Dokpaon Monster Hunter is a mystery dungeon style game that feels like a lazy copy and paste of their board game mechanics. The result is a game that feels slow, tedious, lazy, and poorly thought out.
The game is terribly translated, and not in the way that gives it character like in later entries, it's just barely understandable. The story is childish nonsense anyway, NPC's spout generic lines that repeat the same thing over and over, and then you go to the first dungeon.
There's no tutorial or explanation on how to play, the items you get have no use because enemies die in one hit and you take 1 damage if you do get hit, the combat transitions are very slow and enemies are very common so that gets old fast, and the combat music is a very annoying 3 second loop.
All the tactical variety is in small numerical buffs to attack, defence, or speed, as are the skills you start unlocking, and the bonuses from the weapons you discover. Not that you have any use for them. Enemy sprites in the dungeon also don't look anything like what you end up fighting, and the level designs are incredibly simplistic with no real features.
When I finally got to the boss it one shot me despite having found some 'prevent knockout' items. Maybe if I'd had a reason to figure out what the rock paper scissors mechanics do or if I'd gotten lucky and found better gear I might have survived? All I know for sure is I lost everything found so far and had to start the dungeon over from scratch. I didn't feel like losing another hour to playing more of this.
The copy pasted combat mechanics from the other Dokapon games feel ironically out of place in this rpg game, combat is tedious, poorly implemented, and unintuitive. Menus don't work how you would expect, the skills are numeric and boring, the items and equipment are lacklustre, the maps are dull, the enemies are generic, and the writing is terrible. Maybe mystery dungeons aren't my thing but the core loop was just very off putting. Low marks all around.
The game is terribly translated, and not in the way that gives it character like in later entries, it's just barely understandable. The story is childish nonsense anyway, NPC's spout generic lines that repeat the same thing over and over, and then you go to the first dungeon.
There's no tutorial or explanation on how to play, the items you get have no use because enemies die in one hit and you take 1 damage if you do get hit, the combat transitions are very slow and enemies are very common so that gets old fast, and the combat music is a very annoying 3 second loop.
All the tactical variety is in small numerical buffs to attack, defence, or speed, as are the skills you start unlocking, and the bonuses from the weapons you discover. Not that you have any use for them. Enemy sprites in the dungeon also don't look anything like what you end up fighting, and the level designs are incredibly simplistic with no real features.
When I finally got to the boss it one shot me despite having found some 'prevent knockout' items. Maybe if I'd had a reason to figure out what the rock paper scissors mechanics do or if I'd gotten lucky and found better gear I might have survived? All I know for sure is I lost everything found so far and had to start the dungeon over from scratch. I didn't feel like losing another hour to playing more of this.
The copy pasted combat mechanics from the other Dokapon games feel ironically out of place in this rpg game, combat is tedious, poorly implemented, and unintuitive. Menus don't work how you would expect, the skills are numeric and boring, the items and equipment are lacklustre, the maps are dull, the enemies are generic, and the writing is terrible. Maybe mystery dungeons aren't my thing but the core loop was just very off putting. Low marks all around.