With that being said, I do remember Nexomon: Extinction being a little more refined and brave with its subversion – I’m probably splitting hairs for something that ultimately doesn’t matter, but I do remember thinking that Extinction was surprisingly clever with some of its plot twists and arcs. There are even some fourth-wall-breaking jokes in there, and we all know that that’s a marker of a developer that is having fun with the writing.

A little like Nexomon: Extinction, Nexomon itself is less a subservient slave in homage to Pokémon than it is a game that recognises the silliness of it all, and you’ll come across all kinds of little in-jokes and outright humour as you play along. There are eight “gyms” to tackle, a mysterious evil group to deal with and… well, that’s pretty much all that drives any of these games in question forward. The game follows a similar structure to Pokémon, too. I wanted to go on adventures with all of them. Nexomon’s monsters are, generally speaking, much more aligned with the philosophy of early Pokémon, and because so many of them were so cute, it was really hard to choose which of them to put into my party. Later generations of Pokémon have become MacGuyver-like contraptions that make very little sense, and aren’t all that pleasant to my eyes (and if you don’t know what a “MacGuyver” is then your eyes aren’t old enough to feel the weariness that mine do). While I generally enjoy the direction that Game Freak has taken Pokémon, I do prefer the earlier generation monsters, which were more readily comparable to animals that we see in the really real world.

It’s the designs of these sprites that really drew me in. By that I mean the game plays out through a bright, colourful, and simple top-down perspective, monsters lie in ambush in patches of grass, and battles involve simply-animated sprites whaling away at one another. There are over 300 ‘mons to collect, in just about every way the game is the homage to early-era Pokémon that “fan” base keep screeching at Game Freak to return to. That’s not without caveats, but what the game does well overwhelms any of the issues that you might have with it. I guess we console players could call it a prequel?Īnyhow, it’s also very, very, very good. I think it was a surprising success for the publisher (and it did rightfully deserve to be a success since it is excellent), and so, one year on the team has come back to port the original Nexomon from mobile devices and PC to console as well. Last year, at around this time, PQube released Nexomon: Extinction on various platforms. Nexomon’s console releases have come in an odd order.

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