Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner is a passable game. I would even have deemed it “pretty good” if the endgame hadn’t dragged on interminably. It’s one of those games where you approach the final dungeon thinking “I’ll be done in about 5 hours” and then that 5 turns into 50 before you know it. As happened with Persona, the playing time is all screwy because the clock keeps going even when the game is asleep. Except  this time those 311 hours actually feel like 311 hours. I am slightly burned out right now.

Story

Monsters and humans lived in harmony, then the monsters inexplicably turned into jewels after some Great Disaster. Humans known as “jewel summoners” can summon monsters from their jewels and use them to fight. Our main character, Vice, is looking for a winged monster who killed his mother… and that’s about it for the preliminaries. In the process he ends up losing the monster his mother left him, and then joining the Order of jewel summoners to get it back (he never did on my playthrough) while finding out that there’s more to the Order and jewel power than he’d originally thought.

The story isn’t great to begin with, but it’s made a thousand times worse by some of the most stilted, disjointed English dialogue I have ever had the displeasure to read. It’s seriously bizarre, because most sentences usually make sense on their own, but it’s like someone tossed them all into a bag and shuffled them together, so once you string them together it’s like, WTF? It looks like the writers (or translators?) didn’t have the first clue about cohesive devices and coherence and, you know, plain old Making Fricking Sense.

And there’s a bigger problem: once you slog through all the nonsense and make it to the end, you’re still left with a ton of unanswered questions. E.g. What was Grey doing at the lighthouse at the beginning (I get the feeling they accidentally used Grey’s portrait instead of Bargus’s), why hasn’t Zygard aged all this time, what exactly is that evil thing we fought in ending 1 and what does it want, why did the Abomination go after Maera, where does Zygard and Vice’s special power come from, what exactly (if anything) is so special about Vice’s jewel, etc etc. …Come to think of it, I don’t care to know all that badly. It’s that kind of game.

Characters

Vice starts out as your typical cocky main guy with a bad attitude, and quickly devolves in your typical shocked-at-everything-cares-about-everyone kind of hero. I didn’t hate him as much as I thought I would, mainly because he was so obviously playing it by the book.

A few hours in you’re made to choose two other party members who you are then stuck with for the rest of the game. There’s Elly the Dumb, and Grey the Stupid, then you’ve got Lynn who is nice but nuts, and Bargus who is nice but suspicious. AFAIK there’s no real advantage to picking any particular person, so I went with those I could stand, i.e. Bargus and Lynn.

The supporting cast isn’t much to write home about. No particularly memorable villains or NPCs, though the reveal about Professor Anhj certainly blindsided me. Always be suspicious of unnaturally large boobs!

Gameplay

Third-person dungeon-crawling: Speaks for itself. You also have field abilities like Hover, Decode, Trap, Reveal, etc. that help you make your way through and solve the switch and platform puzzles you come across. While the dungeon layouts were occasionally confusing, I did manage to figure everything out by myself – apart from the bloody awful final Monolith dungeon.

Element triangle: Dark elements (Ice, Water, Earth, Dark) overpower Light Elements (Fire, Thunder, Wind, Light) and vice-versa. It goes like this: Dark <-> Light, and Fire > Ice > Wind > Earth > Electric > Water >Fire. When you hit an enemy with an attack it’s weak against, its turn moves back in the queue, same if they do it to you. It goes on until the monster gets mad (literally. They get pissed) and attack anyway. It’s not too different from the Press-Turn system in some Megami Tensei games otherwise.

Normal turn-based battles: The monsters take to the field, not the summoners, but any damage done to them is drawn from the summoner’s LP (aka HP). When a monster runs out of JP (aka MP) it is removed from battle and replaced with another equipped one. Chaining attacks together gives percentage bonuses to attack. “Escape” works a surprising 75% of the time. I hardly ever used “Guard.”

Monster capture: Beat them within an inch of their lives and then use the appropriate element prism to capture them. It beats the “unchain” mechanic in Unchainblades Rexx, at any rate. Captured monsters are sent to the Jewel Bank and can be equipped and used, though it sucks that you have to exit your current dungeon and return to the Order to do so.

Amalgamy: Where you use quartz and AP to strengthen and level up your monsters. You can make things significantly easier for yourself by giving monsters abilities they normally wouldn’t have naturally or that early in the game. For example, you can give electric attacks to a water monster so it can fight other dark/water monsters more effectively. You can also boost the strength of your attacks, add an ability slot and even evolve certain monsters, though this aspect is hardly explained in-game. Personally, I ended up ditching all my previous monsters in favor of the high-level high-attack monsters I caught in the final two dungeons. Why do monster-capturing games always end up this way?

That’s about it for battle strategy, but the game got a lot more fun and the battles got a lot faster and more interesting once I stopped trying to power my way through and actually took advantage of the element and chain bonus systems. Things got a little too easy towards the end, but hey, I earned it.

Graphics and Music and All the other stuff I don’t care about

The character designs you see on the cover and in the intro are slightly different from the ones that are actually used in-game, which is a real shame. The battle themes were pretty good, but I don’t remember any other tunes – and I just finished the game one hour ago. The screams and croaks of the monsters got on my nerves a bit. Voice-acting was so terrible I turned it off about 5 minutes into the game. I’ve never heard anything so bad. Nothing else worth reporting.

What I think of this game

If not for the half-assed story and the terrible writing and the horrible final dungeon, I would have rated Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner fairly highly. When you actually get to play, it’s actually pretty fun and even challenging in parts. It’s just a shame that my final memories of this game are the painfully bad Monolith dungeon, the pathetically weak final boss and the most insulting excuse for an ending since Blade Dancer. It’s worth playing if you can find it cheap, but don’t expect too much. In summary:

The Good
– Interesting battle system
– Fast transitions to battle
– Short/no loading times
– Decent music
– Easily navigable dungeons (except the Monolith)

The Bad
– Poor story
– Horrible writing/translation
– Meh character design
– Laughable voice “acting”
– Shoddy ending
– Difficulty falls off a cliff near the end
– Amalgamy takes forever unless you cheat
– Insufficient explanation of gameplay elements like stats and amalgamy
– Insufficient differentiation of monsters: all monsters with the same element learn the exact same attacks at the exact same levels.
– The Monolith dungeon SUCKS
– Post-game content is worthless, as usual

Next up

Finally made it to the 9 hour mark in Suikoden II. Also finally patched my DS together so I can continue Iron Master and Aquarian Age. And I’d like to start either Tales of Innocence or 7th Dragon sometime this month. Oh, and I also want to play an SRPG and maybe another otome “game.” So much to do, so little time…