1/5 ★ – Lancey's review of Fossil Fighters: Frontier.

This game is an insult to the Fossil Fighters series. This game is just awful. They took everything good about Fossil Fighters and made it incoherent and not fun. The new battle system means you only have control of one Vivosaur at a time, eliminating the strategy from the old games. The new stance system is beyond confusing, as it doesn't apply universally to every Vivosaur, and stacking on top of the Elemental system makes it super hard to even know if the way you're playing out the battles is even right. The reliance on AI party members also means you are forced to use them as every wild Vivosaur is ridiculously overlevelled to ensure usage of the AI's. In battle, the game is a complete mess that I was never able to figure out. The overworld doesn't function much better either. Instead of being able to walk around freely, you are forced to drive a buggy with some of the most terrible controls I have ever seen. It is an absolute nightmare. And the reasoning for having to do it makes no sense, why add a car if the other games didn't need it and worked just fine? The characters are one-note and completely unlikable cultural stereotypes that honestly make me pine for the characters in the DS titles. It's worse than you're forced to team up with them all game. The game's difficulty is archaic, it spikes and falls constantly. The game encourages you to use the titular Vivosaur Nibbles as much as possible, but if you solely rely on Nibbles you will get stuck halfway through the game as he is taken away from you at a certain point which just means you have to constantly grind. I never at any point in this game felt like my team was strong enough, I always felt weak. It's not a good feeling. The story is often the best part of Fossil Fighters games, as it's always insane and awesome. And that story in this game is stupidly underwhelming and simple with a villain so one dimensional it is painful. The only positive thing I can say about this game is that the music is pretty decent. Not as good as previous titles but still fairly good. It also is pretty graphically impressive for the 3DS, even though I think the artstyle has been butchered a bit in the transition to the 3DS. Overall, this game is bad. And it's no wonder this game killed the series.