Space-Net: Cosmo Blue Import Review
Have Starship, Will Travel
To celebrate the end of the year, and my recently revived Game Boy SP, I chose a title off the backlog shelf that I’d been curious about for years: Space-Net: Cosmo Blue. Part of a matched pair release, as was common around the turn of the century, it was a semi-sequel to Sanrio Time Net. While Space-Net does not contain any direct references to Sanrio characters, it is still the only game covered on this site to come within two degrees of Hello Kitty.
The plot to Space-Net, in both its Cosmo Blue and Cosmo Red variants, is simple. The player is a newly fledged agent of Space-Net, an Earth-based intelligence agency that counters interstellar criminal threats. They have been called to the nearby Rainbow System, whose seven inhabited planets have had their intra-stellar transport systems disabled by a mysterious group of miscreants known as the Crackers. While regular travel between planets has been curtailed, the Space-Net transfer shuttle is still able to navigate with the proper codes, so the player must travel between worlds, find the localized sources of trouble, and restore the plot coupons necessary to reestablish the travel networks.
Each of the seven known worlds of the Rainbow System has a color-coded name and theme. Planet Purple is an icy wasteland, while Planet Indigo is an ocean world. Planet Blue is a gas giant with inhabited islands floating in its stratosphere, but Planet Green is lush with jungles and lakes. Planet Yellow is Earth-like, and Planet Orange has a worldwide desert. Planet Red is, as one might imagine, a single immense volcano. Detailed information on these worlds, their inhabitants, and much more can be accessed via Space-Net’s in-game website, where the player can benefit from interactions such as NPC email correspondence or answering forum questions.
The worlds are further individualized by having their own regional delicacies and restoratives as healing items. This is a cute touch, but it’s hampered by the space limitations of the game’s inventory, which has just twenty spaces for both consumables and instruction manuals for combat techniques. Plot-important items are not counted with this, thankfully, but the redundancy of having different healing items for each planet in the Rainbow System means that personal inventory space is at a premium. The Space-Net Base on Earth has a storage area, but it’s only accessible on site.
In turn, these worlds are populated by a wide variety of alien races, with many individuals having been brainwashed by the Crackers into belligerence. At first, it is the player versus the universe, but as the game continues, they will meet friendly individuals in towns who can be deputized. Additionally, repeated showings of an item called the Comm Card to an enemy combatant will eventually break through the brainwashing and have them leave the fight. After that, they may or may not opt to join the player as another deputy. There is a limited number of Comm Cards available in the game, with more received as the player’s Agent Rank increases, but they are not considered ‘used’ unless an alien is deputized, and they can be recycled by asking a deputy to retire. The game’s alien index keeps track of alien types encounter and deputized, organizing them both by numeric code and by planet of origin. Not all types of aliens will immediately listen to the player, which can be annoying for someone attempting to deputize them all.
The player’s main party has three front-row spaces and a further three-space reserve squad. During combat, the active squad will have a point fighter who’s doing the action that round and two back-bench characters. Pressing the SELECT button switches to the next available character in the triad, once per round and without penalty. If the front-row triad is eliminated, the reserve squad comes in to avenge them. It behooves the player to keep everyone’s levels up, but as this game portions out experience only to characters who’ve taken an action in that fight, getting everyone on equal footing can take some planning and a lot of trawling for easily vanquished mooks with enough XP to make the effort worthwhile.
One interesting aspect of the battle system is the Revolution Mode. All inhabitants of the Rainbow System have the innate ability to boost a particular stat and change their forms for a short period of time, and the player’s space-agent technology allows for the same effect. They’re even included on the game’s alien index as separate entries. The game’s three main stats are Strength, Spirit, and Speed, and party members will gain access to different Revolution Modes based on two of those stats, if they are sufficiently leveled. Revolution Mode only lasts for three rounds, but while it is on, the party member will have significantly boosted stats as well as alternate versions of some attacks. These alternate versions may have different animations, more individual hits, or temporarily gain the ability to hit all enemies (or alternately, the back bench of the active party).
Sadly, not all attacks are created equal. Space-Net does not make it clear what stats power which attacks, or whether an enemy is even susceptible to a hit, beyond knowledge of the standard array of elemental weaknesses. If an attack hits an elemental weakness (e.g. water attack on a fire-aligned enemy), it may still only do single-digit damage for reasons unknown. While this isn’t much of a problem in the early game, around the halfway point, the difficulty spikes and never really flattens out. Much of the late game is spent determining which attacks actually work, and which are never going to, because damage-dealing in this game is all-or-nothing. Some attacks might be tanked by a character in Revolution Mode, but wreck the back bench of the active party before they ever have a chance to deploy. The final boss was particularly nasty in this regard, as it pulls out the De-Revolutionize Ray in its second phase.
While there are no Sanrio characters appearing in this one, the alien species fall squarely within that design aesthetic. They’re not all cute and cuddly, but even the weird ones have the look of something that could get marketed as a key-chain. One particular example is a recurring minor villain who could be Keroppi’s mildly evil cousin in a froggy mech. The area designs make good use of the Game Boy Color’s limited color palette, and everything seems to pop on a Game Boy SP screen. The music is also limited by the Game Boy Color hardware, but this isn’t a game that needs to go hard on the sound effects. Its chipper chiptunes carry the mood, and the sonic elements do their job admirably if not creatively.
Space-Net was an interesting blend of elements I’ve seen in earlier Game Boy games. It has the monster-collecting aspects of a Pokémon clone with its deputy system, while the meandering, multi-world narrative style is reminiscent of Final Fantasy Legend II. If it weren’t for the sudden drop-off in game balance halfway through, I’d even call it a good game. As it is, this game has an interesting concept, fun art, and decent follow-through. It just doesn’t want you to win in the end.

Colorful and varied
Interesting interactions
Unbalanced combat in late-game
Difficulty spikes
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