Recent reviews by Flare

If you enjoyed Pokémon, then chances are you'll probably enjoy this. I went into this game initially thinking it was just a watered down Pokémon clone. But as I played, I found myself warming up to the game very quickly. Overall, I had a good time raising my Nexomon and I had an enjoyable time with the game as well. Since this game was clearly inspired by Pokémon though, do be warned that there will be a lot of comparisons to it. Also, for the 6 people who'll maybe read this review and the 2 of you who will care, I didn't play the first Nexomon game. Frankly I wasn't aware that this was a sequel, so take that however you will.

I'll start with graphics, then go into gameplay/things I liked and hated, and end off with story, so that way people who read this in a blurb don't immediately get spoiled.

As far as graphics are concerned, they're decent. By no means are the graphics reminiscent of Picasso, but it's also not 3rd grade tier art either. The colors are very vibrant, I thought the character art in some instances was cool, not too impressive but still servicable. I did like some of the character and creature art. Deena and Amelie stood out to me as really good. The Scooptor line of Nexomon is really interesting. My favorite Nexomon were probably Rapilux, Rapnux, Voltaic, and Volta. A lot of the other creature designs were pretty "eh", but none of them were really god awful. And for every "Oh, Bulbrit is just a lightbulb" thought that popped into my head, I also thought "Well, Voltorb is literally just a Pokéball so I'll cut them some slack." Some of their names are also wierd, but again, Pokémon also probably had unusual names at the time.

So, how's the gameplay? Not to be one of those armchair game designers/developers, but it certainly has its highs and lows when it comes to design decisions.

-The Good-

One of the things I found pretty great right off the bat is that once you reach the main city and do your first mission, the game really opens up from there. You can go just about anywhere on the world map and run into minimal progress walls. I caught over 100 different Nexomon (there are 381 in total) before I even started the second mission, if that gives you an idea of how open the world is. I definitely liked that aspect about the game!

I like the fact that wild Nexomon and trainers scale with you. When I first saw this advertised on the store page, I was concerned that they would scale all the time, meaning levels were essentially not that useful in the grand scheme of things. But, fortunately, they do scale to a point and eventually you can overtake trainers and wild encounters in level. As someone who actually doesn't mind grinding and investing time into a game, that was reassuring to see. I like the fact that trainers want to rematch you as well.

I also like the stamina mechanic. Unlike in Pokémon where you can only use a move a certain amount of times, in Nexomon, you can use a move as many times as you like, but this is limited by the mon's stamina and certain moves have different stamina costs. Different moves also have different speeds and crit rates. So there's a strategic element to where you can purposefully use a slow but powerful move to deal massive damage, then use a weak but faster move to try and hurry and finish off your opponnet.

-The Bad, or How I Learned to Huff Sulfur-

Unfortunately, there were a lot of things about this game that drove me up a wall as well, or things that I thought they could do better. I'll try to list my groans about the game in order of annoyance. Despite there being more cons than pros, keep in mind I actually really did like this game and enjoyed it, there are just quirks about it that annoy me.

The biggest gripe for me was that the Nexodex or the Database or whatever doesn't show where a Nexomon can be found in the world. In the Pokémon games, when you checked the Pokédex, you had an "area" section that lets you get a general idea of where you could find said Pokémon on the world map. Nexomon doesn't have that. You shouldn't have to go to the Steam Guides or Google to look up where you can find certain mons. Speaking of Steam Guides and Google, I had to look up not only the type advantage chart, but also what the status ailments did.

Now, maybe I missed a tutorial or something, but I don't remember any of that stuff being explained. A really underrated thing about the Pokémon games is that they had a Trainer School or something to that effect. This is so dumb 7 year olds (basically me, mentally) could see what status ailments did. Yes, things like Poison were obvious. But you had to be paying a bit more attention to know stuff like Burn reduces your attack by half in Pokémon. In this game I would've never figured out what status ailments like Frail does without looking it up.

A lot of the trainers have "Lance Syndrome" and have fully evolved mons. I remember being around the early-ish middle of the game when this was happening. I'm not sure if that's the result of scaling or if that's just what they naturally have, because admittedly I was pretty over-leveled, I was in my early to mid-30s and people were still in their mid 20s in terms of level. Either way, I think trainers having mons in their final evolution before you've even seen the final evolution ruins a bit of the mystery and charm of trying to raise a mon and find out what it looks like. Not that big of a deal though.

The lack of encounter variety was also a bit disappointing. For example, and hopefully this will clarify what I mean, in Pokémon you also found mons in tall grass and caves. But, you could also do stuff like headbutt trees and smash rocks. You could also find mons in the sand, in the water, and in even taller grass. In 4th gen you could slather honey on a tree and attract them. If you were really zany, you could use Sweet Scent to attract wild mons...there were a ton of ways to encounter mons! And while these were small bits, they helped flesh out the world and immerse you. In this game it's kind of disappointingly shallow. You only ever find mons in grass or in caves.

Another thing that dreadfully needs variety is the evolution method. All of them are level-based in this game. And look, I get it. At this point you're probably just like "damn dude, just play Pokémon", but in my defense, I don't want this game to be just like Pokémon. I do want it to take what Pokémon did well and expand on it further, and this is one of the things that it did well. Different methods of evolution adds an extra layer of character and uniqueness to each mon. Nexomon doesn't have to have Water, Fire, and Thunder stones. Maybe it could have Nexomon evolve in certain locations, maybe the mons could evolve at a certain happiness threshold (which this game doesn't have either. Your Nexomon don't grow more or less friendly with you, there's no friendship) but either way, there needs to be something other than levels.

Finally, I didn't like the fact that animations can't be turned off, at least that I know of. I looked at the options and didn't see a setting. Turning the animations off, would've made level grinding a lot more convenient and expedient. Thankfully, most of the animations are very brief.

So let's talk story. It's pretty decent. It's at least on par with the plots of most Pokémon games, though probably a bit better. If anything, it's actually closer to Mystery Dungeon in terms of story structure. Especially in the fact that the guild you're working for turns out to be a bit evil. Well, they're not evil, they just hate renegades who aren't in the guild. And considering you eventually become a renegade...yeah. There's a bit of a twist to where it's revealed you're actually a tyrant yourself and not a human, which I thought was pretty neat. Then you fight the final boss as yourself and the tyrants you revived, which was pretty awesome. The parts leading up to the end does have a "muh friendship" aspect to

(Spoiler Warning)

If you played and liked Enter the Gungeon, you'll most likely like this game. The core mechanics and aesthethic is mostly the same, the playable characters are the same as well, for the most part. However, there are also a few new NPCs and enemies. The main gimmick of this game, and what sets it apart from its predecessor, is the randomized gun and the now elevator-like levels.

The levels consist mostly of arenas in the guise of elevators, with enemies spawning in and thrown at you gauntlet style. In order to progress, you have to kill them as quickly and effectively as possible. I think the elevator gimmick itself is pretty fresh. Each level has you riding the elevator and killing enemies, then after a bit of that, you'll find yourself in a room where you can collect a power-up or free an NPC a la the jail rooms in Enter the Gungeon. Depending on what character you choose (each character having their own path), you can find yourself riding different kinds of elevators, some of which have sections that fall out from under you, dropping you into the bottomless pit below, and some of which have buttons you have to stand on in order to move the elevator from right to left to avoid obstacles.

One of the new game mechanics is the randomized gun and the combo meter. Before each stage starts, some mystical priest girl will "bless" your gun in the name of "Kalibur", making it randomly change into a different gun every few seconds. Killing enemies increases the combo meter, and the higher your combo meter, the better guns you get...in theory. In order to maintain your combo meter, all you have to do is avoid getting hit.

I...don't really like this. I much prefer picking up guns as a permanent part of my inventory and switching guns on the fly. In other words, I prefer Enter the Gungeon's gameplay in this aspect. The gun changes every few seconds, but it also seems to change after you've fired it a certain number of times. Sometimes I get a crappy gun even when my combo is still high, like I'll go from a really good gun like the RPG to the Bubbler, which is very much not good. Since the gun also seems to change based on the amount of times you fired it, this can lead to you getting a really good machine gun for like 2 frames and then getting stuck with really crappy gun like the RC Rocket for 13 years since it has an abysmal rate of fire. This doesn't help in the later levels, where when you inevitably get hit, the game punishes you by giving you a crappy weapon while it's still spamming hordes of enemies at you, leading to situations where enemies fill the screen but you have a gun that deals no damage and fires slower than molasses. But that's only occasionally, and I find that recovering is fairly quick, and the game eventually gives you a decent gun afterward, but even that still relies on your luck rather than skill.

I'd rather have like a tree of guns where I can pick and choose which guns I get based on the combo, and getting those guns the higher I get in my selected tree instead of it being entirely random. And when I get hit, I can still keep the guns I've gotten in my tree, but in order to get higher up the tree I have to get my combo meter back to that point. I feel like this still accomplishes the incentive to play well while keeping the shifting gun thing intact.

People who come from Enter the Gungeon will be disappointed that there's no "pasts" anymore. Once you get through the floors that's really it. I have yet to find any secrets in terms of extra bosses or floors if there are any. Once you beat a character's path, you can choose that path for a different character. For example, once you beat Pilot's path, you can play as the Hunter and pick Pilot's path instead of playing on the Hunter's path, but this doesn't really seem to do anything in terms of discovery. There are sidequests but I have yet to figure out how they exactly work. Barto the shopkeep talked about finding unstealable stools but I've tried going through different paths as other characters to no avail, so I won't say these are good or bad, maybe they're a bit obtuse, but I'll chalk this up to my mistake rather than the game's.

The enemies are pretty good, there are a few new ones and returning old ones. All of them I think are good and fair. It's when the game fills the screen with them that things can get a bit hectic and unfair, but this game is a bullet hell game, so that's par for the course.

The bosses are also pretty good. Like the enemies, there are a few returning ones with new gimmicks (most of them being two Enter bosses fused together) and some new ones. The only ones I really don't like are the Fallmonger (The wall boss from Enter recontextualized as the elevator itself) and the Killinder (The flaming six cylinder boss). They have what I like to call "hope you have a blank!" attacks where they shoot screen-filling rounds too frequently for you to jump or dodge-roll through and it's kind of annoying. Maybe slow these attacks down or redesign them so they're a bit easier to avoid.

The game doesn't really seem to have a story aside from "Let's get outta here!" It's mostly simple gameplay where you shoot enemies, fight a boss, progress, fight the final boss, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not as deep as Enter the Gungeon, and that's really the only big fault I find with the game. I do recommend this game, but I also recommend Enter the Gungeon as well. It's a lot deeper in terms of gameplay and story!