To paraphrase Machiavelli (and that one guy in The Wire), when you come for the king, you’d best not miss. This is the problem inherent in Pokémon-likes — everything in the genre is measured against the 1997 classic. For good or ill, if your main monster isn’t at least as charming and memorable as a chubby yellow thunder mouse with red cheeks, your game isn’t going to get a look.
So, where does Monster Crown: Sin Eater sit on the scale of Pokémon to oblivion? Do the Persona-like Fusion mechanics make enough of a difference for this to be a standout game?
Monster Crown: Sin Eater is a sequel to the 2021 game Monster Crown. It was a bit of a mixed bag — lauded for its cool take on breeding and fusion (similar to how you can fuse Personas in the Shin Megami Tensei series) — but let ultimately down by performance issues and dull monster design.
Fast-forward five years and Sin Eater looks pretty sweet, with its pixel art style being effective overall. The wall upon wall of text sadly doesn’t jump off the page, but it’s a cool-looking world. The music, on that note, is excellent, and really gets you into the game. It all fits the dark aesthetic and tone of this game — Sin Eater is the kind of game that gives you a gun for self defense. Monsters will readily attack and kill you if you don’t kill or tame them first.
Sin Eater isn’t shy about swearing and violence either. This is a far cry from Pokémon, which is honestly great to see as a point of differentiation.
Like Pokémon, there’s a Rock Paper Scissors system where one nature will stomp on another and you need to remember and plan for various strengths and weaknesses. It’s a turn-based RPG with dozens of attacks to learn and master. If you get your synergy in battle high enough, you can ‘crown’ your monster’s moves, hence the name of the franchise.
But the comparison to Pokémon is part of the problem. Sitting down to write this review, I can only remember half a dozen of the 200-ish monsters in the game because once you pick up something vaguely powerful, you can steamroll all but the bosses. And that’s without abusing the Fusion and Breeding systems which add some much needed variety, but also allow you craft the perfect monster that will make the game an utter cakewalk.
The story is similarly lacklustre. Your mission is to go and kill the four Heavenly Kings suppressing humanity, and then go kill their boss for good measure. The problem is they’re pretty one-dimensional characters. Everything from the monster design to the game overall feels a little shallow. Everyone has an agenda and it may as well be written on their shirt.
The non-linearity of the game both helps and hinders here — while it’s great that you can go off and do your own thing at your own speed, the world doesn’t quite level up around you. The difficulty curve and the pacing all feel a little off. After going and killing another boss, leaving for the next town and coming across something new but vastly underlevelled, yet again, motivation to play the game evaporates pretty quickly. When you’re running around with a Level 60 demigod and you capture a cool-looking Level 20 stag beetle, you’re not going to add it to your part are you? No, you’re going to go and catch the next Level 20 thing and forget about it, rinse and repeat until you wonder why you’re still playing this game.
