Introduction
From Studio Aurum comes Monster Crown, a turn-based monster taming RPG. You live with your family in your farm on the Royal Island, until one day you decide to be a monster tamer. After teaching you the basics, your parents agree, and they commissioning you a major assignment, bring a gift to the king to win his favor.
Your journey will be a complete one: You will catch monsters, you will fight a gangster’s association, you will solve some citizen’s affairs and you’ll meet a woman seeking power and legendary monsters to fulfill her own desires.
Gathering monsters
I’m going, to be honest, this game remembers me a lot the first Pokemon games. Sometimes, while playing, I got the feeling of playing Pokemon Red again, which brings me good memories. During the gameplay, you fight and catch monsters (with pacts) and level them up. Occasionally, you will fight other people, in story-related events. There aren’t combats with random trainers during your way, only wild monsters, which you will see on the field before fighting them, even some will pursue you. In this respect, I miss more combats against other trainers.
You can encounter some overpowered monsters during your adventure, some are marked with the ??? Name, which means that they are the result of monster breeding, and some brilliant versions of the normal ones. In this game, you can’t evolve your monsters, but you can breed them to get stronger ones. When you catch a new monster, it will be registered in your notebook with a description, but at this current stage of the game, this is not available for all of them.
The combat
The fights are turn-based. The enemy monster appears and you choose which member of your team use. During the combats, there are 5 options, attack the enemy with one of the monster’s skills, switch your monster, guard against an attack, escape from the battle or offer a pact to the enemy to join you. For the last option, you have to debilitate it before it accepts the pact. If the monster kills one of your companions, you can use the rest of your roster. If all are defeated, you will be returned to the last visited town.
Every monster has an affinity: unstable, malicious, brute, relentless, and will, but they can learn movements of different types. Every type has its own strengths and weaknesses, for example, an unstable monster will have an advantage over a relentless one, dealing extra damage and resisting the received one.
During attacking, you will fulfill the synergy meter, which will power-up your attacks if one of the gauges is full. Plus, you need it to use determined skills.
What to expect
Monster Crown started in Early Access 1st August 2020, and it’s constantly updating. The developer will expand the story and the number of available monsters. Also, it’s going to install new functions related to the monsters like a genetic modification or the use of items to transform them. There are plans to implement online battles and a slight improvement in the graphics too.
I enjoyed my gameplay, it’s been a while since I played a monster taming RPG. The game needs polishing in some aspects, but if done right, it can be an interesting title for genre lovers as well as for those who played the first Pokemon games 20 years ago. We’ll see what the future holds.
