Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure (PSP)
With its simple character designs, silly voice performances, lighthearted tone, and rather basic plot, it’s easy to see that Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure was a game that aimed to draw in a young audience. However, rather than oversimplifying things to the degree there’s barely any depth to the experience, Gurumin goes for a rather bold approach in building a hack-and-slash with role-playing game elements for kids. Its systems aren’t too complex still, but it does seem like its trying to both give younger players credit in what they are able to handle in a game while giving older gamers some meatier content after the main adventure to chew on. It’s not too dissimilar to how the Kirby series approaches its games, but those never really get too deep into menu systems and progression mechanics, making Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure a particularly interesting game to look at when it comes to trying to appeal to children without being condescending.
The main character of this monstrous adventure can be named by the player, but Parin is her default name, and the pig-tailed heroine starts off her adventure rather humbly. Heading to live with her grandpa in an old mining town, she finds she’s the only kid around. However, before she can be too bummed out, she comes across some friendly monsters only she can see who quickly invite her to visit their secret monster town adjacent to the village. In a rather interesting choice, this all serves as a cold open with the game kicking off with an impressive cutscene meant to summarize a fair bit of time where Parin gets to know the monsters and has humorous interactions with the human villagers who can’t see her invisible friends. None of these characters really go beyond basic traits. One blobby monster loves to dance, a rock golem is kind of thickheaded, an oddly dressed purple creature is a traveler type who speaks with a french accent, and Parin’s closest friends are a friendly boy and a sweet little girl who are practically just humans themselves. The citizens of the town slot into generic archetypes like an inventor, a friendly baker, and your absent-minded grandpa, although the miner known as Cylinder says some rather unfortunate things that were probably not meant to be as skeevy as they come off.
During some cutscenes the characters will use actual voice acting with some familiar video game voice actors like Steve Blum and Robin Atkin Downes doing rather goofy but fitting voices for their roles, and Tara Strong and Dee Bradley Baker slot in right as they usually do with their even beefier resumes. However, Parin features a surprisingly weak performance from Amber Hood. It’s not so much she does a bad job as she doesn’t match the character who carries many of the most expressive moments. The anime influence on the art style and scene construction is obvious, so when Parin is flailing around wildly and her voice comes out mildly irritated, its clear something was lost in translation. The scenes mostly achieve their goal of keeping the sort of cartoon atmosphere alive, because when you start to plunge into the game’s dungeons, that level of charm does fade into the background for considerable lengths of time.
The peace of Monster Town is disrupted when beings known as the phantoms attack, and while they aren’t very ghostly, they devastate the little town with ease. Parin is able to find an ancient weapon to fight them off though, the drill spear allowing her to head off into the dungeons outside of Monster Town to reclaim the stolen furniture and items to help the monsters rebuild. Along the way she’ll need to face off with the boss Phantoms who all have a bit of personality as well like the flamboyant Roger or the butterfly who speaks an alien language that baffles everyone who hears it.
Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure’s main journey is a decent length, taking you to many new places to explore. Mountains, ruins, forests, and more are split up into small batches of levels where you’re often playing one part of that area of the map, heading off to explore another region, and then unlocking the ability to continue with one of the previous areas afterwards. It keeps the adventuring environments somewhat diverse, but even though they break up time spent in places like the ruins, it is quite easy to see where the game is starting to reuse area concepts and designs that start to rob some of the fun of exploring a new area. Also tamping down your enthusiasm will be the need to collect a large amount of cash to get some of the better outfits and upgrades for Parin and her weapon. Coins are hidden in the myriad of objects sitting around levels, the player needing to break pots, torches, rocks, pillars, trees, and more just to get enough coins to hope to buy the helpful items back in town. Some items like the Vampire Kit that heals on very easily achieved critical hits are a great reward to save towards and other items like the goggles and gas mask are practically required for avoiding swimming and poison damage respectively. If it didn’t require breaking every object in large levels to get these items they’d be more rewarding, and the junk system is comparatively better handled. Enemies with special armor or weapons can have it knocked off and redeemed for improvements to your skills, and junk removal becomes a different approach to combat for the player to take rather than always going for a quick kill. However, the medals ensure there are still some rewards that are a chore to earn, since if you don’t break every object, kill every enemy, and do it in a reasonable time frame, you won’t earn the medals that can be redeemed for the special equipment your grandpa hands out.
The tedium added to exploration is an unfortunate factor of Gurumin’s adventure, and the Steam release bragging about 35+ hours of content is referring to the obnoxious task of trying to get every single item. Avoiding a completionist run is certainly recommended, because if you look past some of the repetition built into the main campaign, you can find things to enjoy. The levels do offer nooks and crannies to search, and the combat, while sometimes boiling down to just smacking around your enemies with basic attacks, does have a few extra elements to it to make it a bit more engaging. Your basic weapon swings do their job, but if you hold the attack button, you can actually spin your drill to do things like break hard objects or destroy armor. Elemental drill bits are used not just for mild puzzle solving but can enhance your damage to certain enemy types, and for the toughest foes like the Phantom bosses or packs of smaller enemies, you have special abilities to spice up the fights. From things like firing off energy out in a trident formation to jumping in the air and sending out a shockwave as you slam down, these extend your reach and up the power of your hits. Their inputs are a little strange so you might pull one off when trying to do another, but they also have another requirement that ties into an interesting gimmick involving your drill spear.
Your drill spear has three levels that your weapon builds up naturally towards during a dungeon. The more you deal damage without getting hit yourself, the more powerful it gets, level three allowing you to pull off your best special moves and score more damaging attacks. It’s a very straightforward incentive to not just rush into action blindly, although your health also can really get knocked down hard by certain creatures with ease. It encourages that extra bit of caution though since you want to maintain your high level, but most regular enemies are fairly easy to defeat with a few swings of a high powered drill. It’s mostly the boss battles that really begin to test how well you can maintain a high leveled drill, although those aren’t too complex either. A few patterns they repeat that are mildly difficult to dodge, and many of the fights are just about running away when the attacks are going and then moving in during the short window after to land your attacks. They aren’t boring though and the regular combat is thankfully pretty decent as well, this likely stemming from the need to balance your own safety with which special moves you want to whip out.
There are healing items and the like you can access from a menu as needed, although these are mostly important for the boss fights again because of them being longer fights with limited healing opportunities. You certainly don’t want to spend your hard to earn cash at the baker to build up these reserves though, at least not until you’ve pushed into post-game content where it can help you avoid levels that start to become both tedious and hard. Game Overs in a dungeon also influence your medal earning even though they’re kind enough to throw you back in where you left off if you don’t care about that, but it really does feel like Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure was clumsy when it came to adding its extra content and completionist challenges, the friendly and fun journey it is attached to chaffing a little when those poke into some otherwise decent enough adventuring action.
THE VERDICT: Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure constructs a fine little journey young and old players can enjoy to some degree. It’s got a cute cast of characters, silly cutscenes, and a friendly atmosphere to it, but the gameplay and exploration can certainly become a little stale as the creators tried to add in extra layers of depth. Collecting coins by destroying everything in sight grows old in levels with somewhat unambitious designs, but the action is enjoyable enough and things like the drill level systems and your special attacks play enough of a role that it’s not all basic weapon swinging. The main campaign is sturdy enough to be somewhat entertaining despite a fair bit of simplicity in both the plot and gameplay, so as long as you don’t dive too deep into the needlessly high amount of repetitive and unengaging extra content, then Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure still provides some cute moments and decent action.
And so, I give Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure for the PlayStation Portable…
An OKAY rating. It’s certainly hard to determine the line where something is truly optional in the Gurumin experience, but even if you do need to smash apart way too many environmental objects and the levels start to look a little too samey at parts, it won’t really lose you unless you start to dive into the more obvious extra layer of content. If you want to get all the S Ranks and unlock all the extra levels then that’s a path you choose rather than one that is required, but the base game isn’t so exceptional that it would motivate going that extra mile. It’s not a bad game, the action is simple but finds a few ways to tinker with it either with your own skills or things like hazards to add a sense of danger. Always trying to keep your drill strong makes it so even a rare small hit won’t just be ignored since it comes with a present but manageable dip in power. The writing of the narrative, the jokes it tells, and the overall structure of the game world is definitely appealing and good for bringing in kids or amusing adults, but it feels like some of the simplicity eked into regular play too. Even with multiple mechanics in play you aren’t being asked to do too much in any situation, but that also means the path through the plot doesn’t have to dip into the areas of deliberate overcomplication like the ranking system.
Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure tried to get many different types of players on board, and what strengths it does have manage to make it an alright game for most gamers to pick up and play. It never really hits a sweet spot when it comes to engagement though, doing just well enough in the areas it needs to and unfortunately flubbing the attempts at adding greater depth for those who might want to seek it. It still has a way to go before it can truly realize its idea of being an enjoyable game for all ages, but it does just well enough where it counts that it can provides a bit of fun to players of many different ages.