In the great gaming landscape, many copycats have tried to unseat the most giant and well-regarded franchises, most of which have failed miserably. Of all the great gaming franchises, none have stood more resilient against pretenders to the throne than Pokémon, with franchises like Spectrobes, Yokai Watch, and Medabots lying dead at its feet. And now, yet another challenger appears: TRAGSoft’s Coromon.
It’s truly refreshing to see a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and Coromon makes that very clear the instant you hit start. It wants to be Pokémon. Calling a game a “Pokémon clone” is somewhat disingenuous. RPGs themed around collecting monsters span a variety of tones and aesthetics, and many of them take a new, creative spin on Pokémon’s tried and true formula. Spectrobes has a heavy focus on archaeology, forcing you to excavate creatures to fight alongside you in real-time battles. Yokai Watch moves the setting to the real world, filled to bursting with cute and terrifying creatures straight out of Japanese mythology. Medabots does much of the same, but with a truly staggering amount of customization, allowing you to create your own miniaturized mechanical monstrosities to carry you to victory.
I make these comparisons to state that for Coromon, “Pokémon clone” is genuinely the most accurate way to describe the game. From the style of the graphics to the near-entirety of its play mechanics, every single pixel of this game is designed to immediately remind you of Pokémon. It has the same gameplay loop, the same stat system, the same catching system, and a near-identical battle system, it’s Pokémon all the way to the core.
On one hand, you know exactly what you’re getting. If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game before, you can immediately slide in and feel comfortable, because almost everything works exactly how you remember it. But on the other hand, you know exactly what you’re getting. This game plays it incredibly safe, careful to avoid mixing things up too much outside of one-off gimmick dungeons, and as a result, the game struggles to find its own identity.
In Coromon, you play as a “Battle Researcher,” working for the scientific institution “Lux Solis,” but in practice, your role is basically identical to that of a Pokémon trainer. You travel the land, capture every monster you can find, battle enemy trainers, and try to save the world from an evil organization, trying not to cringe at all the juvenile jokes along the way. The game adopts a “monster of the week” structure. You travel to a new location, learn about the location’s problems, clear out a dungeon filled with puzzles, beat up the Titan causing the issue and take their essence, travel to the next location, and repeat.
Speaking of Titans, they serve as the game’s one major difference from the copy-pasted Pokémon formula. Instead of fighting a boss trainer with more and stronger Pokémon at the end of every dungeon, you battle a Titan instead. They’re big, they’re nasty, they have massive health pools and overpowered attacks, they’re sentient, and they spend the entire fight trash-talking you. Titans will effortlessly overpower your team without careful planning and use of advanced tactics, making them some of the game’s most intense and exciting battles.
One thing I’m sure most of the older Pokémon veterans will love is that Coromon lacks much of the handholding of modern Pokémon, and the game isn’t afraid to throw a real challenge your way. Most trainers are a credible threat for you, grinding is a necessity at times, dungeons are long, and you get interrupted with Coromon encounters every few steps.
At least the monster designs are pretty solid. They definitely draw from the same core design aesthetic of the core Pokémon series, and this does result in a few that look somewhat off, but I’d say there are more good-looking ones than bad. All 114 of Coromon’s monsters are fully animated, and run the gamut from cute to creepy to cool. Particular favorites of mine include Acie, an adorable little ball of electricity, Blazitaur, a big strong fire bull, and Otogi, a two-headed dragon monster wearing a pair of oni masks.
The monsters are all well drawn and good-looking, but the rest of the game’s presentation is rather mixed. The game is rendered in a pixel art style from an overhead view, with a behind-the-shoulder view for battles. Every battle background looks beautiful and well drawn, they clearly represent the surrounding area in far more detail than the game’s overhead style can allow. The music is solid, but inoffensive, written in the same bubbly style as the mainline Pokémon games, but the lack of a theme for Coromon evolution is absolutely inexcusable.
On the other hand, Coromon places little effort into making its human NPCs memorable or important, most of them are an interchangeable array of men and women in white lab coats, and you never see any larger portraits of them, just their overworld sprites, something Pokémon has had nailed down since 1995. The lack of major NPCs is one very notable absence, there are no “boss” trainers, no Gym Leader equivalent, and no rival character to speak of. Pokémon’s human NPCs are some of the most iconic and beloved characters in all of gaming, and having no equivalent in Coromon is a major oversight.
One area where Coromon legitimately excels compared to Pokémon is oodles of quality of life features and many options for replayability. While Pokémon still tends to be quite obtuse with the deepest mechanics of monster raising, and modification of those mechanics requires obscenely rare items, Coromon is heavily streamlined and far more user-friendly in that regard. For instance, Pokémon’s vague and hidden Effort Values and Individual Values are rolled into one single mechanic known as “Potential,” effectively serving as a second XP gauge, giving you bonus stat points to assign at will once filled up, and can be reset at any time by simply visiting an NPC and paying a small fee. These changes are individually small, but there are so many of them that it makes the raising of Coromon a snap.
If you’re in the absolute elite of Pokémon players, one thing you might appreciate is built-in Nuzlocke support. Nuzlockes (A self-imposed challenge run where if a Pokémon gets knocked out, it’s dead forever) are incredibly popular among Pokémon content creators, and the feature’s built-in inclusion here is an incredibly forward-thinking move. Another feature designed specifically to appeal to diehard fans is a built-in randomizer mode. I didn’t have the time to test its functionality but overviewing the array of options available, I can tell that it would be very fun to play around with and it’s a very nice option to have for replayability value.
I detected very few bugs, outside of some very questionable implementation of online functionality. When starting up the game for the first time, the game asks that you make a profile to connect to the game’s online servers. While the option to make an offline save is available, if you choose to enable online play, the game will endlessly interrupt you with “no connection” interruptions should your internet become unstable, despite its internet functionality being restricted to dedicated online rooms. If it came up with one message saying that online functionality has been lost, that would be one thing, but the repeated interruptions can be extremely annoying if you’re attempting to play the game in handheld mode.
I’m sure the endless comparisons to Pokémon are a bit offputting, but that’s simply the best way to describe it. And also a good metric for whether or not you should make your purchase. If you love Pokémon, you’ll most likely love Coromon. If you’re nostalgic for a simpler, more adventurous age of the franchise, from around Ruby and Sapphire to Black and White, you’ll absolutely adore Coromon. But if you dislike Pokémon, then Coromon will do absolutely nothing to convince you otherwise, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Coromon is a solidly built albeit unimaginative title that’ll scratch a Pokemaniac’s itch for an old-school Pokémon experience perfectly.
Score: 7.5 out of 10.
Coromon is out now on Steam and Epic Game Store and launches on Switch eShop on July 21st.
For more information, visit the official site and join the community on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Discord.
"Videogames have been a massive part of my life since I was three. With a bottomless appreciation for games both modern and retro, I'm always happy to experience something new and wacky. I hope to become a writer someday, to craft wonderful worlds like the ones in my favorite videogames."
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