Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

While the PS2 has been overloaded with RPGs, the PSP has had a slowly growing library of RPGs to call its own.  While some of these titles are rehashes of old titles, a few original RPGs have made their way to Sony’s portable system.

Shin Megami Tensei is an RPG series that is held in high degree on the PS2.  When the maker of a highly acclaimed series is making an RPG for the PSP, the bar is raised high.  Can Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner live up to its high expectations, or does it fall with the majority of other PSP RPGs?

A large portion of the game takes place in dialogue.  During these scenes two characters appear on the screen over the current screen image.  Each of the characters is hand drawn.  While these characters don’t move, they do have a couple of expressions that change when appropriate.  They are well drawn, but most of the expression changes are too subtle and aren’t that different from each other.

When in a room, you can talk to the people in that room.  These characters are hand drawn similar to the dialogue figures.  There isn’t any movement in the background by the characters or anything else, making them look rather stale.

Your character runs across the different areas in a three-quarter perspective view.  Your character runs smoothly, but there isn’t much detail to your character.  When the other characters are on the screen you can tell who each one is, but there isn’t much detail to them either.  The backgrounds have an occasional light that shimmers with some lighting effect, but the backgrounds are boring and repeat themselves.

The graphics in combat look the best in the game.  The monsters are varied, ranging from birds, lions, penguins, and wolves.  During the combat there is a line that shifts between the enemies and your creatures.  The line shifts to the left and right, depending on where the action is.  The well-done lighting effects show off the attacks well.  The textures on the creatures are blurry though, making the monsters look less impressive than they could.

The music behind Jewel Summoner is light, with a bit of mysteriousness behind it.  Light percussion adds accents while flutes, trumpets, or a harpsichord play the main theme of the music giving it a baroque feel.  The music changes depending on what location on the map you are located at, but the theme is still similar throughout the entire game.

RPGs like this are often dependent on a lot of text.  The developers have gone ahead and found voice actors to speak a large majority of the lines in the game.  The voice actors match the look of the characters well, and you’ll probably recognize some of the voices from other games and anime as well.  However, some of the voice acting does come off as a bit dry.  While the performances aren’t necessarily phoned in, they could use a bit more emotion.

Control in an RPG isn’t that difficult since most of the game is controlled by menu selections.  Using the D-pad, you choose your option.  When on the map screen, you can use the L and R buttons to move the arrow to different locations instead of using the D-pad or analog nub, making navigation a lot faster.  All of the menus make sense and are easy to reach.

The only complaint about the controls is the fact that the three-quarters perspective can make it difficult to line yourself up to open chests.  It feels like you need to line yourself up almost exactly right to open chests.  While most of the time this isn’t difficult, it can take a bit to line yourself up exactly.

In Monster Kingdom you play as Vice, a Jewel Summoner who is able to summon monsters without training.  He ends up going to Summoning School and meets up with a cast of characters that summons monsters to fight other monsters and the abominations.  The characters include the Native American-looking Lynn who spouts off prophecies at odd times, the naïve and always cheerful Bargus, the blonde brat Elycia who likes to refer to herself in the third person, the attitude-filled smart aleck Grey, the summoning teacher Anhj, and the nerdy grade-skipping teacher’s aide Skipper.

As you get assignments you are sent to different areas across the map.  The world map has different areas you travel to.  These areas are marked and you travel to them instantly, so you don’t have to worry about random encounters while traveling.  In fact, about the only place you have to worry about random encounters is while traveling through dungeons.  You fight your way through a dungeon.  Often you’ll encounter an Abomination at the end of the area.  This often is a boss that supposedly controls all of the monsters in the local area.

You have three characters in your party.  One is Vice, and you choose the other two early in the game.  You get to choose from Lynn, Bargus, Elycia, and Grey.  The difference between the characters is who you interact with during the missions and the monsters you start out with.  You get different conversations with the characters, but there isn’t that much importance in which characters you choose.

When you enter combat, your characters don’t fight, but instead the monsters in your arsenal stored inside jewels.  Each character starts out with one monster, but each character can carry three monsters, but more jewels can be stored in the Jewel Bank.  Prisms are use to capture monsters, but you need the correct kind of prism depending on the element associated with it.  You also need to wear down at least half of the monster’s Life Points before you can capture it to loosen its bond with the Abomination.  This game has a bit of a Pokemon appeal to it because of how you capture monsters.

As the monsters fight, they gain experience points and level up.  This makes them more powerful and helps them learn new abilities.  However, you can’t constantly use a specific group of monsters the entire time.  JP stands for Jewel Power.  Using an item or trying to escape or guard doesn’t use Jewel Power.  Standard attacks and special attacks use Jewel Power.  Once a monster’s Jewel Power is exhausted, it disappears back to its jewel.  If you have another jewel with a monster, it will be summoned in the previous monster’s place.  This is why it’s good to mix up your groups of monsters you use for combat.  As you take steps Jewel Power is restored, and it’s fully restored when you hit a save point.

Amalgamy is a way to add new abilities or strengthen your monsters.  Fusion fuses quartz to jewels so that monsters can learn new abilities, even abilities of different elements.  It takes a long time to do though, so it really isn’t worth the time, especially when you don’t gain that much and you can always upgrade your monsters by capturing new ones you fight against.

Monsters have a specific element associated with it.  There are eight elements.  Light and darkness specifically oppose each other.  The six other elements are associated with light and darkness.  Fire, wind, and thunder are aligned with light.  Ice, earth, and water are aligned with darkness.  Certain elements are weaker against others.  For example, a water-type ability would deal serious damage on a fire-type monster, but the fire-type ability would be powerful against an ice-type monster.  When attacking with the correct element that the enemy is weak against, you can cause the monster to actually regress in line.  Your monster can actually intrude in line, making you consider a strategy in your attacks.

If you attack an enemy too many times, it will become enraged.  You can’t regress or intrude on it no matter what kind of attack you make.  An enraged monster’s offense increases.  This adds to your strategy during combat.

There are some great concepts in the game, but there is one big reason why this game gets a low score in the gameplay department.  While the Shim Megami Tensei series has been accused of having too high of a random encounter rate, Monster Kingdom suffers from having too much text and not enough game and battle.  Just when you think you are getting through a period where you actually are playing the game, you have even more dialogue and text coming.  Those who thought the introduction of Xenosaga had too many cut scenes and not enough gameplay would be tearing their hairs out before getting to the end of Monster Kingdom.  This isn’t to say that the story isn’t interesting, but if I wanted to have interaction while reading a book I’d grab a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

The battles are usually very easy as well.  Your regular attack is rather strong against a single enemy, so you don't really have to worry about strategy that much during the game.  Strategy can help at times, but it isn't all that necessary.  You don't even have to do much power leveling in the dungeons to have competent fighting monsters.

While you aren’t going to get a 70 hour epic with Monster Kingdom, you are going to get a game that takes you a while to finish.  Unfortunately, that’s because of how much talking the characters do in the game and not the amount of gameplay within the game.  You can always get a UMD if you want to watch a movie and get some type of story.
When I had heard that this game was created by the same person who did the Shin Megami Tensei, I had high hopes for Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner.  Unfortunately the game falls incredibly short.  While the story is engaging and is driven by the dialogue, there is just too much dialogue and not enough gameplay.  The battle mechanic is interesting but the potential is never realized.  If you want to play through the game for the story, then you are in for a treat.  If you want to actually play a game, you’ll find yourself disappointed.

Gaming Trend Score

57

1. Graphics: 64
2. Audio: 72
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 40
5. Value/Replay: 40
6. OVERALL:57