Even on easy difficulty there are champions and boss fights that had be stumped for a while. Speaking of which, the difficulty curves were something spectacular in this game. There are a plethora of monsters and the key is creating a supportive synergistic approach to battle, something it took me a while to implement. This can actually be a bit overwhelming, but a game like MS demands your investment. There are so many monsters, with many skills and strategies to experiment with. The depth and variety on offer is amazing. The animations of the monsters are varied and interesting, and by the end of the game I was very grateful for the option to speed the game up! The gameplay is the heart and soul of Monster Sanctuary, and I have almost entirely good things to say about it. The only issue I had was that during longer sessions the screen would stutter, however a quick internet search discovered closing and reopening the game fixed this. The amount of detail and variation to be found is stunning. Having said that, this does not mean the graphics look aged - far from it. The graphics are extremely charming and alluring, as the designer opted for retro graphics harking back to 8-bit and days of 2D. The fact that an indie game is able to blow Pokemon out of the water is a damning indictment on the state of Pokemon and the games industry as a whole. Monster Sanctuary is amongst a handful of games in a genre you could basically refer to as 'Pokemon', however Monster Sanctuary is possibly Monster Sanctuary is amongst a handful of games in a genre you could basically refer to as 'Pokemon', however Monster Sanctuary is possibly one of the best games this genre has ever seen. However, the gamplay alone makes this a must-play. The sound design in nothing to write home about, but it's serviceable. The graphics are in a Gameboy Advance era pixel-art style, but are still detailed enough and certainly add to the charm of the game. All this means that there's almost never any bad strategic decisions that can't be rectified easily, unlike in other games where you need to put in considerable time to change your character build or in some cases have to restart. There is also a crafting system to upgrade items. There are many quality of life features that such as being able to reset skills for cheap and being able to level monsters upto the level of your highest levelled monster -1. Furthermore, there's a low level cap that is reached by both the player's monsters as well as the one the player encounters, so overlevelling to brute force through everything with little strategy is not possible. The biggest difference here is that the game does not reward grinding and overlevelling and instead tries to make it easy to switch monsters every battle without the need to grind them as much as in Pokemon. And during battles 3 monsters of a side are present simultaneously, similar to the now removed triple battles from Pokemon gen 5, which adds more to the strategy as there are much more possibilities of interactions between different skills of different monsters. Instead of being limited to four moves, 1 item and 1 ability, here monsters have an entire skill tree each and are able to get around 40 skills, each of which may be an active or passive skill. Also, while it doesn't have the sheer variety of monsters, moves and items that Pokemon possesses now in the eighth generation, Monster Sanctuary makes up for it by having much more depth and customizability of each monster. But the best aspect of the gameplay is the turn-based battle system, which is somewhat similar to Pokemon, but is has a much faster pace. And there are various platformer-puzzles located everywhere that reward exploration and out-of-box thinking. The platformer aspect of the game is done excellently with it being semi-open at places allowing you to experience the game's 'dungeons' in a non-linear manner. Monster Sanctuary is a hybrid of a Metroidvania platformer/adventure game and a Japanese style turn-based strategy-rpg. It's very apparent that the critic reviews have underrated an excellent indie game while they continue to shill for big-budget releases like Pokemon (the latest installments of which, I must say, are terribly shallow and low-effort). It's very apparent that the critic I am compelled to write this review after seeing how this game doesn't have a single critic review over 88. I am compelled to write this review after seeing how this game doesn't have a single critic review over 88.
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