Dokapon - Monster Hunter (GBA)

 You look at this game's logo, and the western boxart, and it's easy enough to tell that it owes its western release to a superficial resemblence to the Pokemon games. Though there is a monster recruiting mechanic in Dokapon, it's entirely optional, and the items needed to do it are pretty rare. Personally, I didn't bother with it at all, but the game has enough of its own charm and ideas that it doesn't need to be a Pokemon mockbuster.

 

I'll address the most obvious quality first: the way the game looks. Though there's not much in the way of animation, the spritework in the game is beautiful. The overworld sprites look as if someone took the typical blobby pre-rendered sprites seen in so many GBA games and drew over them to make them look good, but the in-battle sprites are the jewel in the game's visual crown. Every enemy monster is a very charming, well drawn creature or humanoid, and your own character's sprite is not only their equal in terms of being well drawn, but there's a unique sprite for every sword and shield you can obtain in-game. That's two hundred all together!

 

The dungeons aren't particularly interesting. There's a slight bit of roguelike-ness, with procedurally generated floor layouts, but the battles are all more traditional RPG turn-based battles, and you don't recover health while you walk around, nor is there a hunger mechanic. You also get to keep your level when you die, but not your items, equipment, or money. The equipment is the biggest loss, to be honest, as it levels up as you use it, so a sword and shield that have lasted at least one dungeon are going to be significantly stronger than anything on sale in the town shop. I've played up to the third boss so far, and I do like the game enough that I'll probably play it all the way through eventually, and I do like that after the first two dungeons taking the standard settings of mine and forest, the third takes place in a circus.

 

Another misconception you might have on your first play is that the battles are simple and boring, but there are in fact quite a few interesting ideas in there! First, there are attack and defence turnsl when you attack, your enemy defends, and vice versa. The reason this is interesting is because of the second big idea: rock/paper/scissors. Whether attacking or defending, you can either choose the standard attack or block, or one of three skills, each mapped to rock, paper, or scissors. Your enemies do the same. If, while defending, you pick (for example) your "rock" defence skill, and your enemy attacks with their scissors attack skill, their attack is totally nullified, and you get the effects of your defence skill. Defence skills are usually stat buffs or status recovery, attack skills might do more damage, or inflict status ailments, and so on.

 

You might have read the previous paragraph and think that this means that the battles are a totally luck-based affair, but that's really not the case at all. You can see what attack skills your enemies have equipped to each slot, and with this knowledge, you can make an educated guess as to what they'll do. Certain enemies will prefer to try and inflict certain status ailments, for example. Or, you might see a fire-breathing enemy that has a skill named "napalm", and you just use common sense to assume that they'll try and use that when they attack. It's actually a fun and interesting system, that brings a little more strategy to random battles against non-boss enemies that, in a lot of other RPGs, would just have you mashing the confirm button to attack until the battle's over.

 

If you like RPGs, Dokapon Monster Hunter has a lot to offer in most departments except plot (which is barely present at all, and what little there is is very cliched). If you don't, it probably won't do much to convert you. On the other hand, if you like pixel art, you should at least go and look up sprite sheets for the enemies and equipment because they're really, really good. It's good enough that it's also got me curious about other entries in the series, so expect some of those to pop up on the blog at some point in the future, maybe.

Mick and Mack as the Global Gladiators (Mega Drive)

 

If you went back in time a couple of decades, the level of fame enjoyed by the two McDonalds licensed Mega Drive games was pretty much the exact opposite: Global Gladiators was pretty well-known, and has a lot of advertising in magazines around the time of its release, while McDonalds Treasureland Adventure was a much smaller release, that I didn't even know got released outside Japan until fairly recently. But with the Treasure-mania that followed in the wake of Ikaruga in the early 2000s, their game got a lot more attention, and Global Gladiators got forgotten among all the other licensed platformers from the 90s.

 

I actually had Global Gladiators as a kid, and even I had mostly forgotten it (other than the surprisingly good music, which is a far cry from the usual farty rubbish you usually see in American-developed Mega Drive games) until I recently decided to load it up on a whim. The thing is, this is a game that doesn't deserve to be forgotten! It's actually a fast-paced and exciting platform shooter, which sees you playing as one of the eponymous  Gladiators (actually just two kids with super soakers full of brown slime), and shooting monsters in various locales.

 

There's lots of cool little touches that just add to the quality of the game, like how your character's walking/running speed not only builds up as you go in one direrction, but the acceleration rate is affected by going up or down hills, too. Just like Sonic! Your weapon has infinite ammo and shoots as fast as you can hit the fire button, but you still have to pay attention to what you're doing, as the recoil knocks you back just a tiny bit per shot, and can have unattentive players falling to their doom. Another quirk is that there's no bosses: every stage just ends with Ronald McDonald waving a flag.

 

The game's got an overall theme of environmentalism, even having a bonus stage themed around picking up pieces of rubbish and putting them in the right recycling bins. This theming comes trough in some stages better than others. The first stage, for example, is a great subversion of the usual Green Hill Zone knock-off so often used to open platform games: there's lots of green all over the place, but it's actually toxic slime, rather than grass or leaves! And the monsters in that stage fit the theme too, being various kinds of gooey slime monsters. Then that's followed up with an actual forest stage, looking like the Pacific Northwest, and seeing you shooting beavers, fish, and plant monsters. It's obviously not a game-ruining problem, but it is a mildly annoying bit of ludonarrative dissonance.

 

Global Gladiators is definitely a game that deserves a bit more recognition as being a high-quality platform shooter, albeit one with a somewhat strange and ill-fitting license attached to it. If you haven't played it, or if you played it long ago, I recommend giving it a look.