inside the circle colliding into one another every once in a while. The winner is the one that either stays spinning the longest or manages to send the other sailing out of bounds.
In the real world, this activity is recess-grade amusement probably most easily found on the playgrounds of elementary schools across the country. The draw of the video game versions, though, is being able to influence the action after the ripcord's been pulled. In concept, that could work. On the Wii, it doesn't.
The Wii Remote is used to swipe back and forth at the air in front of you in order to command your spinning Beyblade to move left, right, back, or forward and attempt collisions with your opponent. The motion control isn't accurate enough, though, and being paired with the tops' random gyrations around the screen doesn't help things -- you end up never being able to consistently connect.
There are special moves you can activate after enough time has passed and you've successfully built up enough charge in an on-screen energy meter, including techniques that temporarily increase your top's size and spin speed. These too, though, are inconsistent and very difficult to control.
And then the final blow is landed against Beyblade's playability with its over-the-top summoning sequences. These can be triggered for a near-guaranteed instant kill if you fill your energy meter completely, and are the flashiest and most impressive effects the game has to offer. They fall into one of the Wii's most dreaded gameplay traps, though -- waggle. You have to shake your Remote like a maniac back and forth, back and forth while an animation of a spectral lion or some other magical thing happens on screen. If you waggle enough, you'll score more damage. If you don't, you'll just feel like a fool with a sore wrist.
