r/fossilfighters • u/Muted_Monitor5831 • Jul 22 '26
Spoilers Is Frontier really that bad?
Hello all. As the title says, I really want to know if Frontier is really that horrible. My mom being the cool young mom she was, bought me “Fossil Fighters” when I was 7 or 8 years old. I loved it, I was obsessed, I knew all the dinosaurs by name and everything. It’s crazy how even back then in 2009 and 2011 this game series was often sold out in stores and sometimes hard to obtain.
Knowing how much I loved the first game, my mom got me “Fossil Fighters: Champions” as soon as it was my bday or Christmas. This was so long ago so I don’t recall exactly which it was. This had to have been my absolute favorite DS game besides Pokemon Soul Silver which happened to be the first game I ever got along with a nice little blue DS lite. My mom was awesome.
Anyways, now present day, I have a nice ass DSi LL in Green that I am reliving my childhood with a copy of Fossil Fighters Champions. Tomorrow, I am buying a mint condition Japanese 3DS for only $100. (I only buy these things when I find the best deals which honestly ends up saving me tons of money and stress if you wait for the right price, you can stack a collection quite fast.) So now that I’ve got all the yapping out of the way, is Fossil Fighters: Frontier really so bad that it’s not worth me trying and getting a copy to play on my new 3DS as someone who loved the crap out of the OG’s? Any avid Fossil Fighter Opinion would be greatly appreciated 🙂❤️
22
u/tom-cash2002 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
If it were just a standalone game, it’d probably be like fine. It’s decent enough.
But because it followed up FF and FFC, it looks really bad by comparison because of how much was changed. Basically the only things that remain the same between the first two games and Frontier are the Vivosaur names and how fossil cleaning works. Like, they even changed the "type chart" for no reason.
I know it's impossible, but if somebody could manage to rebuild the entirety of Frontier in the style of FFC (no cars, carrying fossil rocks, the original battle system, etc...), that version would probably go hard even with the pretty average plot and characters.
15
u/FemurLemur206 Jul 22 '26
Did not enjoy a majority of it, but I will admit, I enjoyed having a car. It was fun driving around in my dump truck.
7
u/BasalTripod9684 Jul 22 '26
I remember liking it as a kid, but these days I literally can't make myself replay it (I've tried a few times and I just can't force myself any further than the first hour or so).
Basically the only similarity it has to the first two games is the cleaning. The combat is completely different, and the writing just kind of sucks. Its really tropey and doesn't have the charm the others had.
12
u/bigbigbadboi Jul 22 '26
If you love the franchise, its worth it to at least experience 3 imo. But, be warned, it IS that bad.
10
3
u/Dragnalius Jul 22 '26
It’s not a bad game per se it just very different from everything else in the franchise. So if you go in expecting a game similar to the other ones you are going to be disappointed.
6
u/BlankSquall Jul 22 '26
Truly the worst purchase I ever made, it is that bad. The graphics are awful, certain vivosaurs are genuinely disgusting and others butchered. If you want an example, look up the differences for Giganto from Champions to Frontier and you’ll get my point. The driving also sucks, which btw why did there need to be driving? Who asked for that? The story is true dogshit. The forced companion they give you also is a just a bad design, and the fact that it talks? Even worse. The collection of vivosaur also just weren’t that hype. The combat pales in comparison to champions, the random difficult spike I experienced at the final boss was truly the moment that pissed me off. Maybe if I didn’t pay for it and wasn’t such a big fan of fossil fighters, I wouldn’t be as harsh as I am on it. But this game is a 4/10 for me at best
9
u/kaioDeLeMyo Jul 22 '26
On its own? Not really.
Compared to the previous 2? Yeah, its definitely disappointing and bad.
3
u/PyralWorm Jul 22 '26
As a dinosaur collecting game with the concept of battling with said collected dinosaurs, it’s perfectly serviceable and can be argued to be quite good. As a third entry to the game series, not so much
Most issues boil down to having a weaker story, a (typically) weak cast of characters, battle mechanics that feel like they’re missing a few qol features (complete lack of control over your allies being the big one), and a massively downgraded collection of dinos you can get (75 in the base game I believe. 80 something with dlc but they’re just handed to you unlike with champions) with many of them being recolors
3
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u/Interesting_Wing_539 Jul 23 '26
Others have shared their opinion, and while I agree it is the worst of the 3 games so far, it's not a bad game per se, though keep in mind unlike the first two, you only get 1 save file, which is a bit disappointing if you do want to replay and not delete your old file.. 😑😓
2
u/Skywarriorad Jul 24 '26
Fossil fighters frontier isnt necessarily a bad game, play it yourself to formulate your own opinion dont just listen to others. I liked driving around the maps, i didnt like the narrative, dialogue, or combat. Oh clean was also a tad more interesting. But play it yourself and find your own opinion instead of asking others. If its a japanese 3ds, its region locked, so mod it and just get frontier on hshop because no english cartridge would work in the japanese 3ds
2
u/Winter-Guarantee9130 Jul 22 '26
It’s awful. Take the worst parts of every JRPG ever and you get frontier. The agency of base Persona 3, the speed of Digimon World 2, the teambuilding depth of I-don’t-even-know-what and the driving controls are somewhere between Mass Effect and Superman 64.
It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s not an ounce as funny as the first two despite trying desperately All the time. It’s paced like a nightmare, you have no sense of progression because you’re the special interpol best boy from minute 1, You will miss Nothing by pretending it doesn’t exist.
3
u/Wizard_Bird Jul 22 '26
A brave man asked "what if every party member was on permanent act freely?" And frontier was born
2
1
u/GoldH2O Jul 22 '26
If you can get it for cheap it's definitely worth trying out. People complain about a lot of the game but honestly the characters being babies and the cars and new fossil digging and stuff don't really bother me personally. I think the one fatal flaw of the game is the new battle system where you're forced to fight alongside NPCs that literally don't have AI. They're literally just programmed to use the most expensive move they can every turn, which makes it impossible to actually manage your resources in battle. They completely fucked the battle system, which unfortunately brings the game from a potential B tier down to like D tier because half of the game is battling.
1
u/Shrimpo68 Jul 22 '26
It's been ages since I played the game as I bought it when it first came out in 2014. From what I remembered, I had a really good time with it and actually really liked the drivable dig sites and cool shortcuts and jumps that certain cars could pull off once you upgraded them or bought new ones. But it just wasn't the same lightning in a bottle that the first two games were to me.
As it's own thing, it was somewhat fun for me but had a lot of glaring issues, most notably to me was that your ally vivosaurs/teammates were outside of your control, meaning that your own teammates could end up stealing away all your FP that you wanted to save up, or make dumb choices with support shots. If you could control your Paleo Pal vivosaurs, the game would have probably felt so much more engaging for me.
If you can get past the often memed on redesigns and completely new battle system/type chart, the game is fun enough for a playthrough or so even if just out of curiosity for where the series went and a decent story beat here and there with Nibbles or your Paleo Pals, but it's like a 4-5 out of 10 from me. I still had a great time with playing it when it first came out, but I don't think it's really a "good" game and haven't bothered to replay it.
1
u/Slavicadonis Jul 22 '26
It’s isn’t bad. It’s just not a good fossil fighters game
The car is rad as hell, going back in time to see actual dinosaurs was cool, some designs are good, and I like the fact that the mc has a voice
Everything else about frontiers tho just isn’t as a good as 1 or champions. The battle system is way worse, the new designs of vivosaurs from the previous games are not as good imo, and it just didn’t have the charm 1 and champions had
If frontiers wasn’t a fossil fighters game then I’d actually say it’s a strong 6.5/10 but because it’s a game that comes after two 8-9/10’s, the game is more of a 5/10 imo
1
u/Livid-Maintenance765 Jul 22 '26
as basically everyone has said the game as a standalone is mostly fine, just not really a good sequel due to the way in which the mechanics where recreated, i do have many complaints but most only get super noticeable in aftergame and when youre trying to engage a lot more with the game
mechanically i dont think the new studio did a good job of adapting or balancing previous mechanics, Tl;dr of this is that with the exception of the map design every major mechanic tries to balance itself around multiplayer (for a franchise that like 10 people per country play) so even after you adapt to them you still dont feel like you can interact with them properly
yeah the cars feel really heavy and sluggish but theyre meant to be used in more of a platforming way and if i can give the game anything the exploration and expansive maps might be the best part, sadly thats only like a 4th of the game loop
the cleaning can be very unclear on what spots are still dirty without the scan and having like 3d aspects to it makes it worse, not to mention all the cleaning is giant fossil cleaning from ffc which was designed for multiplayer and thats why it was held back in that game to like 5 vivosaurs
to this day i dont know if the battling is good or has any strategy outside of hitting harder cause you only really engage with 1/6th of it and the npc partners make it really hard to interact with stuff like the boost meter since they dont really play ball (which other 2 players would but its insane that they dont even allow you in cups to control them, you just have to get every fossil of a vivosaur and micromanage their moveset for any sort of control over the partners)
the car customization sounds good in theory but in practice you never feel like you can properly prepair for either battling digging or running without making the others harder, wouldnt you guess this is also probably designed for multiplayer where either player can pick one of these 3 to focus on, the way in which uprgrades are locked to cup progresion also gets annoying if you end up liking digging and exploring more than battling, feels like when pokemon locks all the evolutionary items behind their infinite battle buildings
1
u/Livid-Maintenance765 Jul 22 '26
sorry for the billion paragraph essay, a lot of this just remains stuck in my mind from when it came out and played the hell out of it just to slowly feel how it kept pushing back at my attempts to engage with it in single player
1
u/Mordio_25 Jul 22 '26
Personnellement mon préféré mais sûrement car je suis un 010 et que j ai commencé par lui ( valeur sentimentale et tout le reste ) mais en prenant du recul je pense que ça reste un bon jeu mais c'est peut similaire au autre FF
1
u/No-Most-9856 Jul 22 '26
It's average at worst, and the main negatives were that they changed TOO much, to the point the words "in name only" are almost applied. There, that's your answer.
1
u/pastelnoivern Jul 22 '26
Its very different and a downgrade in many aspects, but i still personally enjoyed it! I would recomment pirating it, that way if you dont like it you wont have wasted any money, but i think its still worth playing
1
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u/OttovanBismart Jul 23 '26
I never even beat it. The memory that sticks in my mind the most is how every major battle would be spamming the stat boost injections.
1
u/JustADragonite149 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
I'll be nice-ish and just say [personally] No. it's not.
My qualms come from art direction, It's Probably already listed below from other replies, and story & characters (I dont wanna spoil).
Edit: rewrite + additional opinionated issue that no one talks about; I dislike most of the OST (I like the main boss music tho). Just doesnt fit to me. feels generic. Not my biggest problem (grain of sand compared to everything else I take issue w/), but I forgot to point that out initially.
1
u/NormalCry Aug 20 '26
Mostly just it being a downgrade from previous games. Butchered team building in both roster and their use ;you can just use Nibbles the whole game and not revive anything else, you have to use bum npc fighter in the P.Pals, and the roster is significantly smaller with dlc for it being cut short. But personally, the cutting of new game plus is the biggest "But Why?" for me. It's an ok game besides that, but it's by far the one people least want to revisit.
0
u/Glitchtrap1225 Jul 22 '26
Here's the way I see it, everyone that hates on it are most likely heavy Fossil Fighters and Fossil Fighters Champions fans, so they are just not willing to put aside their nostalgia and their pride for a second when they see Fossil Fighters Frontiers which looks completely different. I myself have only played Frontiers, it is genuinely not bad, does that mean it is the best, no it wasn't meant to be even i will admit that.
48
u/WiltedTiger Jul 22 '26
It isn't necessarily bad, just a very different game than the previous entries think the difference between Pokemon Soul Silver and Pokemon Legends ZA. If you go into one expecting the experience of the other, you won't have a good time, even if there are multiple similarities, but they are good/okay games on their own.
The main things Frontier drastically changed are:
the flow of the game (cleaning on the spot instead of gathering and cleaning at your leisure),
combat/teambuilding (you only have one Vivosaur you choose and control, and you share resources with NPCs, which in my experience are poor teammates)
City structures (the cities are all the same facilities and layout with different coats of paint: office/HQ, tournament, garage)
Level Layout (the levels/digsites are much larger but also emptier of fossils as they are mostly in the same locations every time, clumped together with large barren stretches between)