YMMV / Medabots: Metabee and Rokusho

• Anti-Climax Boss: Depending on how the player plays, many of the bosses can become this, but then again that's the point since the goal is to change the player into a true strategist.
• Catharsis Factor: Fewer things are more satisfying than setting up a good strategy and demolishing the opposing team with it. Seeing big damage numbers on a tank Medabot and smashing their titanic defenses in one or two blows feels extremely cathartic— as it is to see a Chain Reaction demolishing every single part of an enemy Medabot especially when the head is the last part broken.
• Cheese Strategy: Against an enemy or boss whose only attacks are Bombs, Optics and Gravity or a combination between the two. An easy strategy against them is to equip one Medabot with a half-shield and the other parts with parts that grant immunity to those attacks, which makes the opponent unable to damage with victory being guaranteed the moment the opponent has taken damage.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Getting the Mouse Medal as early as possible is highly recommended due to the fact Mt. Odoro, the next area after getting the second Tinpet is full of high Evasion opponents. The first shop even sells parts compatible with this Medal. In the Rokusho version, the Mouse Medal can be even more important since it has a decent Aim Shoot, giving more offensive options.
  • Players who want to collect all the Medaparts tend to choose to chase after Dr. Meta-Evil on Fiyun to get another shot at collecting one of Robo-Emperor's parts.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The old Lady can become this in the Rokusho Version, because her leader Medabot, Spidar, creates traps for Grappling attacks which most of the player's Medals are compatible with are only in this version. It doesn't help that her team is tailor-made to wear you down with a Phoenix Medabot to drain your health and a VERY tanky Megaphant that has 160 health on each arm and 140 health on its leg part.
  • For similar reasons the "Woman", not Young Woman, encounter is this but for the Metabee Version because the leading Medabot is a Botafly that will create traps against Shooting attacks which most effective Medals in this version have. The Greatmotha partner will use its Medaforce to hurt you if you take too long and the Snowbro is tanky and has a knack of stalling the fight with Stop attacks and being pretty sturdy as well.
  • The Ancient Elder in Kodine can be a pain to beat with a tanky Kappalord that has a field advantage and is armed with an unusually accurate and potent laser attack. He also has two buddies (Papyrak and Ambiguous) with strong Grappling and Shooting attacks to ensure you don't rely only on traps to win. Playing defensively against the Ancient Elder is very difficult and this fight is often a matter of who destroys the other side first.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Mt. Odoro, the second major area of the game, is full of high Evasion enemies and tough random encounters that can't be easily brute forced. This will teach you the value of Scout or Missile attacks and opponents having two to three Medabots will make sure to teach you to be more careful when using Aim Shoot or Berserk attacks.
  • Medabot Island is another big one. Random encounters with tougher and smarter team formations are far more common here and if you didn't realize that having the Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality won't always work until now, chances are this area will teach you. Painfully.
  • The nastiest one is right at the game's finale: the Final Boss. There's a good chance you'll find people asking for help on how to beat it and for good damn reason. Read That One Boss entry for the painful details.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Traps can become this once the player has set enough up till a point, it destroys a Medapart by usage and doesn't get disarmed. This makes the battle a waiting game until the enemy defeats themselves with their attacks.
  • Gillgirl's Circulis is very powerful with her unique ability to slow down enemies AND speed herself up. Unlike Bind, the melee variant, there's no defense against this and the effect will always stick for as long as it possibly can. The only thing that stops it from being even more broken is that she cannot speed up her allies with it and it can only be obtained mid-game.
  • Scouts can also become overpowered, especially since after they increase the accuracy of the attacks, they also start increasing their attack power. This can make even the weakest attack strong enough to destroy an opponent's several Medaparts or with some attacks give them a bad status for pretty much the rest of the Robattle.
  • Defense will protect your other Medabots from harm which can give you more liberty in using Berserk/Aim Shoot or time to set up your buffs with very little risk. Most Random Encounter teams have an awfully difficult time breaking through a half-decent Knight Medal Medabot. In certain fights, you can even make sure you opponent cannot hurt you at all by equipping the Medabot with parts that nullify Bomb, Optic, or Gravity attacks, which in some boss fights such as Hachiro or Seaslug in Metabee Version are the only attacks your opponent are capable of performing.
  • Simply having the Terrain advantage can make several story bosses a cakewalk since while they are slowly charging with their incompatible leg types, the player's Medabots can just keep attacking and possibly break their Medapart before they can even use it.
• Goddamned Bats: Any Medabot with high Evasion (usually Fly or Sea types) will force you either to employ Scout or Anti-Air/Sea parts just to have any chance of hitting them at all. Extremely tough Medabots (usually Tank types) are also a pain since they'll cover their buddies and make the battle drag on way longer than it should.
  • The Rubberobo Gang minions are a hassle to fight. They aren't difficult, but fighting them takes forever since the regular encounter mooks always come with a Flatstick who's obnoxiously dodgy and tanky and a Gorem and Haniwa which not only are also tanky but cancels Missile and Optic attacks respectively. This can be made even worse in Metabee's version if you're using Jellyfish and Tortoise Medal Medabots. If you have Anti-Sea parts this fight is less annoying, but just barely.
  • The random encounter "Man" in Medaropolis. He's usually not that difficult but he can be a very tiresome robattle. His leading Medabot is Cordy and he has two Komandogs for partners. Cordy will block off one of your parts, with an uncanny chance of picking the one you rely the most on, and will debuff the rest of your team with "Can't Evade". The Komandogs are heavy hitters with Optic arms and terrain advantage mostly negating their Mighty Glacier status and the "Can't Evade" will ensure their powerful attacks will land despite their poor aim.
• Goddamned Boss: Some mandatory boss fights will test your mettle and patience making sure you don't rely only in high damage numbers.
  • Hachiro isn't too difficult, but his main Medabot has a powerful laser attack (which is also accurate and fast). But the main problem is that he also has two Armorparadeens, very tanky Medabots, alongside it ensuring you won't brute force this fight easily.
  • Gillgirl's battle in Rosewood in Rokusho version is either this or That One Boss. Her main Medabot is a Circulis which will slow your team down to a crawl while the Gloomegs will slowly but surely chip you away. Even with Cancel Bomb to give you immunity this fight is a slog due to Circulis' effects.
  • Baron only uses counterattacks the entire match which doesn't seem like much, but at this point, your attacks are probably strong enough to trigger it which can lead to an unfortunate situation where you'll only be able to pierce their abilities by using Medaforce.
• Good Bad Bugs: Your Medabot Skill will be trained even if said skill fails to trigger due to lack of target or lack of ammo (for Head parts).
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The little soothing jingle that plays whenever your Medal levels up or upon learning a Medaforce is a short, but very sweet music loop.
  • The sound of you obtaining a new Medapart will also make you very happy.
• Padding: There's a truly astonishing number of fights that serve no purpose other than to increase gameplay time. Making things worse most of these fights don't even give rare Medaparts.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the gameplay is fun once you get the hang of its quirks, the game's story is nothing really noteworthy.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: You can go with a single or two Medabots even if your opponents are using all three. Of course, unless you really know what you're doing this will make an already tough game much more difficult.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You have no control over which parts are damaged when dealing or taking damage. This means you can instantly deactivate enemy Medabots with a blow straight to their heads, but the same thing can happen to you as well.
  • Likewise you can't control which ally Medabot will get buffed first (Scout notwithstanding), so if you want to give Speed Up to your main attacker or AutoRecover to your tank Medabot first, but the game decides he'll get it last, tough luck. Having more than one part helps only so much and will sacrifice the Medabot's versatility for it.
  • The game won't warn you, let alone prevent you, from any potential tactical blunders like attempting to use a damaged part, something that won't affect the opponent at all, or that you're going to waste a turn trying to use a Medaforce without enough energy.
  • Speaking of Medaforces, you must have full gauge (80/80) to use it even if the Medaforce uses only 40/80 of it. Medaforces can target your Leader directly bypassing every defensive measure and sometimes a perfectly good fight can end abruptly because the CPU destroyed your Leader's head in a bout of dumb luck.
  • You cannot modify your Medabots during the team selection screen. If you forgot to swap any parts and end up battling in a different terrain after moving from one screen to another, you'll have just to tough it out.
  • Skill training is extremely grindy and tedious: you must constantly use the same type of action over and over again and it takes a good while for it to increase just a single point.
  • There's no way to gauge how powerful an opponent is or how strong their Medal Skills are.
  • Tinpets are given throughout the story and cannot be bought, so you might be stuck with several medals and having to constantly reassemble Medabots which is awfully inconvenient. And, what's that? Do you want to have more Male Tinpets than Female Tinpets or vice-versa? No can do.
  • You can only avoid fights by spending a Rubberobo Medal which can only be obtained by defeating a member of the Rubberobo Gang or a Select Corp. soldier, neither become common encounters until Medabot Island. No, they cannot be bought anywhere. If you accidentally decide not to use it you cannot avoid the battle anymore.
  • Once a Medal reaches Level 100 their skills will not grow anymore. Want to get everything to Skill 100? That ain't happening.
  • There are a few segments where you must have a Medabot equipped with a specific Medapart to progress. This adds nothing to the gameplay and only forces the player to waste time searching for the specific part (many of them depending on how much you've been collecting), do what as to be done, and reassemble the modified Medabot.
  • To use the Vehicles - Mini S. Wheel, Wings of Wind, and Periscope - you must have the Medabot built into your team. Before getting more Tinpets it can be quite a hassle having to disassemble and reassemble your Medabots to use them.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: On Medabot Island, it is rather easy to spend some time playing "Protect the Select Corps. HQ" game to farm Rubberobo Medals since it is the only easy way to get them without robattles.
• Surprise Difficulty: The game has a rather deep battle system with many possibilities for different strategies and relying only on sheer damage numbers will not end well for you. It can surprise many people who expect this to be just another bland, easy, RPG about kids and their robots.
• That One Attack: The Medaforce attacks bypass all kinds of defense and protections and the damaging ones tend to wreck your Medabots like nothing else. The final boss, Mega Emperor, starts with full Medaforce Gauge and will blast a Kabuto and Kuwagata on you if you don't block Medaforces from being used.
• That One Boss: Some of the bosses can be very hard to beat when you're not ready or rarely even when you're ready:
  • Squidguts's first boss battle in the Rokusho Version can be a slaughter, because not only do his Medabots hit hard with their sacrifice and undodgeable Missile attack, but they are also Sea Attribute which makes them hard to hit without the scout ability and make it worse only one of your Medabots can have an Anti-Sea Medapart at this point of the game.
  • In the Metabee Version, Samantha becomes this from her second battle onwards due to the fact her two support Medabots are both Redlace, who can set up traps that damage Medabots that can set up Shoot Traps, which Metabee and most other Medabots in the Metabee Version specialize in.
  • Dr. Armond can be a real handful during his first encounter in Medabot Island. He will use Zorin and Bayonet, variants of Rokusho and Metabee, and without proper strategy, he'll just walk over your team with his superior power.
  • Dark Master in the Witch's Castle is a real hassle to fight. He has two Crimson Kings equipped to instantly destroy your Medabots in Radiation phase (cooldown) and a Fligflag that can increase his Evasion to stall the fight. Even if you bring Anti-Sea/Air parts this fight can go south in one single turn if the Crimson Kings land their attacks.
  • The Final Boss, Mega Emperor, was pretty much made impossible to win without a proper strategy. First up all three Medabots have fully charged Medaforce which they can use immediately, to make it worse their normal Medaparts also hit hard and there is no terrain advantage since it's on the neutral Cyber Terrain. Truly making this fight impossible without good planning, sometimes to the point of Highly Specific Counterplay since the boss is so overwhelmingly more powerful than you.
  • Babbyblu manages to be just as bad, if not worse than the Final Boss. The Leader Medabot has Confusion to make your team uncontrollable, Force Bind to allow his buddy another freaking Mega Emperor to blast a Medaforce if you're not careful and Boost Chrg to counter any attempts to slow them down. Do you want to finish the fight quickly? You'll have to get through one Armorparadeen, a very tanky Medabot. The only good news here is that this fight is optional.
• That One Level: The one thing that's guaranteed to be very annoying to beat is the race minigame especially since the player has to give his team three of the same type of legs which also have to be different from the opponent which can be hard if they don't have any luck in battles or don't grind at all and even that's discounting the amount of times they have to repeat the game just to get the right terrain that would give them the advantage. Not helping the matters is that there is no guide for field advantage Medabots can have.
• That One Sidequest: Getting the Botros Medal which requires you to have 29 Medals in on Save File. It also means having the "?" and Cat Medals which force you to go through two playthroughs and their own sidequests are exceptionally long and easy to mess up, and also every one of Miss Nae's Medals (which can be missable) too.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Medalink in Medaropolis' Medashop could easily be a great way to get infinite fights and re-fights with any available character becoming a fine Post-End Game Content, but instead it has limited uses and serves no purpose once all its fights are done.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Mixed Medabot enemies are almost non-existent. Only one random encounter has it (Ant Medabot in Medaropolis Sewers).
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Since sometimes Pink Means Feminine here it's very easy to think some of the Male Tinpet Medabots are Female until you break one or two parts to reveal its gender.

---