Monster raising games are more common than disk read errors on a PS2. No that doesn’t sound right. More common than empty Mountain Dew cans in a WOW players room? No. More common than Nintendo fanboys on the gamefaqs forums? That’s terrible. Let’s just say there are a lot of monster raising games. Monster Kingdom Jewel Summoner is an average monster raising game with few notable features to distinguish it from the rest. While this reviewer hates to expectedly compare this game to Pokemon, I am all but forced to with the shear number of elements Monster Kingdom borrows from it.

Instead of Pokeballs we have identically functioning prisms, only now monsters are easy to catch and need only be brought down to about half of their heath before succumbing. You control three summoners each who controls three monsters. A summoner may switch between their three monsters as an action. In other words, it’s Pokemon with three monsters on your side in each battle. The monsters have four moves to choose from (later five) each of which consumes an amount AP, which is slowly regained by walking.

Unfortunately, nearly all the monsters are identical. There are eight elements, each weak against another (similar, yet simpler than Pokemon) and each element has several monsters that have use the same carbon copy moveset, only with different elements. That moveset in the order you learn them is as follows:

Physical non-element attack, Light element attack, Light element attack on all, Light element attack with turn delay, Normal, element attack, Normal element attack on all, Heavy element attack, and Heavy element attack on all

Switch out the word “element” for whatever element your monster is and I just listed 90% of the monsters you’ll be playing with. Thank God they made over a hundred, huh? Some monsters will also get a stronger physical attack, status ailing attack, or healing ability, but there are not many variations of these. To make things even more generic you may amalgamate your monsters with gems you find or buy to give them any move you want. To add insult to injury, the monster designs are uninspired and many are simply boring-looking animals.

Apart from attacking enemies with the element they are weak against, the only real strategy in battle involves hitting your enemies right before their turn comes, thus delaying their turn and giving you enough time to finish them. This is fun for a while but the slow repetitive summoning and attack animations cause each battle to take a few minutes, so by the time your half way through the winding maze that is any given dungeon, your mind will likely be numb with monotony.

If you don’t level your monsters to teach them the latest moves, you will likely find some of the later bosses too tough to beat. Finding battles that were too hard was quite refreshing in this day and age where you can beat most RPGs without dieing once. Difficulty gives leveling up a needed purpose. Unfortunately, the lack of strategy in battle means you either are strong enough to easily win, or you can’t. I found myself at a point where I wasn’t, and had to watch the same un-skipable cut scene before each attempt at the boss. After a few tries I managed to squeeze by, but it felt more like work than play.

The game’s story puts you in the role of Vice, a Spike Spiegel wannabe. In the same vein of every single character Vice is ripping off, he wants to track down something and kill it. In this case, an abomination. Abominations are basically bad monsters that appear. Hunting them is what most the game’s scenarios center around. Shortyl into the game, poor Vice, gets stuck joining a jewel summoning academy. At the academy you take on several assignments that people request of you, most all of which end up with you and your team traveling through some dungeon, often one you’ve already been to. Near the beginning of the game you add two of four summoning cadets to your party. The ones you pick will be with you for the rest of the game and will speak in all the cut scenes, so pick wisely.

Lynn: A polite, sensible, responsible woman with no personality

Bargus: A polite, sensible, responsible man with no personality and a British accent

Ely: A valley girl. No, really. She also speaks in the third person and is rude to everyone

Grey: The most repugnant character I’ve ever seen. He responds to everything with childish condescending retorts, or sounds like tich or hmph.

Since there was no way I was going to pick Grey, I picked the valley girl and one of the boring people. While certain combinations aren’t allowed, I was still very impressed at how much shear dialog is in this game. Not only does it have more dialog and cut scenes than in any monster raising game I’ve played (as well as many normal RPGs), but they wrote and voiced a ton of extra dialog to accommodate who you pick as your companions. And it’s not plug-in dialog; it’s new. Most events are fully voiced, and the voice acting is quite good by gaming standards. But the shear fact that most the characters are stupid stereotypes make it hard to take the plot seriously. At least the plot is interesting enough. Sadly, no option for Japanese vocals has been included.

The game’s presentation is top-notch. The soundtrack is worthy of listening to outside of playing the game with several catchy upbeat tunes of standard RPG fare, and the graphics are well done, quite reminiscent of 3D isometric Diablo clones like Baldures Gate: Dark Alliance. The 2D art is fantastic, with huge character portraits for everyone all with different poses and facial expressions and the pictures of the towns you visit are great too. You don’t actually get to explore these towns. They are menu driven like in tactical RPGs. But I submit that this better suits monster raising games where the emphasis should be on monster raising.

It’s truly a shame such great production values should be ruined by massive gameplay flaws. Of course, my patience for things like load times and battle animations has been worn thin by the shear number of RPGs I’ve played (think triple digits). I’m certain many will find Monster Kingdom’s flaws far less annoying. But even if that’s that case, I couldn’t recommend this game unless you’ve already played all the Pokemon you can handle and still need more. Even other monster raising games like Monster Rancher are far more creative and fleshed out than this game which is fated for mediocrity. Atlus has brought us so many great games, so many great RPGs. Are all the good ones taken by other companies now? With any luck, their new DS game Izuna will be good.