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Monster Viator (Android, Played on Retroid Pocket 3)
Our hero is a mysterious amnesiac who apparently made some kind of deal with the local evil-eye witch; but he doesn’t remember anything (not even his name), except that he has a brother who he used to travel with. So the witch gives him a flying cat companion and he discovers he has the mysterious power to talk to monsters (and tame them to fight for him), so off on adventure he goes.
This is a KEMCO rpg, the first I’ve played in a few years. “Full price” for this is a mere $3, and the in-app purchases don’t even bother with a secondary currency. You can just pay real money for double damage, triple XP, or a no-encounters travel method. (Somewhere around 11 hours in, I opted to pay an additional $3 for the no-encounters travel, because I wanted to hunt down sidequests in earlier dungeons but didn’t want to fight a zillion easy, unrewarding battles. The full game took me about 15 hours to beat.)
You don’t actually “capture” monsters Pokemon-style or anything like that; you recruit them periodically as the story progresses. (You have two slots for monsters in your active party and something like two dozen monsters join you—I only used three for the whole game. Fortunately, non-active monsters still get XP and there are no skills to unlock.) You have two human characters who each have classes they can switch between (which determine their skill sets), but class progression is also locked by story progression and finding various special items. Each equipment item can be upgraded by spending gold, up to +5, which can give you a nice advantage if you grind money but also can make it hard to tell if a new item in a shop is actually going to be an upgrade or not. There are lots of sidequests, mostly finding special bosses to fight but occasionally visiting locations or finding new classes. (There are more side dungeons that don’t matter to the plot than there are actual story locations! Plus, there’s a fully-optional roguelike tower dungeon that I skipped entirely.) The story quest system is great; it’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing if you lose track.
The opening segments of the game are a bit deceptive: The first “dungeon” is a single screen area, but they soon balloon into real dungeons with some simple puzzles and mazes. There are also semi-optional side areas attached to some of the dungeons later on.
Difficulty is highly variable—at the very beginning you can die a bunch if you challenge the wrong bonus enemy or if your skills that can land repeatedly…don’t. But if you get the ice sword from the first sidequest boss, you can wipe out random battles for the next whole area with ease. There’s also a heavy emphasis on the Random Number God being nice to you, since whether an enemy uses their nastiest attack or whether your skills proc sufficiently often determines how far out of your weight class you can punch at any point in the game. It’s occasionally difficult to tell whether you’ve hit a place you aren’t supposed to be yet, or if you’d just unlucky/have a lousy strategy. They did use the lovely feature from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest where you can immediately retry a battle you lose, which was what got me through the two final battles and a few of the bonus bosses.
Instead of regular MP, you have a gauge that returns to a starting value at the beginning of every battle and regenerates each turn, so you basically can use skills with impunity in random battles but need to balance them with normal attacks in boss battles so you have MP when you need it. The fact that your HP refills in every battle (and you can upgrade weapons anywhere) also means you aren’t tethered to towns. (Every town has an Inn, but they’re only there for sidequest trading games.)
There are two special encounters: A Doom Gaze-esque overworld monster who’ll destroy you repeatedly before you whittle him down (dying to him has no penalties) who awards you with the second special ability slot when you finally beat him; and the Gold Panchos, which are invincible but give gold proportional to the amount of damage you can do to them in three turns. The latter is fantastic for upgrading weapons.
The main antagonist is Biscute, who is a terribly spoiled prince who wants to be the best Monster Tamer in the world, and what he lacks in talent he makes up for with wealth, privilege, and generally being an asshole. You keep almost feeling sorry for the guy, but then he’ll roll out another jerk move. And he isn’t the final boss: The final boss shows up because he does something stupid and short-sighted. I appreciate this level of class-consciousness in my games.
SPOILERS: We finally get a title drop when Biscute introduces his most powerful monster, a wolf-creature called a Viator. And immediately after that it’s revealed that Culter (the protagonist) and his brother were both Viators who traveled the world together, but Biscute captured the brother, and the witch made a deal with Culter to transform him into a human so he could face the trial to become a Hero. (Harpist sidekick Aira, on the other hand, is the descendant of the legendary Beast King. This never really becomes important.)
Overall: The plot’s a little thin and the amount of randomness in the battles may or may not be your thing, but this was entertaining, especially for the price. I’d also call this particularly strong for a Hit-Point game (probably my least favorite of KEMCO’s developers).
This is a KEMCO rpg, the first I’ve played in a few years. “Full price” for this is a mere $3, and the in-app purchases don’t even bother with a secondary currency. You can just pay real money for double damage, triple XP, or a no-encounters travel method. (Somewhere around 11 hours in, I opted to pay an additional $3 for the no-encounters travel, because I wanted to hunt down sidequests in earlier dungeons but didn’t want to fight a zillion easy, unrewarding battles. The full game took me about 15 hours to beat.)
You don’t actually “capture” monsters Pokemon-style or anything like that; you recruit them periodically as the story progresses. (You have two slots for monsters in your active party and something like two dozen monsters join you—I only used three for the whole game. Fortunately, non-active monsters still get XP and there are no skills to unlock.) You have two human characters who each have classes they can switch between (which determine their skill sets), but class progression is also locked by story progression and finding various special items. Each equipment item can be upgraded by spending gold, up to +5, which can give you a nice advantage if you grind money but also can make it hard to tell if a new item in a shop is actually going to be an upgrade or not. There are lots of sidequests, mostly finding special bosses to fight but occasionally visiting locations or finding new classes. (There are more side dungeons that don’t matter to the plot than there are actual story locations! Plus, there’s a fully-optional roguelike tower dungeon that I skipped entirely.) The story quest system is great; it’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing if you lose track.
The opening segments of the game are a bit deceptive: The first “dungeon” is a single screen area, but they soon balloon into real dungeons with some simple puzzles and mazes. There are also semi-optional side areas attached to some of the dungeons later on.
Difficulty is highly variable—at the very beginning you can die a bunch if you challenge the wrong bonus enemy or if your skills that can land repeatedly…don’t. But if you get the ice sword from the first sidequest boss, you can wipe out random battles for the next whole area with ease. There’s also a heavy emphasis on the Random Number God being nice to you, since whether an enemy uses their nastiest attack or whether your skills proc sufficiently often determines how far out of your weight class you can punch at any point in the game. It’s occasionally difficult to tell whether you’ve hit a place you aren’t supposed to be yet, or if you’d just unlucky/have a lousy strategy. They did use the lovely feature from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest where you can immediately retry a battle you lose, which was what got me through the two final battles and a few of the bonus bosses.
Instead of regular MP, you have a gauge that returns to a starting value at the beginning of every battle and regenerates each turn, so you basically can use skills with impunity in random battles but need to balance them with normal attacks in boss battles so you have MP when you need it. The fact that your HP refills in every battle (and you can upgrade weapons anywhere) also means you aren’t tethered to towns. (Every town has an Inn, but they’re only there for sidequest trading games.)
There are two special encounters: A Doom Gaze-esque overworld monster who’ll destroy you repeatedly before you whittle him down (dying to him has no penalties) who awards you with the second special ability slot when you finally beat him; and the Gold Panchos, which are invincible but give gold proportional to the amount of damage you can do to them in three turns. The latter is fantastic for upgrading weapons.
The main antagonist is Biscute, who is a terribly spoiled prince who wants to be the best Monster Tamer in the world, and what he lacks in talent he makes up for with wealth, privilege, and generally being an asshole. You keep almost feeling sorry for the guy, but then he’ll roll out another jerk move. And he isn’t the final boss: The final boss shows up because he does something stupid and short-sighted. I appreciate this level of class-consciousness in my games.
SPOILERS: We finally get a title drop when Biscute introduces his most powerful monster, a wolf-creature called a Viator. And immediately after that it’s revealed that Culter (the protagonist) and his brother were both Viators who traveled the world together, but Biscute captured the brother, and the witch made a deal with Culter to transform him into a human so he could face the trial to become a Hero. (Harpist sidekick Aira, on the other hand, is the descendant of the legendary Beast King. This never really becomes important.)
Overall: The plot’s a little thin and the amount of randomness in the battles may or may not be your thing, but this was entertaining, especially for the price. I’d also call this particularly strong for a Hit-Point game (probably my least favorite of KEMCO’s developers).