About three years ago, Studio Aurum pitched Monster Crown on Kickstarter, a monster-battling RPG which wasn’t shy about taking inspiration from a certain popular Game Freak franchise. After making over nine times as much money as the initial goal, the title then shifted to Early Access on PC, where it was regularly iterated on and updated in tandem with community feedback. Now it’s 1.0 release has finally come to fruition and it’s naturally made its way over to the Switch. Monster Crown offers up an enjoyable, though flawed throwback to simpler monster-battling days, but it ultimately proves to be a worthwhile experience.
Monster Crown is set in the wild world of Crown Island where humans and monsters don’t so much live together in harmony as they do in begrudging acceptance. For example, here you don’t catch any monsters you bring to your team, but instead form a ‘pact’ that’s essentially a contract for the tamer to provide for the monster’s needs in exchange for its powers. You play as a young, up and coming Monster Tamer from a humble farm, but quickly get swept up in 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 an especially inspired story—the monster battling gameplay is clearly the main draw here—but it’s just interesting enough that it feels worthwhile in the end.
Gameplay follows a rather familiar format, wherein you obtain and train a team of up to eight different monsters and pit them against both wild and tamed foes in simple turn-based battles. Catching monsters is as simple as offering them a pact, which they then read mid-battle and then either accept or reject based on factors like level and health. Each monster can be one of five different types, each of which is resistant to one type and does extra damage to another, so it’s critical you build your team not just with traditional roles (DPS, Tank, etc.) in mind, but also with enough diversity that you can realistically take on a similarly leveled monster of any type.
Things are mixed up a bit with the usage of the Synergy mechanic, too, which allows you to build a special meter by either swapping monsters or defending for a turn. There are four stages to the Synergy meter, with each consecutive one stacking on new stat bumps and benefits that enable you to really let ‘er rip when you finally act, though the trade-off is obviously that every turn spent building the meter is one where you aren’t attacking.
It must be said that combat feels rather unbalanced in many places, which can be both a positive or a negative depending on the player. Simply put, it feels like this is a combat system that’s easily exploited or ‘broken’, which can make for some ridiculous wins that feel almost unearned. For example, we came across one early boss that was level 18, and we opted to open the fight with a level 5 monster we caught in the starting area. We ordered said monster to inflict a poison-like attack on the boss, which promptly took off about 80% of its health over the next couple turns, making it an easy kill for the rest of our still under-leveled team. By all rights, we should not have won that battle so easily, yet it seems 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 difficult to discern whether this is by design or poor balancing.
A fun offshoot of this matter with balancing is the breeding and fusion system, which offers quite a bit of leeway to create a specialized team to your liking. There are about 200 ‘base’ monsters you can forge a pact with, but each of these can be changed into other monsters via special items or through breeding them to get entirely new ones. Going through several generations and seeing what kinds of crazy mutants you can make has some amusing ethical questions, but adds a lot of replayability to the 25-or-so hours it takes to see Monster Crown through. Evidently, there are over a thousand different monsters once you take these factors into account, so there’s no shortage of team comps you can try out here.
If the single player aspect isn’t enough, there’s also the expected suite of multiplayer functionality to contend with, which primarily exists to give you more leeway to battle or trade with other players. The lack of local multiplayer is a disappointing omission, but there are some cool ideas explored online, such as how you can use “NET Eggs” to utilize the genes of another player’s monsters as one of the ‘parents’ in breeding, which basically gives you a random result. Whether the multiplayer remains active will be a key hurdle for Monster Crown to overcome, however. It’s not clear whether cross play with other versions is available, and we can easily see this being a game with a lively 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 longtime classic Pokémon tracks. One area that’s a little lacking, however, is the monster design. With 200 base monsters, there are certainly a few decent designs to behold, but many of them look more like the kind of thing you’d see in a cheap ROM hack. Things aren’t helped by the lack of distinct cries for each monster and the nearly non-existent battle animations, which can make the uninspired designs seem that much flatter. Granted, there are sacrifices that had to be made to maintain the Game Boy style, but it feels like more could’ve been done in these aspects to breathe more life into the overall world.
Unfortunately, we ran into some noticeable performance problems, too, which frankly feel unacceptable given this style of game. Running through the overworld at high speed is prone to hit you with rather frequent frame rate hitches as Monster Crown tries loading in the oncoming assets, and we encountered at least one scenario where a glitched menu selection caused the game to lock, forcing us to close it and lose about 30 minutes of progress. Such issues aren’t game-breaking and very well could be resolved in patches, but just be aware that the launch version feels like it could’ve used a little more polish.
Conclusion
Monster Crown is a decent game that falls short of greatness in a few areas. Legitimately cool ideas with breeding and an overall solid combat system are let down by lackluster monster designs and performance issues. Then there’s the elephant in the room, which is that Monster Crown ultimately feels like a jankier and less addictive version of the oldest Pokémon games. We’d still give this one a recommendation, as the bones of the experience are good enough that its worth a punt for big Pokémon fans pining for the 8-bit days, but you might want to wait for a sale with this one.
Comments 29
Nice! I Kickstarted this and am glad to see it turned out well. From the review, it looks like the things important to me were done well while the cons don't bother me so much.
Looking forward to this!
Yeah those designs still look quite derivative of Pokémon, a common problem with so many of these indie monster catching games.
Looks cool, but releasing too close to Pokemon D/P. I'll just wait for the real thing and maybe pick this up on sale next year
I always have mixed feelings about these types of games. Obviously Pokemon didn’t invent the catch monsters or the make them fight (I feel like that was Dragon Quest Monsters but I could be wrong… or maybe it was SMT) mechanic, but I feel like the “plucky child from a modern inspired world goes off into the world to catch and fight with local wildlife” is where these clones run into trouble.
Copying the pokeformula but being legally distinct has the same impact most counterfeits do: makes most just long for the source material. Obviously there is a subset of people that enjoy rips for the sake of it (or to “stick it to the man”) but I always wonder why people don’t go further. Obviously you want to keep the catch and battle mechanics, but change up the setting type or even the purpose of these game mechanics. We’ve seen game freak themselves do that with Pokemon Conquest ( still needs a sequel).
The catch and battle pokemechanics should be the gameplay style not the identity of the game. Otherwise you just made indie pokemans: don’t sue me edition.
That $30 price tag just doesn't intrigue me, may check it once a sales happen.
This looked solid & the review seems to confirm that. I’ll definitely pick this up, but likely once it hits a sale price of $20 or less.
Does this game have the same problem that Nexomon has where some battles and especially grinding cause the game to slow way down? Or are all the battles quick encounters as mentioned above (for better or worse)?
I think my youngest will actually like this. Sounds solid.
Thanks for the review.
Hoping for a holiday sale. Will definitely get it then, but not for $20
Looking forward to picking this up
What is it with developing in this extremely simple pixel style and still having performance issues? Huh? Can anyone with a better software understanding than me shed light on this
@Ryu_Niiyama Thing is, this game isn't even a "pokeclone". The only thing it has in common is being a child and "catching" monsters.. which so many other games do in this genera. Other than that, it's pretty unique, with a full fledged breeding system, and a world that's non-linear and more open.
@swoose Performance issues are not always about polygons per second or fancy post processing effects or crazy AI or physics - in fact modern hardware and game engines are built to handle those things easily. Often the problem is with loading new data into memory - as per the example with just running quickly through the world so that new stuff has to stream in.
The other problem is just lazy coding. Using an existing game engine like Unity or Unreal, it's so easy to make things work at all that it's tempting to just say something is good enough and move on. In the old days, programmers needed to work magic with sprite mapping and pallette swapping etc, just to get the assets they need into the game. Nowadays, those same techniques are still just as useful but amateur developers often think "this is 2021, we don't need to worry about that stuff" and just import all their assets in as random image files and non-compressed WAVs, etc. Or more accurately, they probably don't know about those tricks since the barrier to entry is so low.
Today, a rando with a vision is able to produce something which 10-20 years ago would have needed a team of experts with a professional QA department and a "ship it when it's gold" mentality (as opposed to "release ASAP, patch later"). It's a fantastic time for creativity but I agree that the performance vs hardware equation can look pretty embarrassing sometimes.
@swoose Another thing that's easy to forget is that people made games for the SNES, Game Boy, etc by working with the strengths of the hardware. Those machines were built to push sprites, scroll backgrounds, and play music. Nowadays it's more polygons and brute force compute power.
Here's a crazy example of my own: when I made my first Unity game, I wanted it to have oldschool midi music instead of prerecorded WAVs. Tiny file sizes should give it basically no performance overhead, right? Well I built the thing and every level would take about 2 minutes to load. I figured that's just how things are. It was only later that I realised that the MIDI library I was using, had to load thousands of WAV files into memory, one for each musical instrument sample (even though my songs themselves were quite simple). It would have been much more performant to just pre-record the music and load it in as a single big WAV - something that the SNES would never have been able to do. But the SNES had a built in sound chip, with its own instrument synths/samples already stored on it - most games didn't need to load in any audio into memory directly.
@Specter_of-the_OLED def eagerly waiting for a sale. It looks nice, & I wanna play but not for that much $$$.
@Ogbert Well, problem is that you can't actually win when it comes to designing monsters for a game like this. There are SO many pokemon in the series and many of them don't even share the same art style or design sense to the point where simply drawing a fictional monster gets called out as "looking like a Pokemon".
It's a problem that the average consumer has enabled in which "creature that didn't already exist" = pokemon.
You could create something totally unique to yourself, base it loosely on an existing animal on Earth but because it has some character; it's classed as a pokemon to those who have no other form of reference.
Honestly, I don't want to hear people say "the designs are derivative of pokemon" unless they:
A: Actually copy the very design foundation of an existing pokemon.
or B: Instead acknowledge that pokemon designs these days are so inconsistent that literally anything can pass as a pokemon when it's not.
Pokemon simply just has the monopoly on the "monster catching" market. It did not invent it.
@Kyranosaurus not true at all. Digimon are visually distinct. Yokai Watch was visually distinct. Ni No Kuni was visually distinct. So many games have monsters that are visually distinct and look like that brand and not Pokemon. These look like Pokemon, which I actually think is deliberate but I find detrimental.
Honestly acting like it’s impossible to make a video game monster not look like a Pokemon is ridiculous.
@Ogbert See, whilst informed people like you and me KNOW that these series are visually distinct, there are more than enough people in the majority of the public who will absolutely think that both Digimon and Yokai Watch monsters look like or are Pokemon.
Digimon works well because it's specifically the art style of plenty of Digimon that give it the same identity. Swap out Agumon's eyes with Charizard and suddenly you have a perfectly valid "pokemon" without changing much else about the design.
A game like this is 100% made by a smaller team than Pokemon's or even Digimon. Being able to hire an artist who can distinctively inject cohesion into every monster design is a luxury not many get.
I'm not saying you can't make monsters that don't look like Pokemon, that's not my point. In fact you proved my point.
My point is that you've bundled this into the "looks like pokemon designs" category when these designs are simply doing their own thing, whether you think the designs look good or not.
If you want to tell me what actually specifically makes these designs look like pokemon designs, then that's a more solid point that I'm willing to take seriously, but until then, I can only see colourful monsters based on real animals that anyone can do. Emphasis on me not saying these are the greatest designs in the world or anything like that.
This review smacks of "it looks like Pokemon but I'm too lazy to actually decipher what makes the game unique".
I'm sorry, as a contributor to the game, this game is really more unique than Pokemon. There are well over 1000 monsters including crossbreeds, and that's part of the joy of the game - finding which ones you like!
The performance problems? I'll give you that, the game has a few issues with those, but calling the designs "needing some work" is just flat-out stupid IMO.
@Kyranosaurus the shape languages and forms, the patterning, the colour palettes.
Look at that cover art. There’s a Nidoran knockoff sat right there next to the human and the Ledyba x Heracross thing in the sky in front of it. The big dragon next to him is not so straight up a copy but certainly take heavy cues from the likes of Kangaskhan and the earlier dragon types. Then later in the pixel art you have a Cubone x Ryhorn mount. A fish that looks like Steelix and Basculin had a baby and theres that big ol’ Arcanine x Entei cross over on the bridge. The rat covered in vines is probably the most original but does have a whiff of Dedene and the pink thing next to it is again a less clear cut inspiration but does give off Sandshrew and Clefairy vibes. Anyone who knows Pokémon will likely immediately see these comparisons and that is the issue.
That’s the long and the short of the problem. Even the ones that aren’t immediately a Pokemon A crossed with Pokemon B still look like they could be. You say take Agumon and give it Charmander eyes and it looks like a Pokemon, that’s over simplifying it and not really true. Agumon has subtle details in his form that Pokemon generally do not. Agumon is knobbly, he has defined knees and elbows and knuckles and face lumps. He has a row of tiny teeth. Pokémon tend to either smooth out these lumps and finer details or make them the feature. They don’t tend to have a small row of tiny teeth they have one or two large ones sticking out or the mouth shape itself has teeth hinted in it.
Charmander and Agumon are essentially the same creature barring Charmander’s fiery tail. If you asked someone to draw Agumon in a Pokemon style you would get Charmander and vice verse. And yet they don’t feel like the same creature looking at the two even side by side. So when someone says “here’s my new monster collecting game” and my first reaction is “well they all look like Pokemon knock offs” it’s not because every monster collecting game is compared to Pokémon and it’s inevitable they will look the same. It’s because the designs and general art style are too derivative of Pokemon.
@Ogbert I don't see ANY Nidoran in Laz (EDIT: you meant Playg, that's a CAT, not a bunny). Arcanine X Entei? For the WALRUS monster Walerus? Are you joking? (EDIT: Wrong bridge, though I don't see the comparison still).
Ledyba X Heracross for Staglus? Where on earth does LEDYBA factor in? Are you just unaware that other types of beetles also have those kind of wings?
I'm sorry, these comparisons are really really bad. It feels like you're just grasping at straws and desperately trying to write them off as Pokemon knock-offs intentionally, which IMO means you're trying to dislike the game and not judge it based on anything else it does.
@Vajra Bizarrely the images on the mobile article are different? There's a whole bunch more here on the desktop browser!
Anyway to answer your questions, yes i am aware there are a multitude of beetles in the real world. Which is why it's even more baffling that the artist chose to go so close to two beetle Pokemon that have been around since gen 2. You'd think they would try and steer clear and take inspiration from something new but sadly they didn't.
Are you seriously telling me that pink creature with the large round ears and the horns standing next to the trainer on the cover art is meant to be a cat? Maybe that's an unfortunate angle...but either way it looks like a Nidoran. i mean I could draw a version of Squirtle with some slight tweaks and call it a frog, doesn't mean it doesn't look like a Squirtle.
And yeah that thing on the bridge looks like Arcanine's body with elements of Entei's face. It just does, at least from that sprite.
Don't let it get you angry though, the game will do well in spite of these comparisons.
If Monster Crown is derivative of Pokemon, Pokemon rips off Dragon Quest wholesale, so I hope that any Pokemon reviews you do address this point.
@N64-ROX All that stuff you are saying is interesting. Makes me think of Modern Vintage Gamer taking about how he wished the OLED Switch had included more, or faster memory (can't remember) because it would help so much with performance. He said most of the months needed for Witcher 3 development on Switch had to do with perfecting the memory usage to keep performance up. Digital Foundry has been pointing out camera issues, both with Unity and with Deathloop. It's interesting to learn that many of the games I thought were dropping frames/performing badly were actually having problems with camera movement being stuttery.
Just play Nexomon. Only $10 and it looks and plays great.
@120frames-please Thanks! I love watching MVG's stuff too. If we think about all that memory management heartache which is required to get an "impossible" port to run at 30fps, or a polished first-party-quality title to run at 60fps, and then consider the alternative for a less-funded or less-committed studio ("how about we don't do that and just ship a game which still works but not always so smooth?") it's not so surprising really.
No less disappointing though. Especially if it's a marquee AA release such as Super Monkey Ball or V-Rally where you'd really be expecting a bit better.
@N64-ROX Yeah, I notice every frame drop in the Monkey Ball remake. Wasn't there on Gamecube. Oh well. Yeah, I can't imagine how frustrating it must be trying to program something. I sometimes feel bad about stuff I've posted about Kingdom New Lands and Kingdom Two Crowns. I adore those games, still play them regularly (on my phone, Switch, PC, XSX!), and really can't stand the frame pacing. Even on my Xbox Series X the frame pacing is off and looks bad to me. If it was locked at 30fps I'd be much happier with the performance. It would be interesting to learn how they programmed the engines for those games to see why they display the way they do.
Just to echo what others have said, I feel like $30 is a bit steep for the game and might hurt its sales ultimately. I played it on PC and had a good time, but it feels like a $20 price tag would work better - especially with pokemon so close. I recommend the game for sure, though. It's a lot of fun.
1.0.2 is supposed to fix a lot of these issues. It’s already out on steam, but the Switch version is still waiting on approval from Nintendo, it seems...
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