Starts fresh but falls flat in the end
The professor charges you with "looking after Terry" while he remains in his ship to track the crystals. Well, looking after Terry is equivalent to controling him without his knowledge. After you recover the first crystal with Terry, the professor installs his space ship into an actual sea ship where you are now able to sail around the world which is made up of many small islands, or at least thats how they appear on your map.
You recover crystal after crystal with Terry to regain operation of the professors ship. Soon you come into conflict with the opposing force that originally attacked the professors ship and a battle ensues to take control of the crystals as they have a great power imbued inside them that can be used for more than just piloting a space ship. With the basic story out of the way, we come to the gameplay. It takes no time at all to get the hang of combat in the game Contact. Basically, all combat consists of is activating combat mode and selecting a foe. Once you activate combat mode and you are close enough to attack, you begin attacking. Now this may not seem so bad if not for the glitchyness that you will no doubt experience. For example, if an enemy hits you at the right time, he will stop you from attacking completely. This may not seem so bad, but if you encounter a few enemies that attack at a decent speed, they will cancel out every single one of your attacks. There are three different types of weapons, fist, sword, and blunt. As with virtually all of your attributes, these will increase in level with use. There is no indicator as to when they will level, but its no real pain to gain levels with your weapons. What I'm getting to is that after a few levels, you will gain special moves with a category of weapons. For example, when you get ten or so in blunt, you will get a move that will deal 200% damage. Basically, the first special move is the same for each type. In order to use the special move, you need to build up the special gauge by killing enemies. Only, as I stated before, enemies can cancel this special move out if they hit you at the right time. This can be extremely detrimental if you are fighting off multiple enemies and really need to be able to use your special move. I wish I could give this game a better score than 6.5, I thought the story started off great but it just couldn't carry the poor gameplay throughout the whole game. Also, a huge part of the game are outfits that you can find. I thought that many outfits were pretty tought to find without the use of a guide which is a pretty lame trend I see now a days in certain games. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need said outfits to further portions of the story. All together I don't regret owning Contact and I really like where it was going, I just think that it could have been a whole lot better.