AT LONG LAST: ROBOPON

Splat & Johnny

Splat should actually be one of my top favorite Robopon in concept; it's a fly! It's got fly eyes on top and even little pipe-like proboscis! With an extra pair of little dot-eyes in between, it's stylized to look more like some sort of little cartoon bird, which is cute, just not my ideal fly-guy situation. And besides, this is a weak, unevolv-er, sorry,-unENHANCED Robopon.

Splat "enhances" into none other than the infamous "Johnny," and back in the day, this game wasn't just known as "That Shameless Pokemon Ripoff," but "that Shameless Pokemon Ripoff With the Toilet Guy." Johnny is a toilet with arms and legs, and little goofy eyeballs on stalks that rise up from the toilet bowl. It's the eyes that make it charming, all things considered, and a description that says Johnny is very clean, but people find it too "creepy" to actually use.

...Use...as...as a Robopon you mean?

....As a Robopon right?

Orbit & Smacks

Orbit is a little pink jellyfish with kirby eyes. Cute! The description however says that it comes from space and reads minds. "From space" like, built by aliens?

Orbit enhances into "Smacks," which is quite a bit different, but in a fun way. It's a metallic dome that crawls on nubbier tentacles, and it has both stalked eyes and stalked lips, apparently widely feared because its kiss drains the energy of Robopon and leaves a lipstick mark that can never be removed. Funny! I'm not seeing much of a connection to Orbit, like at all, except that they're both tentacle-having and kind of "alien."

Urchy & Subrio

Aw, look at URCHY! It's a little ball with a big jaggedy-toothed smile, demented eyes, and drill-like tentacles or spines all around it. It's an "EVIL Attribute" Robopon said to use its paralyzing arms to steal spare parts from other robots. How morbid!

Why, then, would Urchy evolve into a happy Mola-mola-shaped submarine with maracas? This is apparently a popular and friendly sea-attribute 'pon. What's the story, here? Did Urchy heal its dark heart and seek rebirth as a chill dude that everyone loves? Or is Urchy still in there, having constructed this cheerful facade from the stolen organs of its peers?

Virus & Hexbot

This "computer virus" Robopon could be better; it's just a grumpy spiky ball with legs and fangs, kind of the bare minimum effort to illustrate the concept, but it's a little baby anyway, and it grows up into a pretty gnarly one!

HEXBOT is one of the few with official artwork for me to share, which is critical to really appreciating the design of this sinister "curse-throwing" robot. Its body is a red, conical cultist robe with a vertical column of eerie, gold-rimmed eyes down the front, interrupted by its true "face" around the midsection; a rounded white mask with four opposing empty slots, giving the impression of two "eyes" and a "mouth" no matter which way you turn it. Large, golden shoulder pads and white-gloved hands complete the truly ominous and unsettling look of the first non-hilarious Robopon in this review.

Zappa, Viper & Detno

Zappa looks like an oveturned flowerpot or plastic cup with tiny dot eyes and three little tentacle legs. Simple and adorable, but don't be fooled! This is evidently a "parasitic" Robopon that "destroys its victims from within!" That's my kind of Robopon!

Zappa continues the parasitism when it evolves into "Viper," which despite the name is obviously an annelid! It's pretty much just a cartoon earthworm with goofy little white eyes on top of its head and an almost friendly "smile," though the smile just seems to be a curved depression in its head segment and not an actual mouth, which it doesn't need, because it just wraps around other robots and sucks away their lifeforce. Flawless. Perfect. It's an earthworm that acts like a leech, the best of both worlds.

So, I'm not sure what to make of Viper's enhancement into "Detno." This is a grumpy, explosive Robopon modeled after a detonator; a metal dome with a big button on top. It has feet underneath, a snazzy skull mark on the trigger button, and a charming face consisting of just sad, white crescent eyes and a little nozzle-mouth, like a cartoon octopus. I like it! But I know I speak for all of us at some point in our lives when I say "where did all my parasites go!?"

I guess this Robopon is just a force of pure malevolence against its fellow mechanoids, from deadly parasitoid to life-sucking energy vampire until it builds enough power to become a walking bomb. If this were a more biological setting, I'd hypothesize that the explosion is how it scatters its spores or eggs to create more Zappa, but we're stuck working with robots here, so there's almost nary a drop of speculative evolution or ecology to drink!

Topaz

This cute little fella is based on a dogu, the clay artifacts found underground in Japan and so commonly likened to "robots" or "spacemen." Topaz is described as a primitive clay Robopon powered by magic, which is some pretty bonkers world-building to drop in a one-off mon. Magic exists in the Robopon world, but animate magical constructs are just considered more primitive "robot" technology? I guess I technically can't argue with that, but it's funny that Robopon is one of the few things I've seen to put it that way in-universe.

Zariga & V-Zarg

Zariga is an aquatic Robopon not unlike a Triops in shape; a large shield-like head with a tadpole sort of tail. It also has little robot arms, tiny white dots for eyes, and a cute little rectangular panel mouth.

V-Zarg, meanwhile, is the first "enhanced" Robopon on this page that actually looks like a Pokemon-style evolution of its predecessor. It's a sleeker, scarier, sharper head with more bladelike horns, triangular eyes, a larger lower jaw, menacing claws and a spinier crustaceoid tail. It's like Robopon's answer to Kabutops, and I respect it.

Gello

I know what you think this is supposed to resemble, given its "poop emoji" shape and even brownish color scheme, but don't worry! This Robopon really is supposed to be just a "gel," and its official art is quite a bit nicer:


Besides the purple color scheme, we can now see that Gello's inner robot body is an adorable, rounded UFO kinda shaped like a church bell, with large yellow eyes sharing the same dark socket. It has a charmingly worried little expression, and if you look back up at its stat spread, you can probably guess without even reading Japanese that this is Robopon's "shuckle;" subpar offenses with impressive defense. That's an outer layer of BALLISTIC gel! Clever!

Nobone

"Nobone" is an odd name for something officially described as a "skeleton" Robopon, though "skeleton Robopon" is an odd way to describe what looks like a puffy, transparent, four-pointed star with a visible robotic core. Yeah, a lot like Gello, but completely unrelated! The core is a baseball-like sphere, with eyeballs on short little stalks so they can extend out of the star thingy, and four chunky robot limbs.

What's weird is that this thing is one of the only two "legendary" Robopon in the first game, found only in the difficult dungeon of "Illusion Village," which itself appears at only certain times of the day.

Scar

Another jelly guy! I am slowly beginning to respect Robopon beyond just Pokemon's "Homsar." This one's Japanese name is just derived from jellyfish, so I have no idea what they translated it to "Scar," but this time we have a clear blue jellyfish bell with three robotic feet and two arms sprouting from beneath, giving it a proper "walking jellyfish" shape, and two stalk-eyes long enough to pop out the top. This one is a "skeleton" Robopon that "only exists in dreams," so yeah, this is the other "legendary." While every other monster franchise reserves some epic dragons and demigods for its rarest catches, Robopon 1 decided it should be a couple of googly-eyed blobs. Yeah, unmistakable respect forming.

Palmer, Spike & Woody

Palmer is an adorable little burger-shaped metal capsule with beady eyes, waddling feet and a little baby palm tree growing out the top! So this cute as hell little dude is like, a horticultural Robopon, right? A high-tech planter that nurtures a sapling? No, haha, no this is described as a "strange" and "deadly" plant that takes over the bodies of discarded robots. Palmer isn't the robot. Palmer is a palm tree zombifying a robot like it thinks it's some kind of entomopathogenic fungus. Did that EVOLVE in the Robopon world? Is it anti-robot biotech? A mutation? What the heck is this setting, actually?

Palmer evolves into Spike, a big fat round cactus with menacing eyes and a row of ventilation slots for a mouth, definitely looking more like a plant-themed robot, and even described now as nothing but a Plant Robopon. But it still has a bowl-like underside resembling the lower half of Palmer's robot body, with thorn-tipped tentacles sprouting out of it, so perhaps the parasitic palm tree merges with its host to become a true plant-machine hybrid? I guess it also decided to switch taxa, while it was at it.

...And then switch again, to a deciduous tree, when it enhances into WOODY, a tree stump with the kind of Haniwa-esque face common to anime tree guys and a cute little twig nose to boot. It's said to hang around "haunted houses," and is considered a "menacing" Robopon that "causes havoc," despite the whimsical aesthetic. The bucket-like planter and thicker, segmented metal tentacle legs are the only indication that this is a robot at all. I like the progression from a plant commandeering a robot to a "dead" spooky tree. That's actually pretty good!

Leachy, Boobot & Jackey

Oh my god, LEACHY?! Is there really a leech Robopon?! Well...no. Or perhaps maybe? The Japanese name is "Betabeta" which means "sticky," the same as Grimer's Japanese name. Maybe that references being able to cling to things like a leech, but the profile only talks about it living on the ocean floor and kicking up sand when it's upset. Its design is wonderful, a flattened and segmented ovoid with a fringe of little paddle-like fins and a couple of stalk-eyes on top, visually acceptable as a stylized "leech" but equally interpretable as a sea slug, a flatworm, an isopod, a trilobite, maybe even something similar to Anomalocaris if it only had the facial appendages. The most likely intent, in my opinion, was more like a sea cucumber, and that's fine. I like leeches, but I also like every other thing this could possibly be, and I also like it even if it's not supposed to match any animal at all. It's perfect. It's like the mascot of whatever Robopon world has instead of bogleech.com. And in more ways than one, for better or for worse, because....

...Leachy, unfortunately, evolves into something completely and totally different, which is not nearly as interesting to me, but that feels unfair, because it's still pretty solid in its own right. What the English version calls "Boobot" was originally "Keropa," referencing frogs, and you can definitely see the frogginess here. The body, however, is more like a squat sheet ghost, or like a slightly deflated Grimer in a later release of the game, which is why there's two different sprites for all these guys. That's twice we had to liken this line to Grimer, now! The description simply states that it looks like a ghost and it has hypnotic eye beams.

So the sticky sea-bug evolves into a blobby frog ghost. It's thematically a stretch, but, every element of both stages is definitely something I'm into.

I'm sad to say, then, that there's one more evolution, and that it's the least interesting to me, yet I feel as if I have no business criticizing it:

Yeah, seriously! The maybe-leech evolves into a frog-blob-ghost and then into a pumpkin-head guy?! What??! It's such a generic and plain Jack O' Lantern character, even with the little crown and scepter, that it sadly just doesn't grab me as a design, but we basically have a battemonster that goes from the platonic ideal of my favorite animals to the symbol of my next most famous hobby and my birthday. This Robopon does not make any sense in its original context, but it would have made rock-solid sense if someone came up with it as a nod to me and my website in a modern indie romhack. It's almost uncanny. This entire media genre regularly plays with my emotions by morphing creatures into different creatures, but this is a new one, I gotta say.

By now, I've looked at all the Robopon I really, sincerely love, at least at one stage in their evolution. But there are many, many more Robopon, of many questionable degrees of quality. There are Robopon that had to be completely changed for the English release, there are unfortunately Robopon that are also mean-spirited caricatures, and then there are Robopon that are sincerely cool and interesting in ways beyond my own personal tastes.

And I not only COULD write about them all, but I already did. In fact, I spent most of my entire April 1st writing about Robopons instead of enjoying a beautiful nice day without any outstanding responsibilities to attend to, and I even went into more enthusiastic detail about the Robopon you've now seen. I did this whole thing where the list of Robopon got progressively more terrible until we ended discussing the nightmare hell that was the Robopon Manga, and the Robopon Manga Artist whose ass-ugly style would tragically leak right back into the video game.


....And then, just as I was concluding that maybe Robopon was actually probably best left buried, all things considered, I hit something or other on my keyboard that caused the entire file to clear, and I found no Dropbox backups or really any evidence I'd written anything at all, forcing me to start over and bring you this severely truncated but ultimately more positive post.

I guess I must have angered the restless ghost of the Robopon franchise, and in the end, it made me the April Fool. I swear what I wrote was real. And maybe it was funny, too, I don't remember or frankly really care to remember.

...Don't look for that manga.

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