for context, ive been playing temtem since the official public beta launch in 2020, and i really loved it back then. ive felt very comfortable keeping my rating for it a 5/5 for a very long time. the passion these devs have for this game can be felt oozing out of every design, every city, every temtem, very rarely do i find a pokemon-like that feels so well crafted and lovingly produced. the battle mechanics are easy to understand but hard to master, just like pokemon itself. so why did i drop the rating by 2 stars?

simply put, i just am not pleased with how temtem handled its launch. the game now has a battle pass, called the tamer pass, which lasts for roughly 3 months and it's awful. there's a regular free version of it with less rewards and a paid version with rewards for every level that you can only buy using the game's new in-game currency, novas. and, you guessed it, novas can only be bought using real money. oh, sure, you can get novas from leveling up the tamer pass, and maybe you'll EVENTUALLY get enough to buy the premium pass. the devs have stated that the premium pass will be free in the following seasons if you have already bought it prior to the beginning of said new season... but only if you actually finish the tamer pass. and that's where the big problem comes in, leveling up the tamer pass is agonizingly slow. you need 3,300 exp to level up once, and the game offers paltry sums of exp for certain tasks. defeating a wild tem gives you 6 exp, catching one gives you 10. you get exp for doing the daily mail run, usually less than 30, iirc, for doing the 4/5 AND 5/5 koish for the week, which together give a handsome amount, but that's still only once a week. there's still several activities like doing lair raids and dojo rematches that give tamer pass exp, but the main thing the devs want you to do are the weekly activities. and that's the huge problem, you don't get weekly activities until after beating the main campaign. now, granted, the devs have said themselves that the campaign was meant to played nonstop with little to no breaks in-between story missions, but im sorry. that's just not acceptable, like at all. i can meet the devs on their level with a lot of things. the best way to get pansuns early on in the games lifespan was to do freetem, which fed into the loop of catching temtem with ideal stats and breeding them into perfect tems, and releasing all the ones you don't need. i can accept that part of the game since it's fairly open ended at to how it can be approached and, although it can be a bit obtuse and weird, it's how they want you to play the game. they meet with the player halfway, and vice versa, in these regards.
so having the fucking gall to just lock the most effective way to level up the tamer pass behind the story's ending and trying to force players to rush it is just shitty. it demonstrates a lack of understanding what made the game's mechanics so interesting and engaging in the long run, and shows that the developers don't respect your time or patience. this isn't even mentioning that temtem is a really hard game, one that you'll most likely need to grind for on several occasions, be that for levels or TVs (this game's equivalent to EVs.)

i say all of this out of love and respect for the game, because i really do think it's great and engaging, but the tamer's pass has left a real sour taste in my mouth, and makes me feel as though the devs don't actually care about their playerbase, despite what they've shown in the past.

TemTem is an interesting design case study. The Monster Taming genre is already a niche in itself, and they're has been multiple attempts by different developers to branch out into different genres.

To name a few:

- Monster Sanctuary: This indie title incorporated Monster Taming design elements around the CastleVania genre and achieved a level of design cohesion that perfectly melded the disparate elements into a solid experience.

- Digimon World: Next Order: This title is the most recent release from the Digimon World series, this game tackles Monster Taming as a pet raising simulator (e.g. Tamagotchi) so taking care of the daily necessities of your Digimon is pivotal. Feeding, cleaning, putting them to bed, etc. Depending on the quality of life you gave them and meeting other parameters can lead to your monsters evolving into much stronger creatures, allowing you to explore further afield and to fight stronger Digimon.

- Lost Kingdoms 2: A much older game from the sixth console generation. This title was more action based as the gimmick here was the player been able to summon monsters contained within cards to fight for them. It may not fall within the more orthodox Monster Taming game design but the principle still stands. Cards within the game functioned differently. Monster's could be summoned to follow you around the levels and protect you from wild monsters as they acted interpedently from you, or you could summon a more powerful variety of monster that when initiated with a short cinematic giving you time to decide which attack it would unleash. Again, there was gentle melding of different design and genre conventions that harmonised into an authentic experience.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the Monster Taming sub-genre can cross over into other genres if care and attention is put into the design of the game. Instead of falling back on the cliches found throughout the genre. Not every Monster Taming experience has to be Pokémon.

Intrinsically, TemTem does border along those design lines. To a fault at least, as the foundations need to be placed somewhere, the mutation here is deciding to take TemTem into more of an MMO-lite route.

The very notion is baffling, surprising, but quite intriguing. The execution is what matters here. And how the game was delivered went about as well as you could've expected.

The most important thing is to assess how developers incorporated a traditional Monster-Taming design into a GaaS framework. A major positive was seeing players active in the overworld, it made the world feel all the more alive and populated, an auction centre is built-in so you can outbid other players for monsters and items on auction.

A real effort is put in place to support online competitive battling, it's this section of the game that holds the most attention and retention. I'm not sure if the majority of online battling players still remain but the bulk of the games design pillars were holding this aspect up high and wide.

Other online features do exist such as raids where players work together to gather powerful monsters and bonuses in a gauntlet of encounters which ultimately leads to the players fighting a very powerful raid boss. And if the team is successful they receive an egg which hatches into said raid boss.

Those are some positives now for some negatives. At the time of my experience, the game released on the Switch, that's where I played it. (The Switch version had it's own issues but I can get to that later.) At the time, (and I must stress this, at the time) the game utilised a Season Pass feature that was justified as a means to help fund the games continued online operations. The content of the pass was the usual suspects of content found within any other similar pass. Emotes, skins or assets that can be used to decorate your in-game home. Nothing overt, but, and a huge but here. A season pass included in a full retail priced release is not good, not at all. I understand the inclusion and it is optional but the fact it exists is concerning. What didn't alleviate the matter of the pass was how grindy the pass is. At the time of my completion of the main campaign I had only unlocked a scarce number of tiers in the pass. The post-game I believe is the best method of fleshing out progress for the pass, but at that point I was done with the game. In the later seasons, season passes were effectively dropped, so that did remedy some minor long-term woes of the game.

The worst malefactor of the GaaS design was the always online functionality. You could not play this game offline, when a game of this nature lacks that option it's as if a noose has been slowly tied around your neck and are just waiting for your internet connection to fluctuate or disconnect to kick the floor out from under you.

For the game in general, it's roots are dug deep into the prototypical design schemes of the Monster-Taming genre, albeit a turn-based JRPG.

For it's narrative, I'm not going to lie this is a very shallow element, as the narrative only serves as a vehicle to get the experience moving along. No real stand-out characters or world-building to be found here. The writing/dialogue tries it's best to present itself as quirky and wacky but it comes across as awkward and stilted. Almost cringe-worthy, again the narrative is weakest element in the design.

The Aesthetics I'm conflicted on, the art style is very pastel-like it holds a nice, bright colour scheme but it feels mundane and quite muted. Character designs don't favour any better as any NPC's you come across are quite generic. The more unique characters you encounter do have a more refined design that do distinct them from the pale horde of standards NPC's but that's the only appealing aspect of them.

The TemTem on the other hand, these are the stars of the show and they shine very brightly. The designs here vary greatly, obvious that some designs are rather simplistic and others are more elaborate. The better designs here you could contrast with other games and argue that the TemTem designs can stand with the best of them.

To further complement the designs, is their presentation in battle. As each TemTem will animate and express accordingly to the their actions and commands they recieve. Attack animations are well thought and fleshed out as when they are cast in battle it the ensuing attack animation provides quite the spectacle.

You can tell the most effort and detail was put into the TemTem's and their presentation, there's a real style here that can only be found in a smaller scale 3D Monster Taming experience. It's a sentiment I can share across all of TemTem's indie contemporaries 2D of 3D. Games such as Nexomon and Coromon. The diversity of monster designs across all these titles are extraordinary, so much creativity and imagination can be found in this genre.

For the mechanics, the meat of the gameplay lies in the combat. Overall, the combat is your standard turn-based faire. But here it utilises a double-battle format, this is universal across all battles.

A lot of depth can be found in this system as the idiosyncrasies are felt with whichever TemTem you have in your party. The idea here is to craft and build the best team possible to ensure victory, The means to do that is to find the best TemTem that can synergise with each other, whether that's covering each other's weaknesses or supporting each other in battle by buffing each others stats.

There's a lot on offer in the combat, possibly been the most robust turn-based combat I've seen in some time. TemTem's operate with an energy meter instead of having a certain amount of uses per move. Each skill costs so much energy and when the entirety of a Temtem's energy has been exhausted it needs to rest. At this point the TemTem is at it's most vulnerable. It's a very technical system that will take some time to master it's nuances. Again, a lot of depth on offer here in these systems, the more you learn of it's complexities the more strategies you can discover. It involves a lot of experimentation, but any player who likes to dive deeply into any turn-based combat will feel right at home.

The only real negative for the mechanical aspects of this title is what usually plagues this genre... Grinding. Unfortunately, TemTem does not escape it's clutches. Grinding is a necessity in this game. If this is enough to turn you away, then I wouldn't begrudge you for doing so.

To be frank, my experience here was on the Switch. Not the best choice of platform for this game. There were stability issues aplenty, whether it's poor optimisation I cant really say. Multiple system crashes did occur but they were few and far between. The performance was marred with some lag, an issue derived from the always online requirement.

The frame-rate was a casulty also, but this is more than likely because of the Switch's hardware. I've seen the game played on other platforms and the performance was generally much smoother. If the Switch isn't your only option I would advise you to get this game on any other system. The frame-rate is at it's worst when there's so much activity going on the screen at the same time, the Switch labours to get things processed but falls short and the frame-rate tanks because of it.

To summarise, the attempt here to marry a standard monster taming turn-based RPG within an MMO framework did not mesh well. The experience on the Switch is hampered by the constant frame-rate drops and the need for an always-online connection, but if you can grin and bear it you'll find an extremely satisfying, technical and deep combat system and a complete new world of original and distinctive monsters to raise and battle with.

No es un mal juego, quiero dejar eso claro desde el principio. Sin embargo, me voy a centrar en lo malo de primeras porque no me esperaba encontrarle tantos de los defectos que sé que tiene el WoW. La experiencia es claramente insuficiente, solo tengo que decir que llegué casi 20 niveles por debajo intentando saltarme lo menos posible al final. Y es que tampoco se libra de los típicos tropos de pokémon, como el sistema de gimnasios. Por mucho que a veces haga referencias o que sea "en plan irónico" sigue tirando de eso para desarrollarse.
Una vez dicho esto, jugar en cooperativo es súper divertido, y qué queréis que os diga, aprecio descubrir nuevos bichos, explorar y demás. Con lo cual, aunque tenga sus defectos, me gusta, aunque voy a tardar en volver a tocarlo.

It's actually really fun but ran into 2 hiccups I didn't expect:

First, there's the fact that despite me not playing Pokemon with any real fanaticism, I found it's hard to replace my love of the dumb creatures. Some of these are quite cute, but just can't cut it.

Even stranger still though is my second knock - this game is hard, and I like challenging games, but something in my brain is hardwired to want Pokemon and Pokemon adjacent games to offer little challenge. I like them because they're a relaxing time. The challenge makes my brain need to work a lot and honestly I think I'd rather play an smt or persona game if I wanted challenging turn-based combat.

I realize both these problems are hugely subjective but it really kept the game from "clicking" for me.

The game is not yet complete, so its difficult to give a proper review, but I really enjoy Temtem! the world is beautiful, and the battles are quite fun. One issue I do have would be the difficulty when playing solo. Temtem looks light-hearted and casual, but it WILL force you to think strategically. One wrong move can cost you a whole battle if you're not careful!

Overall, I've played up to the end of what is available at the moment, and I'm a big fan of what there is so far. Here's to hoping things only get better in the future!

Not one design looks good. This kind of a game gets carried by the monster designs and the soul just isn't there. The story isn't there either, i didn't get engaged at all. It's some weird mix between generic and edgy that can't find a coherent middle ground.
The pacing is also bad and the game likes to assault you with some weird history lessons and deep lore that's out of place in a game like this.
It's just generally not fun to play. It's not enough to imitate the core of a successful series, you have to make sure the separate elements are up to par too.

Temtem is the best Pokémon game ever made. There are so many reasons why I like this game more than Pokémon titles, especially the modern ones (since the 6th gen).

I'm gonna list the main aspects here:
- there is ACTUALLY A GODDAMN STORY
- coop gameplay right from the start
- great combat design without randomness
- superb Temtem design
- no paywall (you can get EVERY Temtem without having to pay for two different versions)
- brilliant soundtrack
- enjoyable quests
- different islands
- higher difficulty
- cool raid design
- great breeding system
- useful online mechanics
- cool level system for Temtems
- Lunas (shinys) look amazing

Overall, this is better than Pokémon in every aspect imaginable, except nostalgia.
Apart from that, this is by FAR the better experience and I absolutely love this game.

Temtem is a game that has some very good aspects but does not focus enough on them and instead spreads itself too thin trying to be something its not.

The battle system in this game and the tems themselves are very interesting, no battle is a cakewalk but rarely do they ever feel too difficult. This is helped a lot by an excellent level curve and islands being broken up by type to help players learn the new type matchups if coming from other games like Pokemon. The game is also visually pleasing with its simple but effective art style and 3d world.

Unfortunately temtem also tries to be an MMO and this is where it starts to fall apart for me. Firstly I am not a fan of MMOs to begin with so perhaps I am a bit biased but it really does feel like temtem has the worst aspects of MMOs, being poor/uninteresting side quests and overly wordy dialogue, without any of the benefits of a true MMO. The single player campaign also goes on far too long, it took me 50 hours to beat, a monster catching game does not need to be that long imo.

I am interested to see what this team can do next with a bit more focus and clarity on their project and goal. There are no plans to add more temtems/story updates to the game, which is not very MMO like but there is plenty of post game content at the moment for people who are enjoying the game.

The easiest way to explain what Temtem is like is to compare it to Pokemon.

In many ways Temtem is Pokemon but done better. The balancing of Temtem is divine when compared to Pokemon, which has creatures like Delibird that are practically unusable in any and all circumstances. Every Temtem is meant to be viable. The difficulty and overall gameplay are also better and more engaging than any Pokemon game. Every battle being a double battle makes the turns much more interesting by allowing synergy between your team to flourish while also making type matchups much less one-dimensional than Pokemon, because having a type advantage against only one of the two opponents still leaves you vulnerable to attacks from the other.

There are also many tweaks to mechanics in Pokemon that just improve the battling formula significantly. The Power Points from Pokemon, which limit the number of times you can use a move without returning to a Pokemon center, have been entirely reworked into a stamina system, which I think is the best addition to the battle formula. Stamina depletes as you use attacks, with more useful attacks costing more stamina. This adds an entirely new layer to battling and teambuilding which I really enjoyed. Moves with a "hold timer" as well as the changes/additions to status effects are also great changes that differentiates this game from Pokemon and nerfs especially strong abilities like sleep.

Inside battles, there is no RNG at all, which I have enjoyed as a somewhat competitive player. Randomness can be very fun in Pokemon at times, but I don't think that it has a place in a game trying to be a skill/strategy based competitive game. There are still random events in the singeplayer, such as encountering luma (shiny) Temtem, but there is no randomness within battles themselves.

Breeding has also been made significantly easier than it is in Pokemon, by removing the randomness of getting a monster with perfect SVs (IVs in Pokemon). The process is too complex to describe here, but the short version is that by using held items you can guarantee that you will get a Temtem with perfect SVs in every stat by breeding a group of tems together that each have 1 different perfect stat. Moves (including egg moves) can also be remembered at any time by simply going into a tem's summary screen! Unfortunately, breeding leads to the first major problem I have with the game, which is the cost of in-game items.

The previously mentioned items that allow you to breed perfect SV tems are consumable, and cost a prohibitively large amount of in game currency. Doing any of the optional side activities in this game costs currency. Raid dens, the battle frontier, participating in "dojo wars", breeding, TV (EV in Pokemon) training, even USING FAST TRAVEL, all cost in game currency. Once you have a good team of Temtem and can farm money by rematching gym leaders and winning games on the online PvP ladder, these costs are not as punishing, but getting a good team is either extremely expensive or extremely time consuming.

I bred an Anahir with all perfect SVs after beating the game. I had about 200k in currency after beating the game. Breeding this perfect tem cost me about 180k, and that was just to get one perfect SV tem before even TV training it. I ended up with multiple perfect Anahir and am able to sell some of the extras in the auction house to make back some money, but at the price that perfect tems go for in the auction house, I will barely break even after selling the extra perfect tems I bred, which isn't even to mention that I have to wait days (or maybe even weeks) for someone to actually decide to buy them. Getting an entire team of 8 perfect Temtem is not possible with only the money you get from beating the campaign, even if you are the one breeding them. This sucks because to make money you need to already have good Temtem.

To fill out the remaining 7 positions on my team, I just used any member of the species I wanted regardless of what its SVs were, and got to TV training. TV training presents a similar problem, you can use consumable items to TV train Temtem, but they are very expensive. Because I was broke (and couldn't make money yet due to not having a team of TV trained Temtem already) I had to TV train by knocking out wild tems (just like EV training in Pokemon). This was a brutal process. TV training all 8 tems took around 5 hours of just grinding, even though I was training multiple tems at once and in optimal training locations. This is by far the worst part of the game IMO. Stamina, SV hacks/glitches, and breeding are great examples of how Temtem transforms outdated or unnecessary mechanics from Pokemon to be more streamlined and intuitive, and it shocks me that they didn't do the same for TV training. There are some locations where TV training a specific stat is relatively painless because only 1 temtem can spawn in the tall grass which always drops 3-4 of the desired TV, but other places (such as the optimal location to TV train speed) have only tems that yield a small amount of TVs each, and also has additional encounters that provide TVs for stats that you don't want, which you will need to run from, wasting more of your time. TV training is actually worse in Temtem than EV training is in Pokemon, as you can only get one of the TV yield boosting hold item, and it doesn't even increase yields as much as the power items in Pokemon do. Yes, you can TV train Temtem with consumable items quickly, but that is expensive and not possible after merely beating the campaign; everyone will have to TV train a team manually to start off and it is a major turn off and I can see it pushing many players away from trying the postgame.

The only other thing that I think Pokemon does better than Temtem is the general world design/atmosphere. The music in the game is not bad by any means, but it is not as good as the music in any of the Pokemon games and doesn't really work as music to casually listen to outside the context of playing the game. And in most Pokemon games, talking to NPCs is satisfying just because they have interesting things to say about the town they're in or Pokemon that live nearby. The NPCs in Temtem are almost all a waste of time to talk to. Even many of the dialogues from NPCs during cutscenes were incredibly boring and I ended up skipping through them without reading sometimes--something that I have never felt the need to do in a Pokemon game. This isn't to say that there is no interesting lore in Temtem, but it is drowned out by the masses of uninteresting NPCs that just waste your time. Temtem does at least have a quest tracker that shows on the map if there are NPCs that want to give you a quest or have an item to give you, which is a very nice QoL feature, but it doesn't excuse the terrible dialogue.

TLDR: Temtem does most things better than Pokemon, such as competitive, difficulty, tweaks to the battle systems, online features, and reducing frustrating RNG. It especially outperforms the most recent Pokemon games with the impressive amount of polish underlining the entire experience. The game does, however, fail to fill the world with interesting NPCs or make the postgame accessible to players who aren't willing to go through a multi-hour grind.

This game is great! It has learned from many of Pokemon's mistakes to make a new and better, although still not perfect, experience. If you just want to play the campaign singleplayer and don't care about postgame or competitive, go for it. The 40-50 hour campaign is great and much more engaging than a Pokemon campaign. If you want a competitive monster battler like Pokemon that is more balanced, with no RNG, and many unique improvements over Pokemon's battle system, this game is great for that as well.

Also people complaining about the premium currency are misinformed. Exclusively cosmetics, with no in game effects, can be purchased in the game with real money.

This game is similar to Pokemon, better battle system and difficulty but it has some major issues with the tone of the game that hold it back from being better than an actual Pokemon game. The mmo elements are not great either, the best use of it was the mental gym puzzle that was so difficult we had a bunch of people complaining about it and trying to follow each other and failing for about 30 minutes lol, it was actually a pretty great time. But the side quests were pretty bad, and although there was chat, nobody really used it other than to advertise trades. We aren't in the glory days of mmos anymore sadly. It's a decent single player game though, you can easily ignore the multiplayer aspect for the most of the part.

Le he metido más de 350 horas a un early acces. What a time to be alive.

A Game Freak le daría vergüenza lo que hacen con Pokémon si a Game Freak le importara lo más mínimo lo que hacen con Pokémon.

Un 10 de manual cuando el juego esté completo.