Robot Poncots plays a lot like Pokémon. Fighting is turn based and is between two Robopon owners who tell their Robopon to issue attacks or go on the defensive. Robopon can be healed in mid-battle with spells (which can be bought in town shops or stumbled upon between towns) or taken to a Robopon dispatch center and healed in their machine. One thing where Robot Poncots differs from Pokémon is that in battle, a defeated Robopon sometimes will drop add-on items which get claimed by the winner. When a new game is started, the game asks for the player’s birth date which is actually used by the game to select the first Robopon the player will start with.
Star Version was released alongside Sun Version and can connect to that version via infrared sensor. There are 153 different kinds of Robopon, and only by trading between versions can all of them be collected in one save.