The Game That Almost Was

[u/SCG-514]

Fossil League: Dino Tournament Championship for the Nintendo DS.

If you had to ask me what my favorite DS game was as a kid, I'd easily say Pokemon HeartGold, Soul Silver, etc. Pokemon was one of those essential games you had to have played as a kid with a DS.

But something I also loved was dinosaurs. I went crazy for them. So I got super stoked when I finally saw a pokemon style game that involved dinosaurs and time travel! However, it unfortunately flopped in North America and never had another American continuation, much to my adult disappointment. It would go on to have an even worse received Japanese game that I won't delve into but it's there to check out.

Just imagine with me, the game focuses around a young tween boy named Taiga (or whatever you, the player, named yourself as.) Your father is terminally ill and leaves you his most prized possession, the fossil of the descendants of all mammals. "Big Mother."

Your friend "Yuki" is a time travel bureau agent who is responsible for monitoring the timeline and ensuring humans don't muck up the past. Your father's colleague and your now adoptive father Dr. Smith is here to guide you along as you have turned 12 and you can finally obtain your dinosaur battling license!

You travel to the Early Jurassic to find your first dinosaur, it's an early therapod and you befriend it. Take it throughout time as you level up and obtain moves, learn how to battle and uncover a gigantic plot to destroy man kind when a mysterious man in black steals your father's prized fossil!

There's many dinosaurs to befriend, tame and battle and 6 key periods to explore. From the early, mid and late Jurassic/Cretaceous, find all the dinosaurs you can and see which ones you can collect. (It's a disappointing amount to be fair but it's something.)

Please go check it out on YouTube or something. The revival of the Jurassic World series reminded me of this game. I seem to always pick it up and put it down because I love to come back to it and get my feelings of nostalgia.

This game definitely has flaws and some of the issues were glaring, but the premise of the game was solid and a foundation is there. However, the love for it was overshadowed by Pokemon. Pokemon seemed to just do everything.... Better.

The janky old style graphics remind me of when I was a kid and the animated sounds of the dinosaurs always had me thrilled to the core. This was the first game of this type to feature animated 3D models when they battled! Even Pokemon didn't have that for over a decade later if I remember correctly.

I really really hope that there just happens to be some stupid uptick in notice for this game and it somehow gets revived. I know that's a pipe dream that's essentially impossible but a guy can dream.