So two days ago I get this spontaneous impulse to download and play Monster. Monster is a 2D fighting game made by an independent developer. People refer to them as doujin fighters, because they’re made by a doujin group, which basically means their made by fans. However, don’t let that fool you, the graphics, music and gameplay are all very professional. This game has been available to those willing to look for it for quite some time now, so I was a little late to get onboard. I am not a big fan of the Guilty Gear series because of how they seem to innovate a little too much. I think it’s a good game, don’t get me wrong, but the system is such a leap from what I’m used to that I just never sat down to try and get good at it. So when I saw Monster I thought it was just another Melty Blood, which would make its gameplay as extravagant as Guilty Gear.
I can’t say that I was wrong to think that the game would be very different. When you take a look at it side by side with Guilty Gear you can see SOME similarities, but Monster shouldn’t be compared like that. It’s its own game. Not completely innovative and different but it’s got a system that seems to borrow from different games and does so successfully. It’s definitely a leap away from 3S, so why do I like it? I think it’s a matter of time. Guilty Gear and MvC2 took some getting used to but the first impression that they were not ‘pure’ fighters stuck in my head. As time went by I started liking the games more the more I played them. So now that Monster is in my field of vision I can greet it with more open-mindedness.
Like grooves in CvS2, the characters in Monster come in different flavors called shifts. When you start the rounds you won’t notice a difference, but when your shift meter fills up you can… well… you can shift. When you’re shifted all your character’s special moves have different properties. The three shifts are Monster, Freedom and Tranquility. The Monster shift in general gives a damage bonus to your moves and slows them down, but each character’s shift adjustments are unique. The Freedom groove is a little like A-groove in CvS2, in that almost everything becomes cancelable allowing you to tag on move after move after move for high hitting combos. Don’t worry though, the damage scaling in this game is pretty strict. Finally the Tranquility groove… erm… shift gives you some pretty unique benefits and I can’t generalize it too much except that it seems to give several characters an invincible or auto-guard move.
The characters in this game are all Monsters in some way or another. Either they are furry humanoid beings like Katza (cat) and Delga (dinosaur) or they are some scary human person Siely (bat-winged girl). Ok, so I lied, there is this one character Maya who seems like a perfectly normal human girl with some super-human teleporting abilities. The designs are all unique and their move sets suit them very well. So far the game seems to suffer some balancing issues, but doesn’t everything?
My beef with this game is the graphics. I don’t like the character art. They made 3D models, animated them then either through cartoon-shaders or color dithering filters turned them into flat 2D sprites. I don’t have anything against this in principle except that I can see that they did it. You can see some weird artifacts and inconsistent outlines. The plus side is that using 3D models means you can make your animations very smooth. The animation in Monster IS great. They added quite a bit of extra details by hand which I really appreciate. The backgrounds are not that inspiring. They all LOOK pretty dull, but at least the locations are ok. The menu system is well animated and it has a nice dark feel to it.
The sound is great. I can’t believe they got this much voice actor audio in a doujin game. These guys obviously know what they’re doing, but that was never really in doubt. The music is alright, but nothing to write home about.
The game has online play which should be standard nowadays IMHO. The whole menu system is in two languages. This makes it pretty simple to follow for us gai-jin folks. The network mode uses weird terminology like intrude and wait for join and host respectively.
All in all I really like this game. It plays like a commercial game and it's really well thought-out. I’m currently trying to get a hang of Katze. Spending a lot of time in training mode makes you realize the amount of depth that the shift system brings to the game. Go here for all the information you need.
