A young man pulls a rock out of the ground and hold it to the sky, contained within is the skull of a creature dead for millions of years, and the newest member of his team. Each revitalized warrior, from the sturdy Stego, to the quick and fierce V-Raptor, to the hard hitting T-Rex, was once a fossilized skeleton pulled from the storied land of Fossil Island. Fossil Fighters adds a unique spin on the battle monsters formula where instead of merely running into the creatures, you instead revive the fossils of dinosaurs and other long-extinct species to battle it out. Incorporating an interesting fossil cleaning minigame, adds another layer of skill to collecting and strengthening your “vivisaur”, the in universe term for the revived creatures. The game also has a very interesting spin, where although starting out in a tournament like format, third-parties and their meddling spiral the plot away from the mundane.
In a nutshell, Fossil Fighters is a mon game, a game where you collect various types of creatures and battle using them against other teams of monsters. Released for the Nintendo DS in 2008, it garnered mild success and later went on to release 2 sequels. The main gameplay loop revolves around travelling to one of several dig sites, excavating dinosaur fossils, taking them back to the Fossil Lab, cleaning the fossils and reviving the cleaned fossils into new vivisaurs or upgrading the ones you already had. Throughout this process you will use your vivisaurs in teams of 3 to fight other fossil fighters whether through random encounters, during your traversals, or for story progression.
Of course, there could always be some improvements, when you get to the ate game, the relative lack of variety in fossil types, being mainly shape of bones, and shape of the rock itself, means the mandatory fossil cleaning for new fossils can become rather tedious. As well as this, comparatively speaking, the vivisaurs have a rather basic elemental system, with a mere five elemental types, this means that there isn’t much strategy for team building besides “keep the strongest vivisaur of each type in your party” there was a buff/debuff system as well, but that rarely overpowered the elemental advantage.
Of course there are a few steps that could be taken, fleshing out the elemental system for one could make the strategizing on which three vivisaurs to enter into battle would help expand the simple battle system. Another solution would be allowing for multiple visisours of the same type, in the game, you can only have a single vivisaur of a given species, allowing duplicates could mix up the battle system. As for the fossil cleaning issue, the game has a stop gap solution with a cleaning bot that slowly levels up that can clean repeat fossils for you, but that doesn’t keep the process itself very interesting. I think perhaps adding more types of fossil rock, like the fragile stone, or a larger variety of tools, could spice up the cleaning process and perhaps making it so that fossils can be in differently shaped rocks could add more variety for the cleaning.
All in all, I think this is a largely underappreciated game, with a fun story and interesting albeit simple graphics. I would love for this game and series to get a reboot, perhaps for the Switch or even a Mobile game which incorporates the touch controls the original game had. Seeing the dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures, while still taking cues from their theorized looks and discoveries had a really cool imagery for this little game.