Flammie reviews: Monster Sanctuary

Monster Sanctuary is an indie JRPG metroidvania with pokemon-style gotta catch em all theme. Overall the game is quite well made, the graphics are decent indie-style “pixel art”, music is good and story is good enough that it’s fun to follow and has some plot twists even. The battle is very traditional JRPG style turn based combat, quite engaging and 99 % of the game the difficulty level is just right that keeps you interested without being too hard, where it falls down is that last part of the game has so hard difficulty spikes that makes it nearly impossible to complete even after googling ideal party combinations and finding out everyone else had the same problem. The game is also quite unthankful towards grinding, having level caps and skill trees that cannot be finished, to top it all you will find out that grinding levels for all the monsters was total waste of time since simply catching the monster anew when you’re at max level will give you an almost max level monster, this kind of uncommunicated things about the main game mechanics are typical indie mistakes that I cannot score this game more than 7, it left bad after taste.

★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (7 out of 10)

(A version of this review was submitted to metacritic)