NEXOMON REVIEWS PATCH

This is a colourful, vibrant and bright world to discover and collect-em-all within. And where Game Freak found itself in some trouble with Pokémon Sword and Shield for using 3D graphics and worlds but at a standard many were unhappy with, Nexomon is blissfully 2D and HD with the sprites. There’s a wry sense of humour with a fair few of them too – I had a good long chuckle the first time I came across Porklet, for example, as a pig that uses fire abilities (fire + pig = pork + cutlet… gettit?). With 380 or so monsters to collect, you’ve got plenty of room to play around with your party, and while I thought that the monster designs looked a little too “cutting room floor” in those screenshots, once I found myself making decisions about which critters to form my battle party of six out of I realised that there were a lot of designs that I really, really liked, too.

NEXOMON REVIEWS PATCH

It is a little grindy at first (though I’m told there will be a patch that solves that), but once you get into the game proper, it flows nicely, too. These are all subtle little things, but help to give Nexomon that much-needed personality of its own, and that helps it sidestep the trap of being just a “low-budget clone.”

Where Pokémon is a generally linear journey from town to town, Nexomon likes to have you returning to previous locations and zipping around a hub world. It is also filled will little in-jokes, such as a little QTE that you play when trying to catch a Nexomon which may or may not do anything to actually help improve the chances of catching the monster, but hearkens back to the early days of Pokémon where people would share “rumours” of button combinations that would boost your chances of catching a ‘Mon. It’s silly and self-aware, but not in a way that comes across as contrived. It’s what Nexomon does to gently parody The Pokémon Experience that really gets me. And yet, once I started playing those expectations washed away, and quickly. The screenshots and short clips of the game in play were anything but exciting. I went into Nexomon: Extinction expecting an indie clone of Pokémon. Pokémon is great when it’s done well, but even in comparison to other JRPG sub-genres, it’s a difficult development challenge, both creatively and logistically. Then you’ve also got to make sure they’re all aesthetically pleasing, and on top of all that, give players enough of an incentive to push on further through the game. Pokémon is a hard thing to “clone.” Think about it – you’ve got to balance out hundreds (and hundreds) of collectible critters, and make sure there’s a steady flow of them to collect throughout a full-length JRPG.

Nexomon reviews