I mean, I could understand how a touched individual could compare the two. Both Monster Tale and the newer Castlevanias take place in a non-linear, 2-D area comprised of several interconnected areas usually requiring you to find new abilities to enter them. I mean, that has never happened in any game series other than these two oh wait yes it has. There's also the fact that
wait
uh
surprise there is LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE connecting the titles.
I'm not really sure there's such a unanimous consensus that Monster Tale is like a "Castlevania with bright colors!" Okay, actually I do, in that game reviewers are like everyone in The Stand and the first shitheel that got this game was Captain Campion. The only other possibility was that everyone was just to embarrassed to stand up and say "hey this is basically Henry Hatsworth with a terrible monster raising gimmick instead of a sort of fun puzzle gimmick." This is kind of weird, as the game doesn't even try to hide the fact that pretty much everything that isn't a floating moody monster was basically ripped from the developer's previous game. I think the point that I knew that this probably wasn't the game for me was when I ran into the weird turret camera gun things from Henry Hatsworth, except they suddenly had an identity and gotten weird lizard costumes. I feel bad for getting hung up on this, since I just blogged about my love for a game that takes enemy cloning to the highest realms. But then again, there's nothing about Monster Tale that implies that we're getting the exact same engine from Henry Hatsworth.
Not that its a bad engine, mind you. Combat in Monster Tale is probably what kept me going. Like Henry, your character (a young girl thrust into a fantasy world and that's all I'm going to say about the plot because holy shit is it embarrassing) is capable of doing real damage to the bads. Unfortunately, "doing real damage" usually always translates into "start your five-combo hit, launch into air, juggle into oblivion." Granted, this is still deeper and more fulfilling than anything in the Metroidvanias. OMG IS MONSTER TALE RIPPING OFF DEVIL MAY CRY????? It's just pretty fun to kick around bads, just as it was in Henry Hatsworth. Also like that game, difficulty suddenly spikes from wacky kid's game simple to a pretty obnoxious trek between save points near the end, especially with my favorite holdover: random monster ambush rooms!
So, combat is good. Thus, it's kind of a pity that Monster Tale does its god-damnedest to kill the vibe with its bottom screen gimmick. See, in addition to you being able to kill bads, you also get a computer controlled monster that help spread the pain. The gimmick of the game is that while the monster cannot per se "die," as long as it is in the top screen fighting with you, it will steadily lose energy, forcing you to send it back into the bottom screen MONSTARR DIMENSION where it will quickly refill energy. The monster also can learn various abilities, which cost a certain percentage of life but are infinitely better than just letting it float around being just as retarded as the Sword Familiar from Symphony of the Night. The monster gains experience different ways: if it hits an enemy, it gains experience when it dies. However, killing certain enemies will lead to dropping various items that fall into the bottom screen. When you send the monster to the bottom screen, it will play with the items, gaining a sizeable EXP bonus and minute stat points. Levelling the monster will allow it to unlock certain skills and stat boosts. This sounds fairly decent, right?
Well, here's the thing. There's a literal shitload of different monster evolutions. How do you gain these evolutions? No, not just by levelling up your monster, that would be simple and not utterly ruin the flow of the game. Instead, you also need to give the monster items that the next form would "like." Do this enough, eventually it will evolve into a whole new form! And if you want the skills and stat boosts to carry over from one monster to another, you will have to level that little shit up all over again.
This isn't really a problem when you only have a few monster forms available to work on. But as you progress, unless you really want to stagnate in the world of monsters, you're going to have to carefully make sure that you maximize those items drops for each monster form it would most boost the evolution towards. This means constantly stopping the game so you can fumble through the evolution tree and changing the monster so it can play with a soccer ball than changing it to another so it can eat a cookie. Henry Hatsworth had the same game-stopping issue, but at least I felt like I was just switching to another game rather than suddenly remembering why I stopped playing Pokemon every 15 seconds, like some awful gamer's version of Jacob's Ladder. I wouldn't even mind this much, but (GET READY FOR HUGE SALTY TEARS) apparently in copying Castlevania, there was some Brazil-esque error in mapping the buttons for options and maps, because Monster Tale suddenly turned convention on its head and put map access on "start," and options on "select." This meant that literally every time I wanted to switch my monster so the pizza-loving monster would finally appear so I could learn another useless skill, my Castlevania trained fingers would punch the start button, only to get a map screen, and then I would just fumble on buttons until I got sent back. Sometimes, I would hit the start button again, which was probably the most depressing thing in my life.
It doesn't really help that monsters are amazingly unbalanced. PROTIP for anyone reading this after buying the game: go to the teen monster evolution tree, and go leftward until you unlock the Petdozer, and never look back. This form has the skill that is a hyper-powerful, multi-hitting drill attack. The power is nice, but the truly game breaking aspect is that enemies drop more money and items as you execute higher combos on them. The drill essentially allows you to infinitely chain bads until the game gets pissed at you and just removes them from play. As a result, I was literally awash in cash by the end of the game, which allowed me to roll the final boss more convincingly than Simon did at the end of Castlevania II.
I feel pretty shitty about knocking this game. After all, it's probably the last decent side-scroller to ever be released on the DS (and judging by the 3DS's lineup, possibly all Gameboys forever), and done by an indie game development group which probably still deserves more support than all of EA's horrible nightmare shit combined. On the other hand, when your game can barely manage eight hours of play despite a literal third of that playtime being backtracking, and IGN is saying "This is a game that has clearly been crafted with love and respect for what video gaming is," maybe I'm the only one left to make other people feel shitty.
Not that its a bad engine, mind you. Combat in Monster Tale is probably what kept me going. Like Henry, your character (a young girl thrust into a fantasy world and that's all I'm going to say about the plot because holy shit is it embarrassing) is capable of doing real damage to the bads. Unfortunately, "doing real damage" usually always translates into "start your five-combo hit, launch into air, juggle into oblivion." Granted, this is still deeper and more fulfilling than anything in the Metroidvanias. OMG IS MONSTER TALE RIPPING OFF DEVIL MAY CRY????? It's just pretty fun to kick around bads, just as it was in Henry Hatsworth. Also like that game, difficulty suddenly spikes from wacky kid's game simple to a pretty obnoxious trek between save points near the end, especially with my favorite holdover: random monster ambush rooms!
So, combat is good. Thus, it's kind of a pity that Monster Tale does its god-damnedest to kill the vibe with its bottom screen gimmick. See, in addition to you being able to kill bads, you also get a computer controlled monster that help spread the pain. The gimmick of the game is that while the monster cannot per se "die," as long as it is in the top screen fighting with you, it will steadily lose energy, forcing you to send it back into the bottom screen MONSTARR DIMENSION where it will quickly refill energy. The monster also can learn various abilities, which cost a certain percentage of life but are infinitely better than just letting it float around being just as retarded as the Sword Familiar from Symphony of the Night. The monster gains experience different ways: if it hits an enemy, it gains experience when it dies. However, killing certain enemies will lead to dropping various items that fall into the bottom screen. When you send the monster to the bottom screen, it will play with the items, gaining a sizeable EXP bonus and minute stat points. Levelling the monster will allow it to unlock certain skills and stat boosts. This sounds fairly decent, right?
Well, here's the thing. There's a literal shitload of different monster evolutions. How do you gain these evolutions? No, not just by levelling up your monster, that would be simple and not utterly ruin the flow of the game. Instead, you also need to give the monster items that the next form would "like." Do this enough, eventually it will evolve into a whole new form! And if you want the skills and stat boosts to carry over from one monster to another, you will have to level that little shit up all over again.
This isn't really a problem when you only have a few monster forms available to work on. But as you progress, unless you really want to stagnate in the world of monsters, you're going to have to carefully make sure that you maximize those items drops for each monster form it would most boost the evolution towards. This means constantly stopping the game so you can fumble through the evolution tree and changing the monster so it can play with a soccer ball than changing it to another so it can eat a cookie. Henry Hatsworth had the same game-stopping issue, but at least I felt like I was just switching to another game rather than suddenly remembering why I stopped playing Pokemon every 15 seconds, like some awful gamer's version of Jacob's Ladder. I wouldn't even mind this much, but (GET READY FOR HUGE SALTY TEARS) apparently in copying Castlevania, there was some Brazil-esque error in mapping the buttons for options and maps, because Monster Tale suddenly turned convention on its head and put map access on "start," and options on "select." This meant that literally every time I wanted to switch my monster so the pizza-loving monster would finally appear so I could learn another useless skill, my Castlevania trained fingers would punch the start button, only to get a map screen, and then I would just fumble on buttons until I got sent back. Sometimes, I would hit the start button again, which was probably the most depressing thing in my life.
It doesn't really help that monsters are amazingly unbalanced. PROTIP for anyone reading this after buying the game: go to the teen monster evolution tree, and go leftward until you unlock the Petdozer, and never look back. This form has the skill that is a hyper-powerful, multi-hitting drill attack. The power is nice, but the truly game breaking aspect is that enemies drop more money and items as you execute higher combos on them. The drill essentially allows you to infinitely chain bads until the game gets pissed at you and just removes them from play. As a result, I was literally awash in cash by the end of the game, which allowed me to roll the final boss more convincingly than Simon did at the end of Castlevania II.
I feel pretty shitty about knocking this game. After all, it's probably the last decent side-scroller to ever be released on the DS (and judging by the 3DS's lineup, possibly all Gameboys forever), and done by an indie game development group which probably still deserves more support than all of EA's horrible nightmare shit combined. On the other hand, when your game can barely manage eight hours of play despite a literal third of that playtime being backtracking, and IGN is saying "This is a game that has clearly been crafted with love and respect for what video gaming is," maybe I'm the only one left to make other people feel shitty.
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