What follows are my notes about Monster Sanctuary, a monster-collecting RPG from publisher Team 17 and developer Moi Rai Games.
2/26
The radiator in the room next to me is hissing out of control. Like a geyser or a sheer noise act I heard in a hipster Hong Kong factory building years ago. It whistles a glissando from high to low as it finally stops heating my apartment. I’m drunk and it’s dark in my room and I’m playing this game with basic but stylish pixel art called Monster Sanctuary.
It’s quiet now. The past few days I’ve arrived home exhausted from work and mainlined Monster Sanctuary. It’s Pokemon, but it’s also Metroid, but the Pokemon part is more important and the mechanics are less like Pokemon than they are like Dragon Quest or some other old school JRPG with parties and menus. You have a party of three monsters in battle and every monster is equipped with a weapon and three accessories. You min/max. Me? I like to poison everything and lay down critical hits. There’s a combo meter too.
2/27
I got off work and it’s my first time home alone the night before a day off in a long time and I’m lounging on the futon in my claustrophobic bedroom and I’m playing Monster Sanctuary. My room is so small that it makes me feel as though I never left Hong Kong. The pixels on the screen combine to create a beach with a rocky hillside. The sparsity of colour and the picket fence blocking off the ocean remind me of Earthbound.
There are two games in this game, and they complement each other very well. There’s a Pokemon-aping menu-combat-tastic JRPG and a Faxanadirby* with a brilliant mechanic that requires you to actually utilise your pocket-sized monsters in the overworld. Aside from this mechanic that makes you switch between a cat paladin and a toad to surmount certain obstacles, the Faxanadirby game is basically what you expect from a Faxanadirby game minus the difficult combat. You jump, and then [SPOILER ALERT] a little bit later you double jump.
But there’s a lot going on in the RPG. There are the monsters themselves (a hundred or something of them, I have sixteen so far, six gaining EXP, and three in the squad I lead into battle), there are weapons, there are accessories, and there’s a levelling system that asks you to make choices every time you level up if you want to enjoy the fruits of your grind. I have probably spent as much time tweaking the builds of my monsters to squeeze out the juiciest stats as I have actually fighting things.
Contrast all of that with Pokemon, a game in which you battle 1 on 1 and in which you win with little thought.
The story thus far is kind of bare bones; you’re some rich noble kid who has a cool monster. The other rich noble kids who have cool monsters are your rivals. You go exploring through blue caves and green forests and a single, centralised magenta pocket monster gym.
2/28
It’s a gloomy Saturday and I’ve been shitting water from the Dominoes I ate yesterday so I’m playing Monster Sanctuary again on the toilet. According to my Nintendo Switch I have already played more Monster Sanctuary than I have Super Mario 3D World and I am beginning to verge on the playtime of Into the Breach. I don’t know what I expected of this game, maybe a good JRPG to break up the time spent playing other stuff, but it has certainly exceeded my expectations.
Reading over an earlier entry, it occurs to me that I wrote of enjoying the “fruits of your grind,” but this game isn’t particularly grindy. The enemies are always visible, and you can jump over them as though they are spike pits. When you run into new enemies they scale levels alongside you. You will find yourself getting brutalised in certain battles if you forget to spend your skill points or you’re lacking fancy armour and accessories, but you won’t really find yourself needing to level up very often.
2/28
It’s night now and I’m still playing Monster Sanctuary. Maybe I’m playing too much Monster Sanctuary. My eyes glaze over.
2/?
My name is Qwerty McGuster and I am on a golden pathway through an ancient palace, surrounded by enormous preying mantises. I hunt them down like vermin and steal their eggs. I can hatch them at my own convenience. I jump twice with the ancient powers bestowed upon me to arrive at a platform that would be beyond reach to a mere mortal. My pet monsters jump with me as though dogs I domesticated with my own hands. The wind whips behind me and I can see the monster sanctuary off in the distance, past the vast forest. The world around me is flat and made of pixels. I am a 23 x 42 pixel sprite, give or take a few.
3/?
There is no more work
No showers
No more “On Shovelware”
Only Monster Sanctuary
Mountain Dew
And optional meals
*There are people who call these games “Metroidvanias” but I find that kind of arbitrary