Gotta force contracts on ’em all!

I’ve been playing Pokémon for years at this point. Crazy to think that series has been around as long as it has. With only a few exceptions, there hasn’t been many Pokémon style games to come out of the gaming world. At least, not many to speak of other than a handful. So, suffice to say, I was intrigued when I was asked to review Monster Crown, a Pokémon-inspired game set to feel like the old Game Boy games. Oh, and this was on other platforms, not just on a Nintendo system.

Monster Crown has players taking on the role of a new Tamer. Leaving the family farm to tame all kinds of monsters as well as getting thrown into a plot with mobsters, and evil leaders for good measure. Rather than catch monsters, Tamers break out the legal documents and have the monsters sign a contract with them. Does it make sense? Not really, but watching a giant monster read a scroll and agree to join my team was always funny. The story is serviceable, but won’t knock anyone’s socks off. Although, I will say that they are going for a more mature setting here. The fact that people actually die in this game makes it stand out from Nintendo’s giant IP.

Platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC
MSRP: $29.99
Price I’d pay: $20

What Monster Crown does is change up the standard formula. Sure, there are monsters with specific types that are stronger and weaker to others, but what really stands out is the synergy system. There is a four part meter that fills up with each turn in battle depending on if the player switches out a monster or defends. Having more bars of the meter filled will allow the next attack to be more powerful. This can change the entire battle. Think of it a bit like Bravely Default’s system where the player can give up turns to have a bigger hit on the next turn. Along with that, certain monsters have moves that can give status effects and change up stats.

Another change is that the Tamer can carry eight monsters with them at a time allowing players to have more customization in battle. To be honest, it makes the game a bit easy in some aspects because of how the synergy works. Throw in some rather unbalanced moves like status effects that just melts a health bar, and players will learn they can exploit a lot of battles here. To begin, the game feels a bit grindy in the fact that most battles are random encounters. There’s not as many Tamer fights as one would see in a Pokémon game. Sure, there are some but it’s not like they’re on every route just waiting for me to walk by.

Breeding plays a big part in Monster Crown as well. While there are tons of monsters to fight and form contracts with in the wild, there are even more players can get through breeding. You see, in Monster Crown, players can cross breed monsters of different species essentially making a hybrid monster. It allows players to possibly get the best of both worlds when it comes to stats for a specific monster and can allow players to fine tune their team.

The 8-bit aesthetic really nails the Game Boy Color feel and at times made me think I was actually playing an emulated Game Boy game. One thing that I couldn’t get behind were the framerate drops. I ran into a good amount of them while running in the field and I couldn’t figure out why I was having these drops since the game is obviously not graphically intensive and I was play on a Series X.

Another nagging issue I had with the game were the menus. Navigating these became a bit of a chore because of how they are displayed. Both the color scheme and the fact that menus will pop up on top of menus. I found myself backing out of all of them just to get my bearings on what I was actually doing.

There is online multiplayer. At least, I think there is. Both the game and the promotional stuff about the game says there is, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find a single person to battle are trade with. It could be that I was doing something wrong, or it could be that there’s not many people actually playing the game.

Monster Crown is a game that I would say try out if you’re into the old school Pokémon games. This is obviously a primitive game, but offers some new things to the monster catching genre. It’s most certainly not the best game or even the most flashy game out there, but as a Pokémon style game grounded in a more traditional turn-based RPG, it’s not a bad ride.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.