The game’s story goes a little something like this: Crown Island has been enjoying decades of peace since the totalitarian regime of the Philosopher Kings was upended back in the olden days.
To quote Cat Stevens, “Ooh baby, baby, it’s a wild world.” To me, Monster Crown is one of those games where the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. That being said, even if you don’t extensively explore off the beaten path, Monster Crown is not super difficult to complete. Yes, there are some good story beats, but wanderlust and the robust monster breeding system are Monster Crown‘s calling cards. The story doesn’t offer many incentives to stray far off the beaten path you need to be intrinsically motivated to explore. If you’re looking for a compelling story with plot-based motives to do stuff, you won’t really find that here. If you like exploring simply for the sake of exploring, this game will appeal to you. Monster Crown may look like an old-school Pokèmon game from the Game Boy Color days, but with its sinister storyline and occasional use of foul language, it presents itself as an edgier alternative for those who played their first Pokèmon game during childhood and are now teens or adults looking for that same experience, albeit more grown-up.Ĭrown Island, Monster Crown‘s world, has a kind of untamed, less cultivated vibe, like a place that hasn’t been fully explored yet it’s almost like the US during the early stages of Western expansion. Another challenger in this arena is Monster Crown, the debut title from Studio Aurum. The glut of these are derisively referred to as “pokè-clones” even if some are good in their own right.Įven now, in 2021, games like Nexomon, Temtem, Coromon, and more try to compete with Nintendo and Game Freak’s juggernaut. Ever since Pokèmon exploded onto the scene, other companies have tried to craft their own “creature collecting” games to get a piece of that market. Ten-year-olds who were enthralled by Pokèmon Red & Blue back in the late 1990s are now in their mid-30s, and many still enjoy playing Pokèmon games, perhaps with their own children. If only these bugs led to some kind of super-secret “missing number” monster (if you know, you know).It’s hard to believe that Pokèmon has been around for 25 years and is still a popular and viable multimedia entity. As mentioned before, monsters were getting stuck in areas I couldn’t access, but they would also get stuck in trees or in water. Too often I would open the map or journal and the game would seize up, or I would be talking to an NPC and the text box wouldn’t disappear. On top of that, my time with the game was riddled with bugs, and not the ones to collect in-game… actual game-crashing bugs. The issue with this is that many parts of the map are inaccessible, so monsters I want to either fight or make a pact with often get trapped in areas I cannot get to. One of the most infuriating downfalls of Monster Crown is the monster AI monsters appear onscreen as encounters, much like Persona, instead of random encounters in the grass. The world feels entirely too familiar, at times a carbon copy of what has come before, but perhaps that is simply a symptom of 8-bit style games. The game also feels mightily unbalanced I was blasting through basically the entire game just using my starting monster, an unremarkable wolf-creature, and almost never felt the need to strategise or utilise my party’s various types and movesets. Default movement is slow, and then the run option feels too fast.
To start simple, the game just doesn’t feel right. I found the darker tone a welcome change to the tried-and-true storylines of monster collecting titles of the past. Indeed, early in the game, there is a confronting scene where the villain sets one of her monsters upon you, lashing out with its claws to try and beat you into sharing some information. The game’s narrative, while following the blueprints of the genre, is a darker and more mature approach to the coming-of-age adventurer tale. All the fringe extras are present too: trading, breeding, monster storage boxes, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is essentially a carbon copy of the gameplay you know from the Game Freak titles, with some twists that try to set it apart. You make your way through the continent battling other trainers, collecting monsters, and thwarting the dastardly plans of the various thugs and villains you meet along the way. You play as a young teen, living on a farm on the outskirts of a small town, and the time has finally come for you to embark on your very own poke-… I mean monster collecting journey. Monster Crown’s narrative follows an all too familiar premise.
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