Monster Sanctuary is a cross between a monster catcher RPG and a Metroidvania. I am interested in both of those things, so I decided to check it out.
This game is better than Pokemon in every conceivable way except for the most important one: Monster designs. As you can see in the banner above, monster designs are incredibly basic, usually consisting of real plants, animals, or mythical creatures with only minor twists. And those tiny overworld sprites are all you’re getting; you don’t get to see detailed closeups in battle like you do in Pokemon. This is highly unfortunate, because the game is otherwise very enjoyable and has a number of features I wish Pokemon would include.
The game’s big claim to fame is that every single monster has a skill that helps you explore the world in addition to their battle skills, a little like HMs from Pokemon but placed much more center stage. This is what makes the game a Metroidvania: instead of gating progress through items or upgrades to your character, you need to find monsters with the right skill to reach new areas or optional goodies. Not every monster has a unique exploration skill, but this still added a lot of personality to them and helped them feel like real creatures instead of just battle-bots.
The other cool thing is that battles require more than one iota of thought. All battles are 3v3 rather than 1v1, all enemy trainers have a full team, and monsters can survive more than two hits. This means that status and support moves actually matter, and are in fact a cornerstone of most advanced strategies. Additionally, instead of learning new moves automatically on level up, every monster has a skill tree that you can customize yourself, which makes me feel a lot more involved in their development and allows for even more tactical depth. This added complexity means that every monster actually feels like it has a unique niche, rather than them being interchangeable outside of elemental coverage like in Pokemon.
Another thing the game does is that your monsters can have equipment (one weapon and three accessories), which I’m ambivalent about. It provides more opportunities for customization, yes, but for me it felt like too much micromanagement for a game with 101 potential party members. It’s pretty grindy, too, because in order to improve equipment you need to gather crafting materials, which drop randomly from enemies, making it a crapshoot if you’ll get the ones you need. Also, weirdly, every monster starts with a basic weapon that is necessary to boost their attack stats to a meaningful level but for some reason can be unequipped. I feel like, given this is a game about monsters, not humans, they should be relying more on their innate skills than equipment modifiers. Pokemon’s single held items that provided small qualitative changes were enough complexity, this is too much.
This ties into my more substantial criticism, which is that the game overall feels much too complex. So much of the stuff that happens in battles happens automatically; it’s all effects that trigger follow-up effects that trigger follow-up effects that trigger follow-up effects. Good builds require you to exploit these several layers deep, so that every action you take heals you, which grants you a buff, which lets you do a follow-up attack, which… Every single turn in this game features a truly dizzying amount of things happening beyond the action you just took, with no indication of what triggered what or exactly what happened.
To show what I mean, here’s a video of a boss battle:
Playing this game for too long literally gives me a headache, and it’s not hard to see why.
This is especially bad when encountering new enemies; while you can guess what’s going on with your monsters since you built them, you have no idea why this new monster just oneshotted your tank and fully healed itself on the same turn, and thus you have no idea what you’re supposed to do in response.
One thing I did like is that instead of learning new abilities automatically, monsters have skill trees that you invest points in every time they level up. You can never max out a tree (as the level cap is scaled for you to hit at the end of the game instead of off in space), requiring you to make actual choices and come up with customized builds. Monsters can end up remarkably different if you diversify their tree or go all in on one branch, and depending on what passives you choose. This made me feel much more involved and invested in my monsters’ development than I ever did in Pokemon, and lends more credence to the idea you are actually training them. It’s definitely something more mons games should consider.
However, despite all of this complicated setup, the game forces you to rely a lot on random chance. In addition to critical hits, there are buffs and debuffs that can make you randomly miss attacks, and there are a ton of abilities and items that provide a buff or debuff that’s chosen randomly. This isn’t too bad, because a core mechanic is that all of your attacks hit multiple times, so random effects get averaged out… Except, as you might notice in the above video, there’s a scoring system that ranks you on how well the battle went, with crucial rewards like new monsters gated behind high scores. This is immensely frustrating if you’re just on the cusp of getting a perfect score, because you don’t know if that means you need to change your strategy or if you just got unlucky. You can fight a battle the exact same way and get different results, which is fine in general but not if you’re turning battles into a puzzle that must be performed perfectly. And, again, this isn’t just for bragging rights; getting new monsters, the game’s core feature, requires getting high scores.
Compounding this is that the leveling curve is incredibly punishing. See, unlike in Pokemon, boss battles are hair-pullingly difficult, with every enemy trainer having a full and well-balanced team that’s deliberately scaled to be higher level than you. It’s impossible to coast through the game with a single team, as you’ll need to switch out most or all of your monsters for every boss to come up with a viable counter. However, like in Pokemon, benched mons gain no experience from battles; so even if you know intellectually what monsters you should swap for, they’ll be statistically useless until you do a ton of grinding first. This was incredibly frustrating and unfun, and completely killed the pacing every time I ran into a brick wall of a boss. Pokemon also has this problem (which is why people who complain about the EXP share and EXP candies are nuts), we just don’t notice because it’s so easy a monkey can play it.
The game does throw you one bone with Rare Candy-type items that give monsters free levels (capped by the level of your strongest monster, which I thought was a good throttle)… except they’re limited items, so you can only use them to bring one or two old monsters up to par, out of dozens of options. Bizarrely, a late-game area has a shop that lets you buy unlimited amounts for a pittance, which just makes me ask why we couldn’t have that from the start.
Individual levels just… really do not work in mons games, do they. It only works if you treat them like a standard jRPG and swap out your main players rarely if at all, but that defeats the entire appeal of trying out new mons over the course of the game. I wonder how you would fix this — maybe make it so only the trainer levels up, and mon strength is tied to trainer level universally? That would help answer the question of what humans are contributing to the partnership at all.
Speaking of which: So how does the story hold up? Is this series more ethical than Pokemon?
Short answer… no. Long answer… uh…
To start off, we’re given the Pokemon excuse that the monsters you encounter are consensually challenging you. You’re then immediately told that in order to bond with monsters enough for them to follow your orders, you need to raise them from eggs, which, yikes. Weirdly, the way this works is that monsters spring from their eggs fully-formed and ready to battle, which, okay, the alternative would be really boring gameplay-wise and they’re magical creatures, so whatever, but also, yikes. You get these eggs by performing well enough in battles that monsters drop their eggs, which, double yikes. You can then sell these eggs into conscription, which, triple yikes. Despite all this, everyone insists that humans and monsters are friends and the monster keepers care deeply about preserving the monsters’ habitats so everyone can be happy.
Which, weirdly enough… actually seems to be the case? The Sanctuary is your typical Metroidvania of patchwork biomes, but we are told this was deliberately constructed by the monster keepers to provide viable habitats for all the monsters, including the ugly, gross ones who like to live in dungeons and swamps. There is a surprising amount of lore regarding the work the keepers did to secure a safe haven for all monsters, even when other groups wanted to exterminate them. And all the monsters have to do in exchange is let them steal and conscript their eggs. Fair trade???
The monsters’ sapience is very unclear. Your starter is a character who talks regularly, but all other monsters you encounter just make animal noises at you… except goblins, exactly one of whom talks to you and in the process awkwardly lampshades that you’ve never bothered to talk to any other goblins before fighting them. Does this mean all monsters are as intelligent as our starter but just can’t communicate? But we are also told that our starter is special lore-wise; it’s apparently an immortal quasi-deity who has guided monster keepers since the founding of the Sanctuary. So are it and goblins the only intelligent ones, and the others are just animals? The Monsterdex gives very conflicting information, where some monsters are described like animals, while others say the monster keepers negotiated with them and the monsters came willingly to the Sanctuary. So… maybe the monsters are on a spectrum of sapience, like Pokemon apologists like to pretend? Except we still steal eggs from all of them just the same, which is awful even if they’re all just animals.
It’s all very strange, and leads me to think I might be putting more thought into this than the writers did. But on the whole, we do at least see some evidence the characters care about the mons for more than what mons can do for them, which is more than Pokemon has. So, improvement? I do appreciate that your starter gets to be an actual character; it makes it all a smidgen more believable that this is all fine and consensual when it’s coming from the horse’s mouth. We also get some fun scenes with your rivals talking with their starters too, which goes a way towards selling the idea that this is an equal partnership. It is still so, so messed up. Why can’t more mons games learn from Yo-Kai Watch instead of Pokemon?
In general, the writing as a whole feels a little bit off. It’s not notably terrible, but there’s a lot of weak, repetitive, and amateurish sentence construction, and a lot of scenes of characters rambling on for way longer than necessary. There are also a lot of Monsterdex entries whose final page is just a few sentences of spill-over, which drives me bananas. KILL YOUR ORPHANS.
The worldbuilding has a much milder form of HEARTBEAT syndrome, where while the basic structure of the world is pretty comprehensible, I have no idea how correct the villains’ criticisms of the status quo are. They claim the Sanctuary is a self-made prison of pushovers cowering from the hateful people of the outside world, which… is completely true, as far as I can tell? But we never actually see the outside world, so we have no objective evidence to base it against. Also, several Monsterdex entries imply some of the monsters really are evil and probably shouldn’t be preserved (including one species that apparently mind-controlled their trainers to do horrible things in the past but don’t worry it’s totally fine for you to use one), which begs the question of if maybe those monster-hating outsiders kind of had a point? There’s also a really sudden plot twist at the end of the game implying that the Sanctuary’s creators might have nefarious intentions too, but that’s immediately forgotten along with the character who brought it up.
But don’t worry, as always the bad guy just wants power for himself so we don’t have to actually engage with any of this, phew!
I did like that some of the alchemists turned out to be good guys and the message that their methods aren’t inherently evil… except it immediately went back on that by saying the bad guy is evil because he uses “the occult”, which is different from the magic everyone else uses because………
The entire story of the bad guys being an oppressed group seeking revenge on a world that wronged them made sense on a surface level but ended up feeling really bizarre with how little it engaged with the monsters in the room. We’re told at the start of the story that the Sanctuary was founded by people who wanted to protect monsters from those who saw them as irredeemably evil, and then here are some humans who were also driven to the Sanctuary because people saw them as irredeemably evil, and never those two threads shall meet. Is it too much to ask that a mons game be about mons instead of yet another conflict between humans?
So… the game is less than the sum of its parts, but I’m still putting it down as a rec. It’s a fun game overall, and it’s good to experience different takes on the mons genre. Like I said, it’s better than Pokemon in nearly every way, so I don’t object to spreading it around.