Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ June 5, 2014PlayStation Vita is a great device for a card-battling game like Monster Monpiece. The handheld's pick-up-and-play nature means that you can easily progress a fight at a time in Monster Monpiece, and its touch screen makes for intuitive and tactile interfacing when customizing your deck or facing down a digital foe. Unfortunately, Monster Monpiece falls far short of taking advantage of its own inherent potential -- and that of its native hardware -- leaving Uncharted: Fight For Fortune as the uncontested king of Vita card battlers (not that that's saying much).
I tip my hat to publisher Idea Factory for keeping the Japanese voice acting intact, but developer Compile Heart hasn't exactly been known for its great storytelling, and Monster Monpiece isn't about to break the trend. Its plot is about as nonsensical as they come, even by the distressingly low bar set by many of its niche peers. You take on the role of a young girl named May and her "Monster Girl" companion Fia, and pretty much from the beginning, its story does nothing but stand in the way of actually playing the game. Dialogue is boring and often drones on and on, characters are totally uninteresting and all-too-often indistinguishable from one another, and environments in which these interactions take place are pretty much all the same.
Time to fight.
The situation improves when you're not mired in needless conversations that expand upon a mindless story. The card-battling fundamentals at the center of Monster Monpiece are intriguing, albeit somewhat shallow. You can customize your deck with up to 40 cards that come in four different types -- melee, ranged, support, and healer -- and the objective is to mix these cards up in battle to overwhelm your opponent's base. All cards share two statistics -- attack and hit points -- and certain types of cards have their own statistical bonuses (like MP for healers and INT for support cards). The beauty of a system so simple is that it's easy to comprehend, though I certainly would have loved something a bit deeper and more nuanced.
Still, some nuance can be found on the field of (card) battle. In Monster Monpiece's litany of one-on-one duels, you can place up to nine cards at a time on a grid that never gets larger than three squares by seven squares. You can double-up like cards, whether by color or type, to buff-out your position. Placing healer and support cards behind melee and ranged cards can make them stronger and keep them from dying. And since the entire system revolves around a limited amount of mana, you have to be strategic. I definitely got sucked-in to trying to master this overarching system -- and even exploiting it -- and, judged solely on its card-battling merits, there's definitely something fun about Monster Monpiece.
Unfortunately, its aforementioned atrocious storytelling pairs with some other noticeable (and borderline flagrant) flaws to summon forth questions concerning whether it's worth getting through all of the bad to get to the good. For starters, Monster Monpiece's card upgrade system isn't only nonsensical; it's stupid. To upgrade a card, you have to turn your Vita vertically and rub the cards -- almost always adorned with a scantily clad "Monster Girl" -- in order to find all-too-predictable "pleasure points" on the body. Sometimes, she'll shed clothes and gain some statistical boosts; other times, she'll actually gain permanent statistical deficits. Not only am I unsure of who this kind of gimmick is aimed at, but it's a gimmick that makes Monster Monpiece virtually unplayable in its full form in public. That's weird, of course, since it's a Vita game, but either way, as a lifelong fan of Japanese games, I found Monster Monpiece to be supremely off-putting, tasteless, and embarrassing in this respect.
Just wake me up when this conversation is over.
Then there's the question of actually traveling around Monster Monpiece's fictional world, a world completely devoid of personality and uniqueness. There's one thing when characters are boring and dialogue is drab. It's another when the world is mind-numbingly blah. Getting from battle to battle on top-down maps is fine, I guess, but without a sense of discovery, without being invested in anything going on around Monster Monpiece's core gameplay, what's the point of playing it at all? It has absolutely no hook, especially if you aren't wholly compelled by its card-fighting mechanics.
A glimmer of light can be found online, though. Whether via PSN or ad-hoc, you can connect with other Monster Monpiece players to pit your deck of cards against theirs. You can even fully customize the rules, which is a nice touch (single-player campaign battles pretty much use the same rules over and over again). But getting a competent deck of cards requires you to spend 15 or 20 hours with the single-player game, and it's probably not worth the trouble. And then there's the question of balanced match-making, which doesn't seem to exist, either.
More...
→ June 5, 2014PlayStation Vita is a great device for a card-battling game like Monster Monpiece. The handheld's pick-up-and-play nature means that you can easily progress a fight at a time in Monster Monpiece, and its touch screen makes for intuitive and tactile interfacing when customizing your deck or facing down a digital foe. Unfortunately, Monster Monpiece falls far short of taking advantage of its own inherent potential -- and that of its native hardware -- leaving Uncharted: Fight For Fortune as the uncontested king of Vita card battlers (not that that's saying much).
I tip my hat to publisher Idea Factory for keeping the Japanese voice acting intact, but developer Compile Heart hasn't exactly been known for its great storytelling, and Monster Monpiece isn't about to break the trend. Its plot is about as nonsensical as they come, even by the distressingly low bar set by many of its niche peers. You take on the role of a young girl named May and her "Monster Girl" companion Fia, and pretty much from the beginning, its story does nothing but stand in the way of actually playing the game. Dialogue is boring and often drones on and on, characters are totally uninteresting and all-too-often indistinguishable from one another, and environments in which these interactions take place are pretty much all the same.
Time to fight.
The situation improves when you're not mired in needless conversations that expand upon a mindless story. The card-battling fundamentals at the center of Monster Monpiece are intriguing, albeit somewhat shallow. You can customize your deck with up to 40 cards that come in four different types -- melee, ranged, support, and healer -- and the objective is to mix these cards up in battle to overwhelm your opponent's base. All cards share two statistics -- attack and hit points -- and certain types of cards have their own statistical bonuses (like MP for healers and INT for support cards). The beauty of a system so simple is that it's easy to comprehend, though I certainly would have loved something a bit deeper and more nuanced.
Still, some nuance can be found on the field of (card) battle. In Monster Monpiece's litany of one-on-one duels, you can place up to nine cards at a time on a grid that never gets larger than three squares by seven squares. You can double-up like cards, whether by color or type, to buff-out your position. Placing healer and support cards behind melee and ranged cards can make them stronger and keep them from dying. And since the entire system revolves around a limited amount of mana, you have to be strategic. I definitely got sucked-in to trying to master this overarching system -- and even exploiting it -- and, judged solely on its card-battling merits, there's definitely something fun about Monster Monpiece.
Unfortunately, its aforementioned atrocious storytelling pairs with some other noticeable (and borderline flagrant) flaws to summon forth questions concerning whether it's worth getting through all of the bad to get to the good. For starters, Monster Monpiece's card upgrade system isn't only nonsensical; it's stupid. To upgrade a card, you have to turn your Vita vertically and rub the cards -- almost always adorned with a scantily clad "Monster Girl" -- in order to find all-too-predictable "pleasure points" on the body. Sometimes, she'll shed clothes and gain some statistical boosts; other times, she'll actually gain permanent statistical deficits. Not only am I unsure of who this kind of gimmick is aimed at, but it's a gimmick that makes Monster Monpiece virtually unplayable in its full form in public. That's weird, of course, since it's a Vita game, but either way, as a lifelong fan of Japanese games, I found Monster Monpiece to be supremely off-putting, tasteless, and embarrassing in this respect.
Just wake me up when this conversation is over.
Then there's the question of actually traveling around Monster Monpiece's fictional world, a world completely devoid of personality and uniqueness. There's one thing when characters are boring and dialogue is drab. It's another when the world is mind-numbingly blah. Getting from battle to battle on top-down maps is fine, I guess, but without a sense of discovery, without being invested in anything going on around Monster Monpiece's core gameplay, what's the point of playing it at all? It has absolutely no hook, especially if you aren't wholly compelled by its card-fighting mechanics.
A glimmer of light can be found online, though. Whether via PSN or ad-hoc, you can connect with other Monster Monpiece players to pit your deck of cards against theirs. You can even fully customize the rules, which is a nice touch (single-player campaign battles pretty much use the same rules over and over again). But getting a competent deck of cards requires you to spend 15 or 20 hours with the single-player game, and it's probably not worth the trouble. And then there's the question of balanced match-making, which doesn't seem to exist, either.
More...
