Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner is ostensibly an RPG, but in reality it’s more of a Pokémon game for an older crowd. Rather than collecting and training cute little critters to do battle with other cute little critters, you trap demons in jewels and train them to kill other demons. Unfortunately, it’s Pokémon that’s the more engaging game.

In Monster Kingdom you play as Vice, a monster hunter looking to take revenge on the demon that killed his mother. While searching for the demon, he comes across an order of demon hunters that has discovered how to trap the demons in jewels. With the aid of a couple young hunters from the order and the knowledge of the jewels you set off to find that demon once and for all.

The need to travel anywhere in the game’s world has been almost entirely eliminated. The overview maps have markers designating the locations that can be visited. To go somewhere you just click on its marker and you’re there. Saves a lot of time traveling places but you lose the whole exploration aspect of RPGs that a lot of players really enjoy. Even when you are at a location such as a town, you’ll often see just another map with locations marked on it. There are some dungeons and so forth to explore, but they’re really pretty linear affairs that lead you by the nose on a predetermined path.

Those of you who think that the time saved traveling anywhere in the game is a good thing shouldn’t get too excited; the game more than makes up for this with its overly long character conversations. Man, there characters can talk and they do so often. Unfortunately there’s no way to skip past the conversations so you’re stuck with it whether you like it or not.

Well so far we have a very chatty RPG that’s light on the exploration – not exactly the stuff of epic gameplay. But what of the monster on monster combat? Well unfortunately the battles are not compelling enough to save the game. It’s a standard and not all that exciting turn-based affair where you pick an attack from your list, watch a short animation, and then wait your turn for your next attack. If you have a jewel to match the type of monster you’re fighting you can trap it when it is weak enough and add it to your menagerie. This is where all the strategy in the game comes into play; selecting the right monster for the battle as some monsters do better against others based on their elemental alignment. Not that it’s a very deep strategy – the monster types have a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship so you just need to take a water monster into battle when you’re facing a fire monster and so on. Once in the battle that’s pretty much it for strategy as you’re essentially trading slaps until someone falls down.

The potential for an interesting and deep strategy-RPG is here, but it’s never realized. The potentially interesting aspects of the game have been completely buried under bloated and far too frequent conversations and mundane battles.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 64%. Become a Jewel Summoner and learn how to talk a demon to death.