LBX: Little Battlers eXperience

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

LBX: Little Battlers eXperience, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2015, is actually the third game in this series, though it is the first one to make it out of Japan. This Action-RPG takes place in a world where the big craze is the titular action figure-sized fighting robots used by kids in Pokemon-style battles, with this game putting players in the role of a young boy who comes into possession of one of these robots under mysterious circumstances and finds himself the target of shady characters looking to take his LBX for themselves.

Needless to say, the Pokemon vibes are strong here, but LBX manages to back them up with a wonderful presentation featuring cartoony, stylized cel-shaded 3D visuals interspersed with anime-style cutscenes and backed by really good voice acting. This is a really polished game, and this presentation really helps to bring the player into its Saturday Morning Cartoon-style plot.

The gameplay itself starts with a great premise, at least. The notion of players customizing their own little robot fighter is delightful and holds a lot of promise. There’s clearly a lot of thought that went into the customization mechanics here, and there are a good variety of parts to swap out, and different stats to play around with in your attempt to customize your own machine.

Unfortunately, one issue brings all of this crashing down, and that’s the battling itself, which is clunky to the point of maddening frustration. Just about everything you do in battle seems designed to frustrate, whether it’s the way your LBX is basically stunned and frozen for a second every time they land from a jump, the way they often pause when trying to run while shooting, the way enemies can apparently sometimes ignore hitstun completely and attack you to interrupt a combo, the way your melee attacks don’t seem to aim properly… the battle system here is frankly a mess.

This is all so disappointing for me. I really wanted to enjoy LBX. It has a fantastic premise, a wonderful presentation, and the robot customization options are exactly the sort of thing I’d want to see in this sort of game. It’s just a shame that all these elements are let down so terribly and completely by the game’s thoroughly terrible combat. The result is a game I can’t really recommend, as much as it saddens me to say that.

tl;dr – LBX is an Action-RPG about action figure-sized customizable fighting robots. The cartoony presentation here is wonderful, and the ability to customize your robot is excellent. Unfortunately, the actual combat is clunky and aggravating in numerous ways. This unfortunately kills the otherwise fantastic potential this game could have had.

Grade: C-

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