Monster Crown (Switch) Review | Nintendo Life

About three years ago, Studio Aurum released Monster Crown on Kickstarter, a monster-fighting RPG that had no qualms about drawing inspiration from a certain popular Game Freak franchise. After making nine times more money than the initial goal, the title switched to Early Access on PC, where it was repeated and updated regularly along with community feedback. Now its version 1.0 has finally materialized and has naturally made its way to the Switch. Monster Crown offers a nice, if flawed, throwback to the simpler days of monster fighting, but ultimately it proves to be a worthwhile experience.

Monster Crown is set in the wild world of Crown Island, where humans and monsters do not live together in harmony but in grudging acceptance. For example, here you don’t catch any monsters that you bring to your team, instead you form a ‘pact’ which is essentially a contract for the tamer to provide for the monster’s needs in exchange for its powers. You play as a promising young Monster Tamer from a humble farm, but quickly get carried away by a plot that puts the fate of Crown Island in your hands as you repeatedly interact with an anti-hero character focused on installing a group of tyrants. It’s not a particularly inspired story, the monster fighting game is clearly the main draw here, but it’s interesting enough that in the end it seems like it’s worth it.

The game follows a fairly familiar format, in which you obtain and train a team of up to eight different monsters and pit them against savage and tame enemies in simple turn-based battles. Catching monsters is as simple as offering them a pact, which they then read mid-battle and then accept or decline based on factors such as level and health. Each monster can be one of five different types, each of which is resistant to one type and does additional damage to another, so it is essential that you build your team not only with the traditional roles (DPS, Tank, etc.) in mind, but also with enough diversity that you can realistically take on a similar level monster of any kind.

Things also get a bit mixed up with the use of the Synergy mechanic, which allows you to build a special meter by trading monsters or defending for a turn. There are four stages to the synergy meter, and each one in a row stacks into new stat and buff boosts that allow you to really let it break when you finally act, although the trade-off is obviously that each turn spent building the meter is one. . where you are not attacking.

It must be said that the combat feels quite lopsided in many places, which can be both positive and negative depending on the player. In a nutshell, it seems like this is a combat system that is easily exploited or ‘broken’, which can lead to some ridiculous victories that have almost gone unearned. For example, we came across an early boss who was level 18 and opted to open the fight with a level 5 monster that we caught in the starting area. We ordered said monster to inflict a poisonous attack on the boss, which quickly took away roughly 80% of his health over the next two turns, making it an easy kill for the rest of our still low-level team. By all rights, we should no I won that battle so easily, yet it seems like moments like this are almost common if you know what you’re doing. This lack of balance can add a fun element to combat, but it’s hard to discern whether it’s due to design or poor balance.

A fun spin-off of this balance thing is the Brew and Blend system, which offers plenty of leeway to create specialized gear to your liking. There are around 200 ‘base’ monsters you can forge a pact with, but each of these can be turned into other monsters through special items or by breeding them to get brand new ones. Going through multiple generations and seeing what kind of crazy mutants you can make has some fun ethical questions, but it adds a lot of playability to the roughly 25 hours it takes to see Monster Crown. There are obviously over a thousand different monsters once you factor in these factors, so there is no shortage of team comps that you can try out here.

If the single player aspect is not enough, there is also the expected set of multiplayer features to deal with, which mainly exists to give you more leeway to fight or trade with other players. The lack of local multiplayer is a disappointing omission, but there are some interesting ideas explored online, such as how you can use “NET Eggs” to use another player’s monster genes as one of the ‘parents’ in replay, which basically you give a random result. If the multiplayer remains active However, it will be a key hurdle for Monster Crown to overcome. It’s unclear if crossover play with other versions is available, and we can easily see that this is a game with an animated online scene early on before Switch players move on.

From a presentation perspective, Monster Crown certainly nails its GBC aesthetic quite well. The simple sprite work gives it an authentic retro feel and the soundtrack often sounds eerily similar to classic Pokémon tracks. However, one area that is a bit lacking is the monster’s design. With 200 base monsters, there are certainly some decent layouts to look at, but a lot of them look more like the kind of thing you’d see in a cheap ROM hack. Things don’t help with the lack of distinct screams for each monster and the almost non-existent battle animations, which can make uninspired designs appear much flatter. Of course, sacrifices have to be made to maintain the Game Boy style, but it seems like more could have been done in these respects to spice up the world at large.

Unfortunately, we also ran into some notable performance issues, which frankly feel unacceptable given this style of play. Running around the world at high speed is prone to hitting you with fairly frequent frame rate issues when Monster Crown tries to load oncoming assets, and we found at least one scenario where a faulty menu selection caused the game to crash. , which forced us to shut down and lose about 30 minutes of progress. These issues are not a problem for the game and could very well be solved in patches, but keep in mind that the release version looks like it could have used a bit more polish.

conclusion

Monster Crown is a decent game that falls short of greatness in some areas. Legitimately cool ideas with breeding and an overall solid combat system are let down by mediocre monster designs and performance issues. Then there’s the elephant in the room, which is that Monster Crown finally feels like a more jank more and less addictive version of the older Pokemon games. We’d still give this one a recommendation, as the bones of experience are good enough that it’s worth a gamble on big Pokémon fans who crave the 8-bit days, but you might want to wait for a sale with this one. .