Monster Crown Review

Game: Monster Crown
Genre: Role-Playing, Action, Adventure
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam, Windows, macOS, Linux and Playstation 4)
Developer | Publisher: Studio Aurum | SOEDESCO
Age Rating: US Teen | EU 12+
Price: US $29.99 | UK £26.99 | EU € 29,99
Release Date: October 12th, 2021

Review code used with many thanks to SOEDESCO

Wearing its inspirations clearly on its sleeves, Monster Crown is a monster collector/battler. Growing from its initial Kickstarter campaign, Studio Aurum aimed to recapture the magic from those 90s games that we hold near and dear to our hearts. Of course, though, it can be risky wandering into specific genres and attempting to “bring back the magic”, so to say. Does Monster Crown accomplish what it set out to do? Let’s find out.

Just a Kid Running Errands

You play as a young teenager that lives with their family on a farm. One day, your dad decides to give you a comic that has a personality quiz attached, promising to give you your own monster. And what kid doesn’t want their own monster? From that point, you eventually get the option to choose from five different monsters, one of them being recommended based on your answers to the quiz (but you don’t have to go with the recommended choice).

Soon after you obtain your monster in the mail, your dad sends you on your way to the Humanism Kingdom to deliver a pearl to the king, claiming that it will help build up relations. And from there, you begin your long errand quest of travelling across the land, collecting monsters, battling other tamers, and wandering into the antagonist’s plot to control the world.

Fun Battle System

Monster Crown is a turn-based RPG where you can collect monsters and then use them in battle. You can have up to eight monsters in your team at a time, the rest being sent into a monster box that can be accessed from any city or town. Turn order is based on your speed stat. During each turn, you can choose to attack, use an item, form a pact with a monster (if it’s wild), escape the battle (if it’s against a wild monster), or switch your monsters.

There are five different types of monsters: Malicious, Brute, Will, Relentless, and Unstable. Each of these types are strong and weak against one monster type. It’s recommended to have monsters of different types to cover your weaknesses, as there are some battles where powering through won’t help you. You’ll also want to pay attention to the typings of the moves, as some monsters use move types that don’t match their own.

Another aspect of battles that is unique to Monster Crown is the synergy bar. The synergy bar has four levels, with each level giving additional stat boosts that can help turn the tide of battle. You can build the bar by switching out monsters, although that does come at the cost of your switched out monster taking damage.

So in these moments, it’s important to assess the situation and figure out whether it’s better to just grit your teeth and battle, or try to do more damage by building up your synergy bar. Keep in mind, however, that if you are building up your synergy bar and your monster gets knocked out, the bar resets to zero.

Forming Pacts

The way that you capture monsters in Monster Crown is by forming pacts. This operates pretty much the same as any other monster capture game where you use your item to go through the capture process. Being at a higher level and lowering the health of the monster increases your odds of forming a pact. And while through most of the game, you will probably mainly be using Normal Pacts, there are other pacts that you can obtain as well, such as a Supreme Pact.

Using pacts is a great way to obtain higher-level monsters without grinding. While it may take a few pacts before you get lucky, it is possible to form a pact with monsters that are vastly over-levelled. However, to make things easier, you will need to do at least some damage.

Inconsistent Leveling

A major downside to Monster Crown is the fact that the levels of boss monsters feel inconsistent. You are obviously meant to follow a general pattern when exploring the world, but on several occasions, there are moments where the levelling of boss characters and monsters doesn’t quite make sense. The game eases you into the experience of battling pretty easily, but after a while, you will find yourself fighting monsters that are ten levels higher, then fifteen, then twenty.

Of course, it’s possible to work around those moments by building up the synergy bar or getting lucky with a pact sticking, but it can be a bit jarring to fight against tamers around your level, only to have to fight a boss much stronger.

And unfortunately, the Chief Tamers suffer from this issue as well. As you go to different towns and cities, you’ll come across stronger tamers known as chiefs who exist to increase your level cap. And strangely enough, they remain consistently close to the level of your monsters. Sometimes even, they can be a lower level depending on when you come across them.

Of course, any difficulty can be done away with just by grinding levels, but that’s an unfortunate solution to have to succumb to. The other way to work around any difficulty from bosses is by building up your synergy bar and hoping you do enough damage to defeat the boss before it defeats you. Or you could chuck a pact at the wild monster and pray that it accepts.

Interesting Breeding and Evolving System

You are able to breed any monster with each other once you unlock this functionality. You just need to select a primary and secondary monster. The monster you breed will mainly take after the primary monster while gaining attributes from the secondary. Moves from both monsters will pass over, which allows you to build a power monster. The breeding process is very straightforward and you just have to press the Breed button to receive an egg.

No more are the times of running outside of the daycare until the game deems you ready to receive an egg. And the hatching process is just as quick. You only need to wait a couple of minutes before the egg is shaking in your egg container, ready to hatch. All hatched monsters start at level 4.

As for evolving, monsters do not evolve via levelling up. Instead, you will come across certain items as you explore that can be used on your monsters. These items have different effects depending on the monster they are used on. It adds a level of excitement using a strange item that you picked up on a monster, especially when you don’t know what the effects are going to be.

Of course, with these options, that means that after a while, it’s not optimal to keep using the same monsters that you’ve picked up in the wild early on. The game encourages you to experiment with breeding, even displaying a way for you to see the generation a monster has been bred from.

Plagued with Bugs

The Switch version of Monster Crown has been plagued with bugs, some minor and some major. As of writing this review, some of these bugs have been acknowledged by the developers. The first major bug deals with the game soft locking whenever you attempt to rest at a campfire. This happens consistently every time, so before interacting with any campfires in the game, make sure to save your progress first. There have also been some crashes as well with the software.

There are also consistent animation and audio bugs as well. Music will randomly cut out and cut back in. Characters will skip animation frames while in movement. Characters and monsters will be located on top of items that really shouldn’t be. And sometimes, wild monsters will still keep pursuing you even when you wander into a town or city. While the occasional bug is normal and expected, the abundance of these bugs does leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

Everything Comes Up…Vague

The overall experience of Monster Crown is a bit vague. The game generally points you in the direction of your main quest. However, past that point, hints are given in a way that is reminiscent of older games, for better or for worse. If you are someone that likes being able to just explore around and figure things out yourself, this will be perfect for you. But if you need things lined out clearly, there might be some frustration. For instance, a character may mention that their friend is lost, but they won’t tell you the exact area that they wandered off to.

The story is also told in a way that feels as though something is missing. You are made aware of a war that ravaged the land decades ago. But no one really goes into detail about said war. There are thugs that take advantage of those less fortunate, but it only comes up a couple of times despite being composed of a large team of people.

There are world-building elements, via both conversation and visuals with certain locations, but they do come up a bit short. The world is also fairly open, allowing the player to explore where they wish. The only thing that may hold you back is the levels of wild monsters and tamers.

A Blast to the Past

The art for Monster Crown is pretty spot, instantly taking me back to when I was a young kid playing Pokemon. The game uses a 16-bit art style across the board, packing in as much detail as possible with its limited pallet. And while the animation bugs do take away from the visual department a bit, Monster Crown still looks very nice.

They took a step further by including several CGs of key moments in the story. And art isn’t the only thing that brings about nostalgia. The music also draws inspiration from those early GB/GBA era games. With a nice range of upbeat melodies to fast-paced battle tracks, the music definitely gets stuck in your head after a few listens.

Conclusion

Overall, Monster Crown has a good premise behind it. It has a solid base and if the developers decided to make another monster collector down the road, they have a good sense of what to include. The combat is fun and the breeding aspect can make it interesting to see what monsters you can end up creating, especially if you’re into min-maxing. In this aspect, I do believe that they have really touched on what made games like Pokemon popular: the excitement of catching them all and figuring out how to best build your team to be the strongest they can be.

However, the bugs and some of the progression decisions made with Monster Crown make it a tedious experience at best and a downright frustrating one at worse. The storytelling leaves me feeling as though I was always missing some details. And the jumps in levels for boss monsters were frustrating to come across, perhaps more so because they could be cheesed by getting lucky with a pact.

Overall, Monster Crown is an experience that may be better played on other systems that aren’t the Switch and for those who don’t mind the inconsistencies present.

Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.