Have you ever thought Shin Megami Tensei was too easy?

Well, welcome to flavor country.

As I'm writing this, the recent positive rating is 77% while the overall positive rate is 91%. Let me explain the recent drop in favorable rating.

Monster Sanctuary have the unfortunate luck of being packaged in a metroidvania Humble Bundle, which is how I came to play this game. This probably should not have happened. Despite the fact that the world of the Sanctuary is set up like a metroidvania style map of interconnected rooms with tons of secrets and short-cuts, this is definitely not a game for metroidvania fans.

No, Monster Sanctuary is going to appeal to the turn-based JRPG fans who like creature collecting games, and ones who like high difficulty/strategy games at that. This is a small niche of small niche inside of another niche.

In Monster Sanctuary you are a greenhorn Spectral Keeper, a monster tamer. You pick your starting monster and are tasked with gathering together a team to battle powerful bosses to rank up your standing within the Sanctuary. Who knows, you might even make it all the way to Master Keeper? Or uncover a conspiracy that threatens the peace of the sanctuary as you journey through the world's many biomes.

Here's where Monster Sanctuary gets spicy. The 3 vs 3 battle system (or 3 vs 1 for bosses and 6 vs 6 for Keeper Duels) looks like it's based around hitting enemy weaknesses, and well...it is and it isn't. You might be cruising along, defeating all the regular battles easily, and reach a Keeper Duel and have your unbeatable team get absolutely melted within the first round. The key to winning the tougher encounters is to strategically build a team whose skills synergize with each other. Such as you might want a monster who can apply the freeze status ailment and another with a passive ability to make freeze trigger heavy bonus damage on affected enemies at the end of each round.

Skill trees are massive and you only get one point per level so you have to make strategic decisions on which branch of the skill tree you will fill out. Do you want high damage skills or to focus on buffs and debuffs? Magic damage or physical damage? That sort of thing.

The game also encourages you to build up damage multipliers. Each skill has a number of hits, and as the turn passes to the next monster in the line up, it increases the damage for the next turn. For example, if you buff your party on the first turn that's 3 hits so the meter rises to 1.3, meaning the next monster will get a 1.3 boost to their damage output, and if their skill makes 5 hits, the final monster will get a damage boost of 1.8. So there is a lot to consider whenever you enter battle.

There times when I had to just stop playing for a while because whatever Keeper Duel (and it was always a Keeper Duel) I was stuck on felt too hard so I have a feeling this game is going to be too much for most players.

Monster Sanctuary is a decent game with an overall interesting mashup of the monster collector and metroidvania genre. While it has a couple major flaws that keep me from recommending it, I will say it’s a decent little game to try if this sort of game looks interesting to you. Art’s good, sound is fine, gameplay is exactly what it seems like and, overall, I did enjoy the first 12 hours or so of the game.

Unfortunately, those big flaws are too large to overlook and the biggest is that the game is a massive grindfest. Combat is very samey and, throughout the game, you’ll end up doing hundreds of battles and thousands of turns doing more or less the same handful of actions. The exploration and collection were pretty good but felt like the world needed 1/3rd as much combat getting in the way. The game would 1/4th as long if you weren’t being stopped very other screen to engage in a 5-10 minute battle.

The second biggest problem was the game’s reliance on its monster variety. I ended up playing 80% of the game with the same 6 mons because it wasn’t worth the effort to build entire new teams of sub-leveled monsters with matching stats for a new area when just keeping my 6 highest, best geared monsters in play was perfectly effective. Granted I rarely got 5 star ratings from it but the only rewards a better combat rating mattered was better chance at eggs.

And so, having 50 monsters in my pocket didn’t matter right up until the moment it became basically required to have a purpose-built team in order to win battles. This, in itself, felt ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that I had played with my solid team for the entire game of, not necessarily efficient, but effective monsters and now I could not proceed without spending an hour or two purpose-building, leveling, skilling, equipping and feeding a monster pack for, effectivly, a single fight. This feeds back into the grindiness.

And, by the end, there are too many options, too many monsters with varying vulnerabilities, too many damage types to keep track of, too many skill synergies to try to make sense of… So, if you’re not one of those people who wants to get into the weeds and spend hours figuring it out for yourself, you’re just going to look online for the strategy and push the buttons to make it happen which, at that point, feels like a flaw in the game design.

In the end, I was tired of the game, tired of the samey battles, tired of running into someone who wanted to have another bloody keeper battle. Near the end of the game, one of your allies wants to ‘show you how strong they’ve become’ with an unskippable fight and I kid you not, my head hit desk with a groan loud enough to startle my partner. I stuck it out just to have closure on the 30 hours I’d sunk into it and there’s so much more grind to do after roll credits that I just can’t be arsed.

It's still a fully fleshed out functional game that I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to try anyway, just be aware of what you’re in for and, honestly, don’t feel bad putting the difficulty down to casual just to save yourself 10 hours of grind. If I’d known then what I know now, I certainly would have.

Pretty good quite a variety of monsters and it's cool pairing them up together to see how strong you can make them. I like the exploration, every area feels very pretty and unique which is good for a game like this.