#magic pockets

After playing Dolphin Island, I booted up Dolphin Island 2, made for the A Game By Its Cover game jam, where real games are made based on mockup game cartridges in the My Famicase art exhibit. This one uses Ko Takeuchi's entry from 2008 and its accompanying blurb as the jumping off point to create a stylish action platformer. It has potential but during the jam the creators Jan and James were only able to implement a few small areas and two bosses… wait a minute, this isn't a sequel to the dolphin park management game at all!

Setting aside the gag, Magic Pockets' successor to Dolphin Island is Planet Rescue: Ocean Patrol (known in North America as Petz Rescue: Ocean Patrol, part of a small subset within the Petz series of Petz Rescue animal care simulation games on DS and Wii). This time the setting is more upfront a marine wildlife sanctuary, rather than a retrofitted amusement park, and thankfully gone is the element of training dolphins to perform in shows while being kept in tiny pools. You do still play games with dolphins, orcas, and now pinnipeds [seals and sea lions] as well, but it's framed as enrichment while they recuperate.

Mila and Greg, plus some other returning characters from Dolphin Island, have been kidnapped and dumped on a tropical island in the same fictional Hawai'i-esque archipelago. The culprit is WAZAPS, the shadowy organisation out to protect the environment and punish those who cause harm to animals (they were in the last game as well). They've set up an animal sanctuary there, where creatures who have been injured in the wild can recover. Much of the harm is coming from a particular Captain Planet-style villain whose fishing trawler is causing problems with its pollution and unsustainable fishing practices, so you have to deal with him while unravelling more secrets of local mythology with the help of the other quirky staff.

This time the more outright altruistic nature of the setting is welcome, and to support it there's more of a focus on medically treating animals and then—importantly—returning them to the wild after they've healed. Dolphins, orcas, and pinnipeds get the close-in attention where a wide variety of tools are used in touchscreen minigames to treat specific ailments and injuries, done over a series of sessions to heal them over time. These three categories of creature also now have unique minigames to play with the animals, and a more involved feeding mechanic. Other animals fill the island's pools and enclosed lagoons, all again modelled well, including a few additions to the roster like polar bears and whale sharks. You can now go for a swim to get up close to them, but they don't require much attention unlike the very needy busywork in the first game.

Instead of micromanaging every individual creature daily, this is a more chill experience, where their needs tick down slowly and you only have to do a couple of required tasks per day. There's more interaction with the other characters on the island (again, all with fun cartoony designs), managing your inventory of tools, food, and medical supplies, and digging up goodies from the sands and waters. Another big focus is the boat minigame, which is how you get new animal residents. Almost every day you can optionally sail out to rescue an animal in distress, while avoiding rocks with touchscreen controls.

Despite the names flip-flopping around, this is the third in a trilogy of marine-life-care games on the DS by French studio Magic Pockets. They did explore similar themes and concepts in games such as Tigerz: Circus Life and Imagine: Zookeeper, but these three have consistent characters and specifically aquatic animals. In North America this one was branded as Petz: Dolphin Encounter, but you aren't only encountering dolphins, nor are you bound to one island this time around.

Mila and Greg are once again on holiday when they are hit by a surprise recruitment to be eco-warriors, this time without any covert agencies involved. Tevaï from the last game (although they call her Teva now) brings you aboard a high-tech ship which becomes your mobile base of operations as you travel the globe, rescuing animals in distress and putting a stop to the plans of another Captain Planet villain who's out to loot and pollute.

Since you're taking to the seas to find animals in situ, there's much more of a focus on scuba diving, making this feel closer to an Endless Ocean game or the like. You get whisked along to new coastal locations, stopping briefly to catalogue animals, before a crisis suddenly but inevitably crops up. The boat merely serves as a hub to check on your animaldex, upgrade medicines, and change location, while you'll spend most of your time swimming around in first person via the touchscreen; the optional "swim in the enclosures" mode from the second game serving as a kind of prototype for the main gameplay this time around.

I was enjoying exploring these little mini underwater maps—they're well-modelled with interesting landmarks—but the emergencies insist on keeping the pace up and pulling you away. You don't get to freely explore at your own speed until the postgame… although it won't take long to get there. The story is very short in this one compared to the other games, plus it doesn't really end conclusively with the villain getting his comeuppance, so the whole thing feels a bit rushed. I think I prefer this to the sometimes plodding routine we had before, though.

Rescuing animals usually involves a streamlined version of the medical minigame introduced in Ocean Patrol (doing various touchscreen tasks to administer first aid to different kinds of wounds and afflictions), which can be expedited further by finding algae in the exploration phase to mix custom medicines. Other events added to the mix include sawing through a net to release a trapped animal, pulling a plastic bag out of a hungry mouth, removing illicit tracking devices, or sealing up leaking oil containers. These are all timed, and reward points for fast and efficient completion, but the points aren't redeemed for anything this time, they just level you up (this might advance the plot on milestones, not sure).

Since you no longer have to take in individual animals, naming them and giving them consistent care, the creatures you encounter can feel a bit disposable. Underwater Adventures makes up for this by letting you swim among them in their home environments, from jellies and some fish species up to even very large animals like whales and whale sharks. To enter them in your log requires only a very simple scanning task, which tells you their species name and endangered status. You can then take photos of them, although these aren't saved anywhere, which is odd because this has DSi support to take a photo of you for your virtual ID, so could it not have saved photos to your console's album? Finally with all tasks complete you can give them a pat in classic Nintendogs fashion. It's all quite simple and low-demand, which balances with the time pressure of the emergency events.

While exploring there's also a mechanic of uncovering buried treasures, ranging from relics of ancient civilisations to fossils to evidence of more recent organisms that can teach you something about the environment and our impact on it, like a leftover squid beak, a bleached coral, or an aquatic weed. The archaeology minigame is a bit more on the puzzley side as you use your tools to reveal tiles, but there's only a handful of these in total and most are optional.

After playing the three dolphin/ocean conservation-themed games that French studio Magic Pockets made for the DS, I was primed and ready for this modern adventure freed from the shackles of Ubisoft and their Petz branding. It turns out this isn't really much of a successor to those games, apart from sharing environmentalist themes and the goal of saving animals from pollution and such. In practice it actually takes a lot more after Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, a sweet little game from three years prior by British dev Ustwo Games.

Your player avatar is Pava (F) / Avi (M), a kid visiting their grandparent on a remote island for the summer holidays. While there they end up working with the residents to clean up the environment and help out animals. This premise is the same as Alba, but here the focus is more on the ocean and a dash of mysticism, rather than the community aspect of Alba. Also, rather than a Spanish locale the setting of Maupiroa is a tiny Polynesian island, apparently the last remaining vestige of the lost civilisation of Mu.

The only people on Maupiroa are the members of a scientific research organisation; the game outlines that other houses belong to people who only come here on holiday, although that doesn't explain why some have washing on the line in their yards, or who is running the general store which has fresh produce stocked on its shelves. I did find the lack of minor NPCs made the island feel a little lonely. But to look at it another way, it keeps the cast tight on a few charmingly designed folks with their own quirks but who all care for the environment and are working to protect it. Your grandfather is keen to pass on the secrets of the island; you come to find that there are spirits who can work through you as a member of an ancient guardian clan, which give you new abilities (being able to run is the most important, but others can help you bypass barriers to explore further in the underwater sections).

With your burgeoning spirit bond comes a cute dolphin companion; Keanu helps you out by identifying tasks for you to carry out, and eventually gives you a faster swim option by pulling you along. Unlike most animals in the game, Keanu has a slightly more cartoony appearance, and even manifests glowy markings. In the diving sections there's plenty of ambient wildlife but having this constant companion is very nice, since diving in games is often a solitary experience.

Both while running around the island or out on a dive at one of the four ocean locations, your goals are generally to help animals affected by pollution, caught in nets, etc., to stop hazards like leaking oil pipes, to pick up rubbish littered around, and to document animal species by taking photos. Unlike on the DS there's no little minigames; if you have the right object like the toolbox or first aid kit, it's just done with the simple press of a button. So it can feel a little like busywork, and the only actual gameplay comes from navigating the 3D underwater spaces and pointing the camera at moving animals. Still, this means the experience is quite chill and I appreciated the breeziness and relaxed pace.

Documenting animals lets you learn a little about them in the encyclopedia, and they look better than ever (the animal modelling was always a strength of Magic Pockets, and with more advanced technology and resolution they shine within the slightly stylised art direction… except for birds' wings being folded weirdly when they're walking around). Your notebook also contains educational snippets about sustainable fishing, how to handle injured animals, etc., among plot-related notes about the island's fictional history and such.