January Assassination #2 (SG Win)

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Coromon is a good game at its core, but with layers of annoyance and frustration around it that drag the whole experience down. Were it streamlined and more focused it would be a strong recommendation from me, but the way it is now I can't seem to recommend it.

The good: combat is really, really solid. Not super complex or sophisticated, but it takes the basic Pokemon combat formula and modernizes many aspects of it. Like any good squad-based RPG, fights are super quick, with either you or the enemy dying in two or three hits max. With that pacing, buffs and debuffs are not super important, because by the time you finished setting yourself up, your mon is dead. It's a very different battle pacing than traditional party-based JRPGs like Final Fantasy or Battle Quest.

The enhancements to the Pokemon battle system include Traits (which add unique effects to each mon you own or is battling against), point allocation you can choose, free-form evolution and devolution, unlimited skill flashing, enabling and disabling skills at will, battles against 2 or 3 enemies at once, etc. Those are good additions and keep the combat system a bit more dynamic. Coromons are also varied, battle animations are fluid and smooth.

But, alas, the bad, starting with the combat: elemental damage is still king, meaning you can clear the whole fire-based dungeon with one mon, spamming one attack, including the boss in many cases. This makes progression a bit dull - just pick one mon from the element you need to clear that dungeon, rinse and repeat for all dungeons. The last dungeon introduces some additional complexity with a new elemental type, but there are few battles there and the last boss is just an endurance test where you can use all your items, so it's not the hardest thing.

The plot and the writing are just uninspired. It's clearly aimed at children, but it's childish to a fault. Pretty much no NPCs have remarkable personalities; the protagonist speaks and reacts enough to prevent you from feeling you're roleplaying, but not enough to have a solid personality; dialogue is shallow, as is the overall plot development, and you hardly feel invested in the world or the fate of its inhabitants. And the game is painfully linear, for no good reason that I could make sense of. Since the plot is so weak and disconnected, probably the devs could open the whole world from the beginning and let you choose your path, linking key plot development with each boss defeated. That would give the player a lot of agency on which dungeon he wants to tackle in which order based on the elemental makeup of his party, and would allow us to acquire, say, fire mon before we got to the fire dungeon (which is near the end of the game). Locking your choice of mons to the dungeons and limiting the order of those dungeons limits a lot player agency, and I cannot see how the game was made better for that. It would be justified with a strong plot, and that's not what we have here.

But for me, the biggest annoyance and the one that eventually brought this review to a Thumbs Down were all the tacked-on side puzzles that we must suffer through. Coromon sometimes forget that it's first and foremost a squad-based JRPG and thinks it's a smart puzzler, or a management simulator, forcing you to do stupid, senseless sokoban-puzzles or sliding floor shenanigans. The amount of times you're forced to stop fighting and enjoying the good parts of the game to do forced stealth on a palace, or a badly implemented obstacle course (don't touch the enemies) or a run from shelter to shelter (hot sand) - it's baffling. These segments are poorly implemented, dull, unfun, and too frequent. I'm not playing Coromon for the fruit-harvesting mini game, I'm not playing Coromon to customize my looks and outfits for 45 minutes, I'm not playing it for the cart-ride puzzles or the mushroom picking, cake baking, aroma making minigames - I'm playing for the combat and the monster capture! This lack of focus turns a short, weak, but focused squad-based JRPG into a grinding, dull, and monotonous unfocused mess that is a chore to get through.

Coromon is a classic example of less is more, but unfortunately the devs chose more, more and more