So I bought, for 10$, what is probably Atlus' best and worst game. Best because it's an extremely fun party game that supports (like, literally, advocating on the box) backstabbing, strategy, psychology, and generally being a complete bastard in order to win, all wrapped up in a seemingly innocent package full of chibi characters and adorable voice acting. It's also the worst game because if you don't have completely awesome friends, you'll tear your hair out trying to play it.
Hey kids, do you want to see some magic?!
It's kind of like Mario Party, except with a PhD in bastardry.
While I do have friends willing to play for a while, the story mode is OBSCENELY long, encompassing 8 chapters over 7 continents and 10 or so dungeons. WAY WAY WAY longer than any party is going to last, it would take a group of friends DAYS to complete the entire game and have ONE of them attain ultimate victory.
The premise of the game is simple, the kingdom of Dokapon has been beset on all sides by hordes of monsters, all of which are ransacking the towns and generally taking all the money from the Kingdom, a very bad thing that the King insists on. The King of Dokapon hires the adventurers (you and everyone you’re playing with) to free Dokapon from this menace. As an incentive, he adds that whomever collects the most money (both in cash-in-hand, and raw assets owned) will get to marry his daughter Penny, and become the next King of Dokapon.
To accomplish this one important goal, collecting the most money, the game encourages you to be the biggest asshole you can be. And trust me, the potential is HUGE. Atlus themselves have published that the game is ‘friendship destroying’, and so it needs to be made clear that if you intend to play with anyone, they need to be really cool people.
There’s also some RPG elements, being able level up, learn special abilities, allocate stat points, and change classes that have different growth rates and abilities add an element of strategy in how you plan on raising your character.
The game is also excellently balanced so that it’s impossible for a single player to grab the lead, and hold onto it indefinitely. The game will occasionally present the last place player with the option to become a ‘darkling’, which is a super, unbeatable monster that has magic abilities that can lay waste to even the most powerful character and their money, towns, and items. The transformation only lasts two in-game weeks, but it’s not unusual for a darkling to completely obliterate each player’s accumulated wealth, resetting the status quo, except now with that last place player significantly more leveled up than they were before, and capable of being competitive again. It’s a great equalizing force, to say the least.
Also, I recommend that you play with real live humans, because while you CAN play with the AI, it’s not recommended, because the AI flatout cheats. The harder the AI setting, the harder it cheats, there’s no getting around it. Plus, in the minigame where you do combat with other players, it removes the psychological portion of the game where you try to deduce what you’re opponent is going to do, since computers don’t have psychology that can be read or manipulated.
Out of convenience though, I tried playing the game with three AI set to the lowest difficulty setting, at the fastest speed setting so I could get through the game as fast as possible, just to see the ending.
Then I get to the second to last area before the ending and I’m about ready to give up. I have to fight this nearly impossible boss that simply doesn’t behave like a normal fight, he follows a script. On this script, it says “Counter everything the player does with impunity, and SPAM SPAM SPAM the Quake spell, because nothing can counter that, and it paralyzes the player.”.
It turns out that I made the mistake of building an extremely magic-heavy character, with little physical strength, and this led to his downfall as he simply cannot deal enough damage to kill this monstrosity, because it turns out my magic attacks are completely worthless since they’ll be countered with impunity, and normal physical attacks are the only thing that can get through reliably, which do pitiful damage due to my low physical stats. I’m already over level 80, and even grinding against the most experience heavy monsters in the game don’t level me up quickly anymore. I’m stuck.
It is here I learn that while you have to worry about the other players, you have to worry about the game designers not wanting you to have fun any more. If it were just that... but there are tons of generic late game monsters that have un-counterable abilities that just outright destroy your equipment, which is extremely expensive and difficult and time-consuming to obtain by that point. It’s a mechanic that only accomplishes one thing: pissing off the players, and it’s bad game design. They should have focused on more ways of pitting the players against eachother, rather than FORCING them to invest all their energy into fighting against the game mechanics themselves.
Dokapon Kingdom is a fun game to play at the beginning with your friends, but I fear that the game’s design simply does not permit anyone to have fun past a certain point. It’s such a colossal waste to get this far, and just find out that the effort placed into the game was either woefully insufficient near the end, or Atlus wanted to destroy people’s free time, patience, and tolerance for the game itself ontop of the their friendships.
Has anyone else experienced Dokapon Kingdom?
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Topic: Dokapon Kingdom (Read 4830 times)