Left to my own devices, Zubo is not something I would have picked up while casually scanning new games for sale. That would have been a huge mistake. Zubo is now firmly in my top five favorite games for the DS, even if it is cutting into my other gaming time and made me miss a “ready” check in my World of Warcraft Ulduar raid. Oops.

Zubo is a crazy blend of adventure game, rhythm game and turn-based combat game. It’s like the Ben & Jerry’s of the gaming world — a little off-beat but oh-so-yummy when you bring it all together.

I start the game by choosing if I want to play a boy or girl. I pick my girl and name her Alla. I’m promptly dropped (literally) into the strange world of Zubalon. I’m met by Zubo 1 who explains that Zubalon and the Zubos are in danger from the Zombos — and I’m just the gal to save the world for them. OK, I can do that.

I will confess now that I didn’t get to see the very first tutorial since my daughter absconded with my DS as soon as she saw me playing this new game. I’m going to say that the tutorial did its job given that she was easily able to follow it (she’s almost 9) and was able to add Zubo friends, heal them and successfully do combat.

One of my few complaints about Zubo is the reason I couldn’t see the tutorial for myself. There is only one save game. I wasn’t willing to wipe the time my daughter had already spent playing, so there was no way to start a new game and see the beginning for myself. One save game is very frustrating if you’re sharing with a child or have more than one child that needs to share a game.

Let’s talk about those Zubos. There are potentially 55 different Zubos for you to make friends with. There are 11 different Zubo factions with five Zubos in each faction. The starter world has the folks from Horror, Fairytale and Pop. They all have unique names, but you’ll recognize them for the most part. The Horror group consists of Hunchy, Dombie, Drakool, Boltz and Ragz, for example. Alissa’s favorite group so far is Fairytale. She hasn’t seen Pinocchio so doesn’t recognize Chip, but Snoozy, Cinders, Alice and Red all make her smile.

You’ll generally have to do some kind of task in order to befriend a Zubo. Some tasks are quickies while others are larger quests. I love that once a Zubo is your friend, you can instantly call them up to join your party from anywhere in the game (as long as you aren’t in combat). I ran into one particular situation in which this saved the game for me. I was out of food (used to heal your Zubos after combat) and trying to make my way to a food vendor. The main bad guy for that level was blocking my only exit from the area. His team of Zombos (basically evil versions of all of the Zubos in the game) easily defeated my group. You can immediately try a battle again, but I had no way to heal my team (and since there’s only one save, I was really afraid I was going to have to start the game over). After a little frantic running around looking for any loot I might have missed, I recalled my friends list. I was able to pull three fresh, although slightly lower level, Zubos from the list and get some major payback on the Zombos blocking my way.