The mobile arena has a lot of Pokemon rip off games. Like a lot of Pokemon rip off games. Serious, stop reading this and type in Pokemon into your app store and start scrolling. I’ll wait. Are you back? Great! The main problem with the market over saturation is that a lot of them aren’t actually any good. The stories are either generic or nonexistent, the characters are carbon copies of existing characters, and the monsters are kinda boring. Things is the biggest reason for why I wanted to tell you about Nexomon, a Monster RPG that I have found to be actually quite good. So good I bought it, with my own money.
Nexomon starts off like almost every other Pokemon game. After a brief encounter with the bad guys who have stolen creatures called Nexomon from the population you embark on an adventure to stop their evil plan once and for all. I was prepared for the standard affair. Enter an area, capture a few creatures, beat some baddies, and then fight a boss all before moving on to another area to do the same thing. I wasn’t however prepared for the amazing story that was going to follow. Nexomon does a great job of not only making fun of itself but the genre of monsters catching as a whole. It has no problem calling out the stupidity of the main character as well as the characters around them. (One of my favorite parts talks about how a fishing pole is still called a fishing pole when “fish” don’t actually exist, the world only has Nexomon.)
The plot is so good that I’m not going to spoil it in this review. All I can say is that it is something that I have wanted a Pokemon game to do for a long time. Nexomon has shown that is isn’t afraid to take a slightly gritty and realistic view to a world that is populated with literal monsters. Its this feel that separates this game from the other piles of games like it.
Battles are fought one on one with you being able to switch out if your Nexomon takes to much of a beating. The creature designs are actually really cool, with the art work taking a slightly more realistic tone to that of Pokemon. Each Nexomon can only use four moves, but here is the kicker, every move your Nexomon learns it knows forever. So, if you switch to a move you end up not liking you can can the moves back to something you are more familiar with. This allows you to take more risk in your team compositions. There are seven types of Nexomon for you to find and when you start your adventure you can pick from one of the seven types. You also have a bag for storing items and a Nexopad with an way more useful database than Pokemon has ever had. The database in the game not only tells you all the creatures stat values but also when it evolves. This makes is super easy to build my team to my liking and know exactly what goal I am working towards.
Creatures are captured using Nexotraps, which can be found in the game, bought with in game currency, or bought with real money. At first, I was skeptical about this. If you can buy the capture device with real money than it must be hard to get in the game, right? This could not be further from the truth. The in game currency is made increasingly easy to farm considering that every battle nets you money, even the random encounters. Once I got to the point where my main could one hit most creatures I encountered I started farming for in game loot in order to stock up on traps for future fights.
Now lets talk about something we all love, micro-transactions. Yes, even though the game is $2.99 it does contain micro-transactions in order to obtain an in-game loot called Diamonds. Diamonds can be used to buy different avatar skins for your character, pets to follow them, and Golden Nexotraps which function as the Master Ball of the game. You can also buy game modifiers that help with the overall experience like Skates to move faster and an Exp. Share to level up your party faster. These things are nice but don’t effect the game. What is a little pay to win is the Nexomon Boxes that give you rare Nexomon in exchange for diamonds. This coupled with the PVP that is in beta seems like a recipe for disaster but I haven’t seen it abused yet. Honestly, it is really easy to ignore the store stuff and go about your adventure so it doesn’t bother me too much.
The most impressive thing about the whole game in my book is the size of the map. After spending about seven hours playing the game I finally got access to the fast travel aspect of the game, and looking at the map shocked me. I figured that I was at least half way done with the game, I was mistaken. The world of Nexomon still has many other regions to explore and sights to see. And with constant updates to the game, the $2.99 admission fee is well worth the ride.
Pause For Snacks 