Monster Crown is a mons game by people who either don’t know or can’t be bothered to construct a functional video game.

The game is incredibly janky, with obvious screen tearing, monsters appearing out of bounds, and confusing menus full of freefloating text. This frankly feels like an early beta or even alpha, not something remotely ready for commercial release. I’m genuinely surprised anyone on the team was willing to put their name to this.

And this is just personally offensive to me. Yeah, slightly misaligned images in text boxes are pretty minor compared to everything else I just showed, but just. When I was making Flawed Crystals, a free game completely detached from my professional name, this kind of graphical error would keep me up at night. I would grind development to a halt to fix it, even though I hate fiddling with graphics. I would be mortified if anyone saw such lazy, slapdash work and thought I considered that acceptable presentation. And these jokers are not only demanding but getting money when their game looks like this.

It is genuinely shocking and appalling to me that any of this stuff passed QA, let alone that the developers had the gall to demand money for this. No one in this studio should make any more games until they’ve taken a course on UI design.

But hey, let’s not judge a book by its cover. There could be a perfectly serviceable game underneath here if we can navigate all the graphical errors.

I mean, there isn’t, but there could be.

Gameplay is somehow even simpler than Pokemon’s: Mons have only one type (Coromon did this too, what is with Pokemon fangames taking out Pokemon’s few good mechanics) and PP doesn’t exist, so there is no reason to do anything other than spam your strongest attack all the time. You’re also shown your enemies’ types automatically and the game even does the modern Pokemon thing of highlighting your supereffective moves, so there’s not even any guesswork involved. I guess the fact types are now abstract concepts rather than physical properties thus making matchups completely arbitrary was meant to make up for this? It’s also even grindier than Pokemon, demanding you gain enough levels to take down a level 9 boss monster before you can even enter the first town.

They did add one new mechanic, which is that swapping out monsters makes your next attack stronger, which… eh. I’d much rather just have battles with multiple monsters out at once so they could have actual synergy, you know, another thing Pokemon has that this game doesn’t. This does at least mean enemy trainers will swap out their mons to use the mechanic, which is at least something to make trainer battles more interesting, but it’s still slim offerings.

The game’s main draw is supposedly a sophisticated breeding mechanic where you can make totally unique monster crossbreeds, but I dropped the game long before I got to see it due to the aforementioned issues. If they ever release a version of the game that isn’t held together with spit and packing tape I might be able to form an opinion on it.

Storywise, the game is exactly as unethical as Pokemon but find-replaces some terms to make it seem more palatable.

The intro continues Pokemon’s fine tradition of telling us the relationship between humans and mons is mutually beneficial then floundering when trying to come up with examples of how it benefits the mons. Humans get power, mons get… the ability to be more useful to humans. Very equitable, that. The one thing humans could actually bring to the table here is the ability to travel, but that just makes me ask why monsters can’t travel themselves, if they want it so much.

As explained here, you catch monsters with magically binding contracts instead of capture balls, and the flavor text explicitly says that success/failure is determined by whether they accept or refuse the contract… but mechanically the contracts work exactly like pokeballs, and we never see what the contracts contain or if they’re actually a good deal for the monster. This is some pretty extreme whiplash coming straight from Shin Megami Tensei, where you do actually negotiate contracts as a core mechanic.

And we get this gem in the tutorial area, confirming that no, the contracts are not actually made in good faith. Humans are effectively fey who trick monsters into incredibly slanted contracts of servitude. I guess the fact they are getting some form of compensation for this means it’s technically no longer slavery? Sure would be cool if we actually got to provide that compensation.

Additionally, the bit about monsters’ compensation being the ability to become strong is also immediately contradicted by another mechanic: They’ve made the “you need badges to make mons obey you” mechanic even more punishing, by preventing you from leveling up at all beyond a certain point until you’ve increased your “tamer level”. The in-universe explanation? “You need to level up as a tamer to have your monsters respect you enough to grow as powerful as they can be.” WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. Monsters supposedly pact with tamers to become powerful, but also they deliberately hold back if the tamer isn’t good enough for them? Why do they bother traveling with tamers at all, then???

Plotwise, the story is tonally really weird. Despite having the same pastel, upbeat aesthetic as Pokemon, it’s also really dark and edgy, with the first gym leader analogue being a cackling evil robber baron who gets bloodily murdered by a monster when he tries to run from you. As I’ve said in my Pokemon fanfic reviews, if you want an edgy story where monsters are actually deadly, I genuinely don’t understand what you like about Pokemon. There is an entire genre of grimdark fantasy stories like that already; Pokemon’s softness and optimism is what makes it unique. “Pokemon, but like every grimdark jRPG ever” is not actually a great pitch.

And the most important thing, the monster designs, are… nothing to write home about. They’re decent, but they made the baffling decision to restrict themselves to GameBoy color limitations, so all monsters necessarily have to have extremely simple designs that can be parsed with only one or two hues. Most of the time, the color limitations just make the monsters look very flat, even the ones with potentially interesting designs. Sometimes things that are retro are worse, guys.

They do get one thing right, though: Your appearance options aren’t limited by gender, and “they” is included as a pronoun option. This is a nice feature that shows just how easy inclusivity is, and frankly Pokemon ought to get with the times.