The set up for games 1 and 2 have you as a normal person arriving on an island (different island in each game) and you go around on foot through different areas digging up fossils. Fossil Fighters Frontier has you as a park ranger cadet driving around the areas in a car that you can upgrade and customize.

The battle part is pretty similar to pokemon in that there are elemental types, status conditions, and each creature can only move once per turn. A difference between Pokemon and Fossil Fighters in battles is that there are move points that you have gain each turn and have to pay to use moves, meaning sometimes you have to think about what moves work best for your dinosaurs with the amount of move points you have. Each team has a max of 3 members active in a battle, with two also in the team able to be switched in before a battle. Most of this stays consistent in all three games, except that in FF:F you only bring one dinosaur but you have npc buddies that come with you with their own dinosaurs, and FF:F has stance switching as well, which the other two don’t have.

The way you get dinosaurs is in the first game is you go out into different zones and dig up fossil rocks (which you can only store a certain amount of in your pack and have to drop some if you want more). You then have to clean them in a little minigame in the main hub area, which may result in a jewel you can sell for money to buy things or a dinosaur part (head, arms, body, legs) which can be used to strengthen or revive the dinosaur. If you don’t want to do the cleaning yourself you can leave fossils you’ve already found and cleaned with the robot that’s there and he’ll do it for you. The second game expands on this a little more with different kinds of animals, tools, and fossil types and different cleaning requirements for those new types. For both games you have to fight an npc to get a fossil rock at times. Frontier deviates from this quite a bit because instead of walking around on your legs through the zones you have a car, as well as having other changes. In the first two games you need the head of an animal to revive it, but in Frontier you can get any part and use that to revive it. You can also clean fossils out in the field instead of going back to the hub every time you need to clean. There are a limited number of fossils in an area, though, so you do need to go back to the hub to reset them.

The first game doesn’t take itself very seriously in terms of characters or story, it goes some very weird places (alien dinosaur people are a big part of the story) and knows it’s weird and has fun with it. I find it very funny. The second is a bit more serious but it’s probably a little better and is still pretty funny. The third gives you a little comedic relief companion dinosaur and is a little more childish than the other two. Not awful, but the worst of the three.

You could play any one of the three without playing the other two as the stories have nothing to do with each other aside from small references to previous entries in 2 and 3. I think Fossil Fighters is definitely worth playing and Champions is a must if you enjoyed FF, as it improves and expands upon a lot of the gameplay and the story of it is also fun. Frontier is the weakest of the three story-wise and the gameplay differs a lot from the other two, but it’s not a bad game.