Glad you guys are intrigued by Robotrek. It's definitely an enjoyable JRPG, and one that's fairly quirky in its humor. The intro, for instance, illustrates the bad guys' villainy by showing them stomping on little children's sand castles. Early on you can walk into the mayor's office and surprise him with his head in his secretary's lap. The determined female reporter will pursue the bad guy all the way to the heart of his volcano base, and then let him go because he fled into the men's room, where no woman is allowed to enter. The game's full of those moments.
In terms of gameplay, I'm not sure I'd compare it to Pokemon. You only get up to three robots (which you must build), and none of them have static movesets: each of them can equip something different in each hand, on their legs, and on their back, plus you can "program" combos into them, but you're always in control of these aspects. There's a lot of customization involved, although I tend to favor projectiles in the early game and melee later on, so my robots tend to become identical.
The game shines most in its puzzle solving though. Your character is a young inventor, so you often use simple inventions in creative ways to proceed. For example, one of your earliest tools is a simple noise maker, which makes a loud bang. There's a haunted house which is being explored by the bad guys. The grunts are feeling nervous because of the ghosts, so in order to get one to abandon his post you can flick the lights on and off and use your noise maker to spook him away, thus giving you access to what he was protecting. Simple, but satisfying.