Monster Tale (DS)

There is a somewhat common trope in stories for children where a kid will be whisked away to a fantasy land where only they have the power to deliver it from darkness, their arrival in this world often resulting in them acquiring special gifts that aid in their quest but can’t be taken home after. Something that’s rarely addressed in these tales though is the fact that for some kids, this situation might go in a very different direction. Thrusting power onto a young mind can lead to them taking advantage of such a situation rather than going down altruistic or heroic paths, and for kids who had rather mundane lives back on Earth, it’s not hard to see why they’d choose to just settle into their new life in a land apart.

 

Monster Tale’s antagonists are just such kids, the Monster World having a prophecy about a child who would one day save them from evil, but little did they know the kids themselves would be that evil. Five children arrive and are embraced too heavily by the populace, their egos inflating to dangerous levels and each one using the monsters to build their own dream utopias. By the time the Kid Kings have taken over, it’s too late for the monsters to realize that they’re being oppressed, but soon a sixth child arrives, a little girl named Ellie who finally sees the state of the Monster World and is inspired to be the selfless hero they always desired. While there are certainly dark directions such a story could go, Monster Tale keeps things bright and light-hearted, the motivations of the Kid Kings stemming from simple things like having few friends at home, no one to share their hobbies with, or not getting much attention from their parents. Only the most fiendish child in the game, Priscilla, seems fully selfish and aware that the monsters under her are unwilling servants, so of course she’s the one who most often badgers the other Kid Kings into opposing Ellie’s quest to liberate the monsters.

Each Kid King has a domain that represents their interests as well, Ellie’s travel through the kingdoms taking her to a beach, a huge monster dance club, a technological kingdom, and some more typical platform game environments like a fantasy forest or a fancy mansion. Kingdoms tend to have a few enemies who match their theme, but much of the navigation relates more to Ellie’s developing abilities rather than world-appropriate challenges. Still, Ellie gets new skills at a fairly steady pace to supplement the action platforming. Her attacks start off fairly weak, melee strikes and an energy shot being her go-tos until her abilities start to get upgrades. The energy shots get stronger but require energy from a bar to use, but soon you’ll get versions where it can rapid fire or be comboed into for extra damage. Your attack capabilities expand as well, Ellie able to pull off longer combo strings and add extra skills like launching enemies into the air to continue laying on the hurt. Many enemies in the game take a lot of damage to kill, even when it comes to basic fiends who block your path, and while they don’t respawn the moment you reenter a room, they do come back to life fairly quickly and navigation can be slowed down by the need to deal with the enemies who block your way. You can start buying stat upgrades as the game goes on, upping your health, damage, and energy efficiency so these frequent fights can be handled better, but they still manage to remain an enjoyable combat challenge even once you’ve built up your power quite a bit.

 

Relentless chasers, projectile throwers, and big bulky baddies who block paths get stronger and smarter as you progress, but Ellie isn’t alone on her journey, as early on, she finds an egg that hatches into a companion she calls Chomp. While an action platformer for the most part, Chomp plays into an entire second side of the game where you aren’t just trying to take down the Kid Kings but also raising a monster of your own into the best companion it can be. Beginning as a child itself, over the course of the game you can gather experience points to help it grow into new forms, the monster having so many different paths for his growth and potential abilities he can unlock that you’ll not even see half of them over the course of a regular playthrough. The abundance of options does mean there is quite a lot of room to personalize your pal, the monster’s different forms having unique attacks and traits that can carry over into future evolutions. At plot-relevant times it will grow into a teenager and finally an adult, but you can still pursue paths for the younger forms to learn skills and find the abilities you like, the freedom to revert it to any state allowing for your special battle skills to come in many forms.  A new evolution may just be a cycloptic version of Chomp or one with bat wings and horns, but the attack powers they have lead to Chomp becoming some very unusual shapes. Launching different types of projectiles or firing forward like a torpedo are some of the simpler attacks, but Chomp can learn to use his tongue to hurl Ellie around, take on the form of a giant spike to stab enemies, and even become a protective bubble for Ellie to seek safety in.

Despite having so much variety in forms and skills, the monster isn’t as big of a factor in combat as one might think. Chomp can only be actively helping you for so long, and any time he takes damage that time is reduced a fair bit. It doesn’t really help his self-preservation instincts aren’t the best even when he’s fast, and his basic attacks are often going to put him in danger to execute. To recover energy you’ll need to send him to the DS’s bottom screen, but the game finds a few creative uses for the fact he can travel back and forth as needed. Certain areas have mechanisms that only appear on the bottom screen that he’ll need to activate, and some enemies like a plant monster will try to place seeds on the lower screen that grow into harmful enemies, but Chomp can deal with them before they’ve grown into problems. The bottom screen is where Chomp will inevitably spend much of his time, and it is down there that he gets most of his experience points for evolving and learning skills. Finding toys or food in the game world will send them down to Chomp to learn from, but there are also specialty items where Chomp can fight in a different way. Catapults, remote controlled cars, and soccer balls all can be activated by Chomp to lay down some damage on the top screen, although they aren’t really targeted at all so they aren’t a reliable means of hurting enemies. Chomp’s battle participation is certainly situational with Ellie carrying most of the weight, even the boss fights usually just having Chomp deal with some gimmick while the player handles actually dodging and hitting the Kid King’s monster ally. The battles are surprisingly tough at least, requiring smart use of abilities to avoid damage and lay on the hurt during openings, each one feeling distinct as well. A young girl’s stuffed bunny turned into a deranged giant, a creature made of water that shields its Kid King, and a small monster piloting a mechanical suit are highlights, but even simpler ideas like dragons can test your mettle well.

 

So far, I’ve mentioned the game is an action platformer with a pet raising mechanic, but I’ve been very careful not to use a certain genre name that could be applied to this game. If you look at Monster Tale’s game world, where things are segmented into rooms and areas are later opened up with new abilities, it would be very easy to classify it as an exploration-focused Metroidvania, but this understandable assumption is actually a bit of a misrepresentation. Yes, there are areas you can’t progress through until you have unlocked the right ability for Ellie, but the game makes very poor use of this. It starts off executing this well enough in its early areas, but as you delve deeper into larger areas, Monster Tale gets incredibly sloppy at justifying it. Getting past progression gates ends up just being long trips from a new area to an old one, the old area sometimes only containing two or three new rooms for you to explore to get the next ability needed to continue the game. Then the player needs to go back to the roadblock they encountered that forced the back track so they can finally get to the more substantial new areas. The monster’s implementation was a bit undercooked, but the backtracking and Metroidvania elements contribute so little that the game would be far better off scrapping them and just rearranging the map to avoid grinding a pretty good action platformer to a halt.

THE VERDICT: The colorful Monster World, the Kid Kings and their pets, and the concept of the power-hungry children ruining a fantasy land makes Monster Tale’s world interesting to traverse, the ever evolving skills of the protagonist Ellie feeding both into her navigation of it and her ability to handle some rather tough enemies and bosses. The monster Chomp that joins you for the journey is interesting to engage with as a pet project, the player able to customize his abilities to a considerable degree, but his usefulness is much smaller than such an emphasis would imply. His participation ranges from gimmicky to too limited, but he doesn’t undermine the experience. The Metroidvania elements on the other hand definitely hold the game back from greatness, the mandatory backtracking dragging things out since Monster Tale seems to not understand you should find interesting things when you go back to explore old locations with new abilities. The boss fights, abilities, and game world in general are still strong enough to make things fun when moving forward, but going backwards is just needless padding.

 

And so, I give Monster Tale for DS…

A GOOD rating. Monster Tale has a good thing going for most of its experience. The platforming and enemies mix together to remain challenging even as you get new skills, and while your monster assistant could do with being a greater presence, he does have his moments and is never an impediment to your enjoyment of the rest of the game. Boss fights are good injections of challenge and the story keeps introducing new Kid Kings with their personalized environments to make the game world diverse and fun to learn about. The thing is, while you facing off with strong regular enemies works for normal forward progression, the game soon stretches out its excellent designs too much. A room with challenging hazards and tough foes loses its appeal when you have to go through it again and again, your reward being to find a new room or two that arbitrarily blocked off your forward progress without offering much of interest themselves. When it starts to get egregious in the later areas, the game goes from something potentially Great to a Good game held back by trying to force a genre style on it that wasn’t compatible with the overall design.

 

Longer doesn’t always mean better, and in the case of Monster Tale, it could have been a much better game if it had kept things moving forward. It’s still definitely got the challenging opposition and interesting world design to make it worth playing, with an interesting monster-raising mechanic attached to it that gives you something to constantly work towards even when retreading old areas, so Monster Tale isn’t ruined by its Metroidvania elements, it just ends up straining itself to achieve a longer runtime.