Key to the Kingdom
Dokapon Kingdom can be an absolute blast, but you need one very important thing: friends.
Published: October 26, 2008
Dokapon Kingdom hit almost two weeks ago, and yet we still haven't been able to get our review posted despite having the game for somewhere around a good month or so. The reason? This is a pure multiplayer experience, just like most party games, and we rarely had enough people around that could donate a few hours. Frankly speaking, it sucks trying to grind your way through things because so much of the game is a passive experience, meaning you'll take your turn, move your character, maybe get into a battle or gain a roulette-powered item and then move on to the next turn where the AI characters will speedily zip through the same actions in order until it's your turn again.
When playing against friends, this is fine, since you're rather invested, be it for good or ill, in how they're doing. When playing against CPU players that will blatantly cheat to get the perfect number of moves to occupy everything from equipment squares to towns to end goals, it's just not as much fun. Yes, you can eke out a bit of enjoyment from the Story Mode's dozen-plus hours of gameplay, but the meat of the game is in playing with other actual humans, making the lack of an online play option that much more tragic.
Still, this is a party game/RPG, and it's meant to be a social, sit-on-the-couch kind of experience. As much I'd love to go back into detail on how things work (that's a lie; I'm lazy and the game is insanely deep), it's probably better just to point you in the direction of our own hands-on time with the game; you'll get the basics and understand some of the flow of things at the very least (or, uh, don't read it and you won't).
No matter what you do or if you play catch-up, the gist is this: take a board game not unlike the Mario Party series, throw in a bunch of typical JRPG mainstays like classes (mage, warrior, thief), spells, turn-based combat (though in this case it's something of a glorified rock/paper/scissors approach), and wrap it all around a cutesy super-deformed set of characters and their quaint little world. It's a simple way to start, but because this is an RPG -- and an exceptionally deep one at that should you really dig into it -- most of the time spent in the game will be handled doing typical RPG things like grinding and tackling random encounters.
In fact, so much of the game comes down to the whims of the Life-like spinner that it'd be easy to think the game a set of utterly random happenings, but that's honestly pretty far off. Yes, you'll have to contend with the luck of the spin, but the game doles out enough resources to essentially bypass it that you generally have a decent amount of control over what's happening. Just to keep with the party game atmosphere, though, there are events specifically designed to allow players lagging behind to smite their friends-turned-foes with a special deal with the devil, for instance. Fun, no?
All this means is the game is incredibly accessible, though younger players may well just assume everything is in fact random. That's fine, honestly, since the uber-hardcore nerd-out types will have their RPG truisms to juggle and kids or casual players can just enjoy the game as-is without having to dig too deep. Because the game does a fairly good job of balancing strategy and luck, newcomers will have no problem actually jumping in and hanging with the more advanced players -- especially because there are things that can happen when someone has too huge a lead.
And so, you'll take turns, skipping around the map, taking over towns and/or stealing items via rock/paper/scissors duels, eventually amassing (or trying to, anyway) enough cash to be called the winner. It's not a quick process; I'd recommend at least a good hour or so to actually get through a basic game, and it's not unheard of to double that if you've got a lot of good players that like taking their time. There is an option to save and come back to things later, but I found that doing so left everyone a little out of it and it took a bit too long to get back into things. It's an RPG, sure, but the way the game flows means that there's no real central story or events to latch onto to make it easy to come back to things.
The game's look is certainly a major contributor to everything being accessible. The generally low-poly characters and bright colors do plenty to make it seem like a kids game (though it's anything but), and the cartoonish approach the voice actors took when delivering the characters' lines doesn't help matters any. The caricatures of different regional inhabitants and overall plucky music just help sell things that much more to the younger crowd.
It's also going to limit the initial appeal of the game, which is a double-edged sword. Sure, it's enticing for younger players, and those that stick around long enough are going to find a real, honest-to-goodness RPG here (though certainly not in the traditional sense), but there is an additional hurdle to be overcome. Luckily, if there's one publisher that knows how to target and sell to niche markets, it's Atlus, and across the board their usual superlative localization and translation has worked its magic. Sure, the game is cutesy, but that doesn't mean it's only for kids.
If you don't have friends, it's probably best not to pick this one up. I don't mean that in the loner sense; you'll actually need at least one other human (and things get exponentially more crazy the more you add) that will sit with you for an hour or more and grind, fight, steal, capture and level up with you. Doing it with the CPU characters just makes the game seem unfair (even on the lowest difficulty) and cheats you out of the real reason Spike created the game: it's fun to mess with friends -- even if it does destroy friendships for a little while.
When playing against friends, this is fine, since you're rather invested, be it for good or ill, in how they're doing. When playing against CPU players that will blatantly cheat to get the perfect number of moves to occupy everything from equipment squares to towns to end goals, it's just not as much fun. Yes, you can eke out a bit of enjoyment from the Story Mode's dozen-plus hours of gameplay, but the meat of the game is in playing with other actual humans, making the lack of an online play option that much more tragic.
Still, this is a party game/RPG, and it's meant to be a social, sit-on-the-couch kind of experience. As much I'd love to go back into detail on how things work (that's a lie; I'm lazy and the game is insanely deep), it's probably better just to point you in the direction of our own hands-on time with the game; you'll get the basics and understand some of the flow of things at the very least (or, uh, don't read it and you won't).
No matter what you do or if you play catch-up, the gist is this: take a board game not unlike the Mario Party series, throw in a bunch of typical JRPG mainstays like classes (mage, warrior, thief), spells, turn-based combat (though in this case it's something of a glorified rock/paper/scissors approach), and wrap it all around a cutesy super-deformed set of characters and their quaint little world. It's a simple way to start, but because this is an RPG -- and an exceptionally deep one at that should you really dig into it -- most of the time spent in the game will be handled doing typical RPG things like grinding and tackling random encounters.
In fact, so much of the game comes down to the whims of the Life-like spinner that it'd be easy to think the game a set of utterly random happenings, but that's honestly pretty far off. Yes, you'll have to contend with the luck of the spin, but the game doles out enough resources to essentially bypass it that you generally have a decent amount of control over what's happening. Just to keep with the party game atmosphere, though, there are events specifically designed to allow players lagging behind to smite their friends-turned-foes with a special deal with the devil, for instance. Fun, no?
All this means is the game is incredibly accessible, though younger players may well just assume everything is in fact random. That's fine, honestly, since the uber-hardcore nerd-out types will have their RPG truisms to juggle and kids or casual players can just enjoy the game as-is without having to dig too deep. Because the game does a fairly good job of balancing strategy and luck, newcomers will have no problem actually jumping in and hanging with the more advanced players -- especially because there are things that can happen when someone has too huge a lead.
And so, you'll take turns, skipping around the map, taking over towns and/or stealing items via rock/paper/scissors duels, eventually amassing (or trying to, anyway) enough cash to be called the winner. It's not a quick process; I'd recommend at least a good hour or so to actually get through a basic game, and it's not unheard of to double that if you've got a lot of good players that like taking their time. There is an option to save and come back to things later, but I found that doing so left everyone a little out of it and it took a bit too long to get back into things. It's an RPG, sure, but the way the game flows means that there's no real central story or events to latch onto to make it easy to come back to things.
The game's look is certainly a major contributor to everything being accessible. The generally low-poly characters and bright colors do plenty to make it seem like a kids game (though it's anything but), and the cartoonish approach the voice actors took when delivering the characters' lines doesn't help matters any. The caricatures of different regional inhabitants and overall plucky music just help sell things that much more to the younger crowd.
It's also going to limit the initial appeal of the game, which is a double-edged sword. Sure, it's enticing for younger players, and those that stick around long enough are going to find a real, honest-to-goodness RPG here (though certainly not in the traditional sense), but there is an additional hurdle to be overcome. Luckily, if there's one publisher that knows how to target and sell to niche markets, it's Atlus, and across the board their usual superlative localization and translation has worked its magic. Sure, the game is cutesy, but that doesn't mean it's only for kids.
If you don't have friends, it's probably best not to pick this one up. I don't mean that in the loner sense; you'll actually need at least one other human (and things get exponentially more crazy the more you add) that will sit with you for an hour or more and grind, fight, steal, capture and level up with you. Doing it with the CPU characters just makes the game seem unfair (even on the lowest difficulty) and cheats you out of the real reason Spike created the game: it's fun to mess with friends -- even if it does destroy friendships for a little while.
