Mani-Kanina
@Mani-Kanina

It's been about a year since Coromon came out on steam. Since then the game has basically been relegated to obscurity as far as I know. I've heard absolutely no one talk about this game, and I'm friends with some decently big Pokemon nerds. The game was on sale, so I figured I'd take it for a spin-ner.

I checked itch.io, but I couldn't seem to locate the game there, otherwise I would have picked it up there instead, oh well.

This post will contain spoilers for the entirety of the game, though I'll try to keep them to a minimum. If you just want it spoken plainly: No, I don't recommend this game. But the reasons for why are a bit complex.

If you just want something that plays a lot like Pokemon to scratch that same itch? Well, Coromon will certainly deliver upon that in some ways, and the store page should be enough to tell if you'll be into it.

As for me? I've got very mixed feelings about this title.

That was your spoiler warning, by the by, let's get into the whys.


What genre is Pokemon?

Most people would tell you that it is it's own genre. Those people obviously don't know video game history all that well, but it's not a perspective I can fault anyone from having.

The "monster wrangler" genre is one that is completely dominated by Pokemon, despite it neither being the first nor the best. But every other game in the genre will be compared and contrasted with it, because that's the big shot.

This is generally not a good thing.

Pokemon does a few things well, and a lot of things poorly. I could elaborate, but this isn't about Pokemon; nor is it an attack upon those who happen to enjoy the Pokemon formula.

And that's really what it comes down to: The Pokemon Formula.

Half of the games being made in this genre directly tries to copy that formula in the vain hope of copying its success, the latter half does something completely different yet is doomed to be judged based on how well it succeeds at being the formula.

Coromon is neither something different, nor is it very good at the formula.

A battle in the early game featuring a forest backdrop. A tiny bug is facing a small armadillo.

What is Coromon?

Coromon is a monster raising game combined with a world progression so linear that you're wondering if you actually stepped off that train at the start of the game or if you're still riding. There is also a story in there somewhere, something about and epic fight against evil. Frankly I couldn't tell you too much about it because half of it doesn't make any sense.

And I don't know if that's on me or on the game. It does not explain much, but the way the story is told makes it really hard to get invested in it.

Fighting monsters is fun, the trainer fights are neat. Collecting six mcguffins as the main quest isn't the worst thing out there.

There wasn't any time during my playthrough of Coromon where I had a bad time. Okay, that's a blatant lie, there were a few sore spots in my playthrough, but generally it was a very friction-less game to play (complete with friction-less ice!).

The issue is that I can't really remember that many moments where I had a good time either. Nor are there that many things I felt invested in. There's Mothfriend, my precious, but beyond that? Not that much.

A battle in the desert, a chilly moth is facing a sand alligator. Note the superficial similarities Mothfriend 2.0 displays in contrast to the original. (A new palette separates the two).

The Good

So does the game do anything good or is it just as big of a train wreck as it's name is in relation to it's release window? (I can read, but other's can't). Yeah, there are good things, obviously; otherwise I would have dropped it.

One of the main reasons I picked up the game is that it looks great. The art style and quality of the battle animations are really up there. This game was made by a small team with likely an even smaller budget, yet the 2D visuals generally look better than anything Pokemon put out there.

This is despite the fact that the mainline series remained in the realm of 2D up until the release of the 3DS. The creature animation eventually got good in Black & White, but battle scene backdrops remained lacking in any detail.

It's no doubt in my mind that this game has an edge up visually... except... there's the monster designs; does those count as part of the aesthetics? Regardless, I'll go into more details about those later.

The music is also generally good. The second trainer battle theme is amazing and I can't get it out of my head, though it seems almost random which trainers uses it and which uses the first one. The boss music is also great.

And, character customization at the start of the game is pretty comprehensive and I like it, it's only really missing a pronoun selection option. Instead the game just kind of darts around the whole thing... mostly. There's is this one scene where it seems like a character is talking to you and is referring to you by he/him, but they are actually talking to another NPC.

I wish I had more positive things to say about the game, but mostly everything else I can think of to bring up also comes with a big "but" attached to it.

In a spooky forest a flying bug faces off against three ghost kitties.

Where the Gameplay(?) Fails.

One of the things I love the most in video games is exploration. This does not mean I crave every game I get to scratch that itch. I like Killing Floor, a zombie survival shooter, hardly the type of game you can explore in, you know?

But one thing I do despise is games that practically beg for there to be places to explore... yet have none. Coromon is a lot like that. I can only think of two optional places I found in my entire playthrough, the first was a tiny extra floor in one of the game's caverns, this one serving as the place for a rare monster.

The second was in a breakable wall near the end of the game, which housed a tiny room with three chests and an encounter rate that rivals the monster closets in Final Fantasy 2.

There's probably a few more places like the latter, given that I recall seeing that same wall texture at least once earlier in the game. But I've had no motivation to go back and search for it anymore; especially when the reward for doing so would be nothing I care about.

No, a game like this scream out in a need for optional places to go, places to seek out and find hidden monsters. It could be as little as an optional side area off the beaten path with a few items strewn about and a unique encounter table.

Or it could be as big as entirely optional cavern that you don't need to go into, but doing so let's you see more of the world.

I'm rambling, but the core issue is that the game is as linear as a train track, with absolutely nothing to find off the track. One point early on in the game I thought I was doing an optional cave for a side quest, only to later realize that, no, this was actually the main quest.

Which is a good point to pivot to the story, but this cave is actually even more insidious, given that it houses a softlock. If you didn't happen to carry one of the items that let's you warp back to town and then save there... well, you'd brick your save file. (I tried saving and quiting there to see if it would get me out: it did not).

Which, really, tells you a lot of how well constructed the game is in places. I wasn't really rolling in bugs when I played the game, and this was definitively the worst one, but there were a few consistent ones).

The player character standing in a lab like environment inside of a cave. The one I noticed the most was that I got achievements for doing things, and I got those on steam, yet they remained listed as incomplete in the in-game achievement tracker.

But I digress.

The story in Coromon couldn't seem to decide on if it wanted to be light hearted fun or an epic journey across the world in order to save the planet. So it did both; on the same time. This works just as well as you'd expect it to.

I'll save everyone some time and neglect from paraphrasing the entire plot, it's really not worth it.

No, what's more interesting is just how completely disinterested the game is in it's own plot. You have these weird antagonists that are kidnapping people and inserting themselves into positions of power in order to do something sinister.

But there is no urgency in the plot, deep into the game you're wasting time painting someone's fence as part of the main quest. Mind, the antagonists were so over the top that I couldn't take them seriously even from the outset. But it's hard to feel like the world ending danger has any urgency when people just have you do menial tasks in order to progress the main quest.

So when you get to the end of the game and it's supposed to be this huge epic showdown against the final boss? It doesn't really feel like there's any tension to it, there's no build up.

Mind you... I wasn't entirely convinced I was facing the final boss, despite going into my third attempt against them; because the narrative didn't exactly convey that it was the finale. I was pretty 50/50 on that there would be another dungeon after it followed by the actual final boss.

I'm partially wondering if that was the original idea, but then they went with what they did because they had to rush the game out.

But that is baffling in another way, because the game has no shortage of gimmick sections that must have taken extra development time to implement.

The player character walking in tall grass in the desert, a bar in the top left corner features the visage of a sun and is in the shape of a thermometer. Pictured above is an area in the middle of the game, you can only take X number of steps on the hot sand before you get thrown back to an earlier checkpoint, so you need to dart into the shade of tiny tents to cool down.

There's nothing wrong with this ideas.

Though granted, I didn't like it when Golden Sun did this either, and that has sun in the name.

But this isn't the only thing in the game like this. It's a feature that is there to pad out the main quest with "content", but said content is often far removed from the core appeal of the game or even the genre.

There's one segment like this where you're just walking around collecting orbs, while on the same time dodging bad orbs; as if you're playing some really jank bullet hell game where you're on a grid but the bullets aren't.

I don't mind stuff like this too much, but it felt like it interrupted the game I actually wanted to play more times than not, but again, I didn't hate it. But in the context of what felt like a completely under developed story and a rushed ending... I have to wonder if the team prioritized the right things.

A level 92 cloud creature thingy fighting against two giant lizards with crab claws out on some ancient ruins in the middle of the ocean. God, why does this premise sound way more epic than it is? You can also just get thrown into a wild encounter against multiple enemies. You don't get to send out more creatures though. Despite the wast level gap seen above, these two can kill my lead in one turn (I had it happened).

Everything in this game just comes back to one thing:

Who is Coromon for?

It remains unstated so far, but the game has a huge focus on elements that "hard core" Pokemon fans like. The game has built in Nuzlocke mode you can use, as well as a randomizer, etc.

In fact, the game has the Nuzlocke mode be just labeled "hard mode", which for anyone who is even remotely familiar with how a Nuzlockes plays should quickly realize that this is a horrendous idea. It's not a mainstream appealing thing at all, and touting it as a hard mode will likely lead to the uninitiated having a bad time.

There's also a much bigger focus on PvP and competitive play, the form this takes is varied, but there is a much bigger focus on balance and letting you build your mons exactly how you want to.

Okay, so simple, right? Coromon was made for self describing Pokemon pro challenge players and hard core PvP players, right?

Except...

The main quest makes no sense in that light. The story could have been a complete throwaway if the core appeal was elsewhere (and make no mistake, it is). Yet it clearly tries to do something with narrative stakes; it just fails at it completely.

But it's not even the story though, it's all these weird asinine side things that has nothing to do with battling that you need to slog through in order to do the main quest. If the game was for hard asses who naturally wouldn't care for stuff like that, then why is there a stealth segment in the game?

Like, I can't see myself sloging through all of that crap again in order to try the game with its built in randomizer.

But Coromon is obviously not for casual Pokemon fans either: the main story plot is crap, the world has no depth to explore, and critically: the monster designs suck.

The Monster Designs.

The monster designs in Coromon aren't bad... but they also aren't good. Which is why they suck.

I can look at any generation of Pokemon and find designs I both love and hate. Different things appeal to different people, so that's only natural. I might think Klefki looks fucking stupid, but they probably hold the keys to at least one fan's heart.

There are a few Coromon I think look dumb, the ice starter being one of them. But I don't hate them. The only one that really grew on me was the ice bug I got early on the game, I was so convinced it would turn into a moth that I named it Mothfriend (which it did). But that's like one example, one creature that I liked a lot, and even then it was riding on just hopes for a good chunk of the game.

They could have stood to do a few more outliers. A few designs that are extra appealing to people who like cute critters, a few that capitalizes extra hard on the "cool" aesthetic fantasy. There's a reason why Charizard remains one of the more popular Pokemon designs, and it's not because Game Freak is more obsessed with them than the fans are.

But admittedly, I think a big issue is just numbers.

Coromon has a total of 114 critters. This does not count the boss creatures that you fight throughout the game but can't capture. Though, 114 still isn't accurate, 106 is closer to the truth. The eight final creature designs are "variants" of existing ones but with a different type; they look almost identical.

When Pokemon Red & Blue launched, they did so with 150 designs. I don't want to credit them as if they had chosen that specific count by design; but it's hard to argue that they didn't hit a sweet spot.

You need a certain minimum number of creatures for a game like this. Both to populate the world with enough variety, but also in order to give players compelling choices to choose between.

I could not point to six individual evolution lines in Coromon that I like enough to fill up an entire team. Like, why is there no rabbit mon? Heck, there isn't even a fox mon, and everyone knows how big of a mass appeal those have.

A Hard Sell.

And this is why I can't recommend Coromon. Not because it's a crap game, but because it's game with no audience. I can't think of anyone I could recommend this game to and have them fall in love with it.

The more casual Pokemon fans I know would not find anything to love in the game.

The more hardcore competitive people I know that play in simulators... Well, it says itself doesn't it? They don't even have their fun in official games anymore; not really. There's just no compelling argument for why they should switch over and play this instead of what they are already doing.

Instead I'm left with a game that I found to be pretty meh but was okay enough to finish. And in many ways, you can speak of Coromon in terms of how it differs from Pokemon:

It's Pokemon, but:

  1. You get to manually spend your EVs, except you need to reach max level to spend them all.
  2. You don't need to worry about getting a bad shiny, all shinies have maxed stats because the two are one and the same.
  3. You can keep a creature un-evolved if you like their design, you even get a buff to their passive instead in order to slightly compete with the lost stats.
  4. You don't need to waste any space for HM moves, all progression things are now upgrades to your main character instead!

I could go on, but I won't. I also have a huge list of nitpicks and gripes, but I don't really feel like it's worth getting into. This post has already devolved into rambling as-is.

For the Future.

It's not as if Coromon doesn't have potential, it absolutely does. They have a finished engine now, plenty of monster designs and visual assets. There's a lot here to work with already, a lot of things that can be re-used without issue.

My recommendations for the team is to soldier on and make Coromon 2.

Make another 100 - 120 monster designs to round out the existing roster and provide more variety.

Maybe capitalize on some of the damage types that only exists as damage types and make creatures of those types too? Only having seven types seems to have hampered the creative juices a bit, especially since there's like two or three lizards/dinosaurs that are ground type. I'm sure the team can figure out some cool ideas for "Air" type creatures, etc.

But most importantly: A more fleshed out world that feels like a real place, with a story that that actually grabs you and pulls you into the world. I don't care if it's an epic or just a silly adventure, pick one and go all in on it.

I think a Coromon 2 could actually be great.

But Coromon?

It¨s a flawed game that pulls in too many directions and succeeds at little.



Nothing too exciting, I'm still basically a normie (I added that as a word, ha) but I think direct asexuality was wrong and always kinda was, so I traded that out for alloromantic asexual and demisexual (which, from what I understand, means I have difficulty becoming attracted to people on physical appearance alone).

Since I made this I discovered that it's basically an alternative to things like caard, but I found this first so it's what I ended up using.

Call to action of this post: did you actually click on my pronouns.page at some point? I'm curious as to how much people actually look at things like this vs when they simply lay it out in the description of their profile directly. I usually read them, personally, but I see that typing it out directly is much more common.