When discussing Monster Taming games, I try not to bring up Pokémon. Whilst it did provide the framework for the genre, many other games try to do its own thing to varying degrees in an attempt to create its own identity.

Avoiding comparisons with Coromon, however, is quite difficult as the game thrives in how much it is like Pokémon. The game feels like a love letter to Pokémon Black & White, using both that visual style and the increased emphasis on storytelling.

Were they successful in creating their own evolution of the formula, or should the game be released back into the wild?

Let’s discuss.

Many thanks to the publishers for the review copy.

ATTACK ON TITANS
The game starts out as you would expect, with a youngster (although it never specifies just how young) waking up in their bedroom ready to start their new job as a Battle Researcher for the Lux Solis corporation. These researchers design technology relating to coromon, and your job is to field test their equipment. The first thing you’ll receive as a researcher is a gauntlet, which is effectively a multitool that stores your spinners (pokéballs, effectively) and lets you activate certain ability modules that you’ll acquire along your journey.

Of course, as a researcher, collecting and battling with coromon will be your primary function and for that you’ll need a starter. There’s a water, fire, and ice type available to you – which fit together in the same rock-paper-scissors weakness triangle as the Pokémon starters. They’re all pretty neat in their own way, and all three are obtainable in the main game (although they’re pretty hard to find) making the choice far less stressful than it would otherwise be.

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Speaking of types, there are seven elemental types in the game: normal, fire, water, ice, sand, electric, and ghost. It may not seem like a lot, but there are six more types that only apply to moves – or skills – in the game. Each typing has its own strengths and weaknesses, many of which are straightforward and logical – although, as you can imagine, there are some combinations that you’ll just need to memorise. Thankfully coromon only have a single typing, which makes identifying their strengths and weaknesses a straightforward task.

As the story progresses, you’ll soon be given a special assignment by Lux Solis to track down the six Titans in order to obtain their essence. These fights are essentially the gym replacements, and are somewhat reminiscent of the trials in Pokémon Sun & Moon. Leading up to each fight, there will be a dungeon of sorts offering a series of puzzles, which culminates in a fight with an extremely powerful creature at the end. These behemoths have a ton of health, and most don’t exactly play fair, so you’ll likely need to use most of your time in order to make it out alive. These fights are generally quite fun, even if the difficulty is a little bit on the hard side.

This Titan questline soon ties into the antagonist plotline, which structures the rest of the story going forward. I won’t spoil the experience, but it’s quite different to what you would expect and I found it quite compelling. The main issue with the plot is that the game ends on a bit of an anticlimax. The final battle is enjoyable, but then the game just ends soon after without really resolving the plot satisfactorily. It’s all rather anticlimactic, and something I hope gets resolved with post launch content.

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DUNGEON MASTER
Whilst Pokémon tends to focus primarily on the catching and battling, Coromon feels more like it’s aiming to be an RPG but with a Monster Taming catching and battle system. As someone that has become increasingly more frustrated by the lack of any meaningful ancillary activities in the Pokémon series, Coromon feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s not just because of the strong narrative either: the world is jam-packed full of things to do, whether it be one of the handful of side-quests, playing arcade mini-games, or going through the many different dungeons in the game. It offers a varied and meaty experience to ensure that you’ll rarely get tired from endless battling.

The dungeons in particular are worth highlighting, as these are typically some of the best parts in the game. As mentioned earlier, these typically precede the boss encounters, and include some really great puzzles. Things start out a little safe, with the first pre-Titan area being somewhat reminiscent of the Team Rocket hideouts – complete with switch puzzles and conveyor belts – but then later things get shaken up entirely: there’s stealth sections, minecart riding, and even one bit where you take the form of a coromon to harvest souls! There’s a ton of interesting activities to do, and the difficulty seems to be tricky enough to keep you engage without ever getting too frustrating – especially as failure usually sets you mere seconds before you screwed up. 

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GOTTA FIGHT ‘EM ALL
Of course, the main draw of the game for many players will be the battle system, and Pokémon fans will be pleased to hear that it plays similarly to what you would expect: using your spinners, you capture and assemble a team of six creatures to participate in 1v1 battles as you take turns to knock out the other opposing trainer’s coromon. Each creature has a set of four moves, and you need to choose the best beast and skill for the job. Where things differ in Coromon is that instead of having a limited number of PP (the number of times a move can be used), the game has a stamina bar shared amongst all moves. Some skills are more strenuous than others, and status moves use up little (or no) stamina at all. It still allows for move management, but feels far less restrictive; if you run out of stamina, you can simply use up a turn to recharge half of it back. It allows for a much better flow than in Pokémon and you can tell that the developers thought this system through well.

Moves available are mostly variants of Pokémon alternatives for the most part, with only a handful feeling particularly unique. Status effects work a little bit different in Coromon, which does shake things up a bit with newly introduced effects like bleed, and creatures are able to shake off effects after a while too. The best part about the move system is that you are able to enable and disable your active moves at will without any need for move relearners or heart scales or anything like that. It’s a really convenient system that makes customising your coromon an absolute doddle.

As your team level up, they gain two types of experience. The primary one is used for levelling up, as is to be expected, but the secondary one grants you potential points to help boost certain stats. This functions the the same as the EVs in Pokémon which are obtained by battling, except this isn’t hidden and you can actually choose which skill you want to boost. All your attributes will increase naturally as you level up, so these are really just to help provide a certain combat focus based on your creature’s strengths. You only have a limited number of points available, so it’s best to focus your attention on two stats that you want your coromon to excel in. Have a bulky creature that focuses on status effects? Add some extra defensive stats. Is your creature a glass cannon? Speed and Attack/Special Attack may be a good idea! Not only does this method allow you to optimise your team, these points can also be redistributed easily by an early game NPC that resides on the upper floor of one of the medical centres. Most medical centres offer some kind of useful functionality like this too, so don’t forget to investigate each one to find out what they can do!

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WHO’S THAT COROMON?
Of course, catching them all is still a key feature here and there’s a large roster of fantastic coromon to find and collect using the range of spinners at your disposal. One problem I find with a lot of Monster Tamer games is that the creature designs aren’t particularly appealing, and there are very few you really care about. Coromon thankfully succeeds in providing a bestiary of 114 well-designed beasts. There are very few misses here, and there’s certainly enough variety here to stop repetition from setting in. This is helped in a large part to the introduction of Potent and Perfect forms; these are stronger and colourful variants that you have a small chance of encountering, but are well worth picking up. These have higher stats than the standard forms, and ‘perfect’ forms are guaranteed to have the best possible stats. There’s even a separate bestiary for each of the three forms, giving completionists plenty to keep them going! 

On the normal difficulty setting, the game provides a decent challenge for veterans of the genre with even normal trainers being tough enough to break you out into a sweat; however, novices can are able to tweak various settings if they’re looking for an easier time. Reducing shop prices and making it so that levelled up monsters restore both their health and stamina are just some of the options you can fiddle with to make things easier. The game certainly still offers a challenge regardless, and the game does force you to grind at certain points to keep up, but these options certainly help. Hardcore players, on the other hand, can tweak the setting to create something akin to the ‘Nuzlocke’ challenge, or randomise many different things. The game really does want you to replay again and again, and it’s refreshing to see such robust options at your fingertips.

Replaying will likely be the key way of maximising your enjoyment with the title since there’s no post-game at all once the credits roll. It’s a lengthy game, but it’s sad to see so little to do once it’s over. There’s a lot of bang for your buck here, along with a robust online PvP, so it’s not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice to see some extra content added down the line – even as paid DLC.

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Coromon is very much made for veterans of the Pokémon series who have been itching for a challenge that Game Freak doesn’t seem to want to give them. With it’s refreshing roster full of interesting creatures and its compelling – although perhaps a little anticlimactic – story, the game brought back feelings of playing the original Pokémon Black & White. The tweaks TRAGsoft have made to the formula are largely positive, even if there’s the occasional misstep, making this my favourite Monster Taming game on the Switch so far. I hope Coromon continues to evolve in future instalments, as there’s a lot of potential here for an outstanding franchise.