My personal game review philosophy dictates that I approach each new game title as blind as can be. I don’t do any research, I don’t read any other reviews — I try to isolate myself entirely until I’ve finished experiencing whatever the title has in store, so I can accurately judge it on its own merits. Going into Cocoto Fishing Master, for instance, I had no idea I was about to waste several hours with a three-year-old piece of PS2 shovelware. Well, I had a hunch…
But them’s the breaks, and if it means I can dissuade even one more individual from wasting their time, then I’ll have done my job. And as it turns out, Cocoto’s not all bad — follow the jump and I’ll explain just what I mean.
After explaining something or other about a world to save and a giant cauldron filled with lava that can only be quenched by the almighty power of HUGE FISH, Cocoto Fishing Master throws gamers unceremoniously into the middle of the ocean, where a tiny fairy with a huge head, a skimpy red two-piece and a devil horn tiara explains the controls… to a bright red imp steering a boat with four oars and no rowers. Your protagonist, Cocoto.
In hindsight, the fact that anything — even a scantily-dressed fairy — is needed to explain a WiiWare title’s controls should have tipped me off to the title’s quality, but when I first tried Cocoto I was more concerned that there was no explanation of anything else. Like where to go next, or what in blazes fishing had to do with saving the world. But thankfully, there was a handy red compass indicator pointing to something that looked vaguely like a turtle, standing on top of a tiny raft. He told me he was hungry, and asked if I had an Exocet. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t have any Exocets.
Go fish.
And so I did.
For most of an hour, I aimed the nose of my boat at a cluster of differently colored dots on my sonar display, marveled at how Cocoto managed to instantaneously rotate his boat ninety-degrees so that he could fish out the starboard side yet still aim at where the bow had just been (apparently it never occurred to the developers to utilize the Wiimote pointer function) and cast line after line with a flick of the wrist. I caught nothing.
Now, if this was meant to be a simulation of real-life fishing, where the fish only bite if they A.) are hungry, B.) like the bait you’re using and C.) happen to be present in the general vicinity of said bait, I would take this in stride. However, Cocoto is more like playing Let’s Go Fishin with a piece of magnetized Neodymium — assuming you put the bait anywhere near the fish, a bite is all but guaranteed. The problem was the controls — and more specifically, the incredibly misleading instructions on how to use them.
After you cast the line, fishing is broken down into four distinct phases. First, you wiggle the bait about with the Nunchuk analog stick, a motion which serves absolutely no purpose if you’ve failed to cast the bait close to a fish. It’s not particularly intuitive to move bait in the water with the Nunchuk (ostensibly corresponding to the ‘reel’) while the Wiimote ‘rod’ sits without purpose, but it works. They use this symbol to refer to the analog stick control. Once a fish goes for the bait, the game cuts to a sequence where you must mimic the fish’s motions (again, on the analog stick) to ensure the bait gets eyeballed long enough to tempt the soon-to-be-seafood to have a taste. So far, so good — but when the fish tries to chow down, things get hairy.
According to our helpful red Tinkerbell, “when the fish bites, you have to quickly pull up the Wii Remote vertically to strike the fish.” Logically speaking, in three dimensions the words “pull up…vertically” could be interpreted in a number of ways — and I tried them all. As it turned out, the word “quickly” was actually the culprit. In order to actually hook a fish in Cocoto, you don’t strike when you see the fish bite; when you feel the fish bite through the Wiimote’s vibration; or even when the on-screen indicators tell you to.
They are all out of sync.
Instead, you must gently, smoothly flip the Wiimote from horizontal to vertical as soon as the game switches from the bait mimicry sequence to the fish bite phase — before the fish has even touched the bait. And if you somehow forgot to leave your Wiimote in a horizontal position before the scene begins, you can kiss that ichthyoid goodbye.
Remember this symbol? Here it is again, used to refer to the controls for reeling in a hooked fish. Except here, the analog stick does nothing — rather, you have to physically wind a reel with the Nunchuk as virtual crank. Aside from the confusion the instructions caused me, this sequence was actually quite fun; the Wiimote-Nunchuk combo feels remarkably like a real rod and reel here, and fighting the flailing fish that threaten to snap the line was rather exhilarating the first few dozen times I had to do so.
Despite my devoting the last three paragraphs to a proper explanation of the game’s controls, it’s not the input mechanism that ultimately sinks Cocoto Fishing Master, it’s the fact that aside from the game’s two shops (at which you sell fish for rubies at the one, then spend 30 seconds paddling to the next to trade those rubies for equipment) and the so-called “boss fights” that simply pit you against a larger fish than usual, you’ve now seen everything the game likely has to offer.
“Likely,” you say? I’m going to be completely honest with you: I didn’t finish this game. Why? Because by the time I got three-fifths through, I was literally bored to tears by the immense repetition and utter lack of reward for successful angling.
In order to progress through the game, the old turtle asks you to bag one of each of the six varieties of fish — one of which he’s got a particular taste for, and so will ask for a second — and one of which is invariably harder to catch than the rest, meaning you have to level grind, scooping one easy fish after another in order to afford a new rod. In exchange, you get a chance to fight the “boss,” a huge fish whose grand entrance consists of clipping through the bottom of the level. The underwhelming battle ends not with a gigantic creature being hauled on deck, but instead the monster going all princess-in-another-castle, speaking to you from the side of your boat…
Congratulations! You are a good fisherman! You have earned this.
…before spitting up a piece of the magical trinket designed to advance the plot. Only by “advance the plot,” we mean teleport you to a palette-swapped version of the exact same world where you get to do everything you just did again… and again… and again. To be fair, a few of the fish have slightly different chase animations and struggle slightly harder for their worthless lives in each subsequent world, but the rest is window dressing.
There’s really no question, even at only 700 Wii Points: Cocoto Fishing Master is not worth your money, let alone a huge 308 blocks of storage. I’m deleting mine right now.
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July 9th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
[...] it’s a three-year old piece of PS2 shovelware, but it’s actually kind of fun to reel in the fish,” I would [...]
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