Indiemon: Earth Nation

April 13, 2013 by Indie Gamer Chick

I have an idea for a children’s game. In it, you’ll play as a pre-pubescent lad who will wander the world making animals fight for sport and for fame. You’ll start with one enslaved creature (possibly an adorable mouse-lightning bolt thing, something that just oozes cuteness) and then randomly fight other adorable creatures along the countryside. During a fight, right at the moment before your huggable little animal buddy delivers a merciless death-blow to the creature it just beat into a pulp, you’ll capture the creature in a cage way too small for it to possibly live comfortably in. You’ll then force it to fight creatures that you wish to enslave, with your ultimate aim being to capture one of every creature like some deranged, asexual Noah.

And I’ve just been handed a cease and desist order, as apparently someone else already had this idea and has made billions off it. Huh. You know, I thought I paid a lot of attention to gaming. I’m not sure how that one slipped me by.

Actually, more than one person had this idea. Sort of. A wild XBLIG just appeared before me called Indiemon: Earth Nation. Quick thought: if you remove the word “Indiemon” from that name, would it not sound like a reality show you would expect to see on Discovery Channel? No? Just me? Okay, never mind.

So Indiemon is just like my hypothetical game would have been, except you’re a dude dressed like a knight instead of a baseball cap and parachute pants wearing child. Well, that just saps the whimsy right out of the concept, does it not? I mean, why does a knight need to make animals fight his battles for him? Wouldn’t he have, like, something pointy and deadly? A sword perhaps? A spear? No? So this guy in his fancy armor and sequined cape is making animals fight his battles for him?

What an asshole.

Well, being a friend to animals (I make a point of eating under six a day), I decided I wouldn’t be a jerk about it. Instead, I would only keep one Indiemon, a fuzzy cute little rabbit thing called Bunnidusk in the game and “Peter Cottonmurder” by me. When I engaged in battles with Peter, I decided to forgo any unnecessary violence against those innocent creatures that I so cowardly refused to fight myself. So, instead of going through all the fancy attacks that Peter had acquired through the leveling up process (which happens roughly every three to four minutes), I would just spend every battle selecting attack from the menu, then selecting the most basic attack I had available. Of course, such a brazenly lazy tactic would lead to failure in my hypothetical cockfighting game for children, where battles would be based around a rock-scissors-paper style strategy, probably something incorporating elements or living environments. But, in Indiemon, it worked. I never once had to use any attack except the weakest one I had open to me. I never had to capture a creature. I never came close to dying. I never once had to use any item to save a fight. Eventually, Peter Cottonmurder evolved (totally stolen from my hypothetical cockfighting game for children concept) into a giant, muscular, humanoid rabbit thing, sort of like Bucky O’Hare’s roided up cousin, Stucky O’HGHare. Tougher, stronger, and probably now possessing erectile dysfunction.

Not that it changed the game much. I could still breeze past any encounter just by mashing the A button until the battle ended with me standing over the bloody, comatose body of some helpless animal. I was amused that the game took time to note that any animal you beat-up is not dead, but rather “unconscious.” Well, that’s a moralistic weight off my shoulder, I can tell you that. Otherwise, you just walk from town-to-town, then go through a cave, and then meet an old dude at a dock, then the game ends, presumably to be continued at some point in the future. Yep, there’s not even a proper ending here. It just ends.

And thank God for that. I sound like a broken record this week, but Indiemon is so awful that I am almost at a loss for words. Thankfully, I have a thesaurus, and shall now list every synonym for awful: abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, deplorable, depressing, dire, disgusting, distressing, dreadful, fearful, frightful, ghastly, grody, gross, gruesome, grungy, harrowing, hideous, horrendous, horrible, horrific, horrifying, nasty, offensive, raunchy, repulsive, shocking, stinking, synthetic, tough, ugly, unpleasant, and unsightly. Well, besides raunchy or synthetic, I think all of those work.

Really, the biggest sin of Indiemon is just how fucking dull it is. There’s no original ideas on display here, which gives the game a boredom handicap right out of the starting gate. But once some of the technical flaws of the game begin, it really starts to fall apart. While going through the cave at the end of the game, it took me about five to ten minutes to find the dude who I needed to launch me on a ship in what turned out to be the “wait, that’s it?” ending sequence. Once I got him, I think something in the game must have crapped out, because I got stuck in the cave for over an hour dealing with non-stop “random encounters.” For a while, every single step I took led to a battle. It took me over an hour to make my way to the exit of the cave. Considering that this was the end of the game, I figured this was done intentionally to be the big finale gauntlet. However, I talked to another player of Indiemon who experienced no-such diarrhea of the random encounter. Huh. You ever get the feeling a game was intentionally trolling you? Happens to me all the time.

So Indiemon is boring and unoriginal and technically problematic. That’s not even mentioning how loose and busted the movement controls are. Whatever you do, don’t use the analog stick to walk. You’ll zig-zag around like a drunken knight who makes animals fight his battles for him like a total pussy. Character design is, well, I suppose no more lazy or absurd than your average new Pokemon is these days. But, I can’t even recommend Indiemon as the cheap dollar store knock-off that I suppose it has positioned itself to be. It’s just too bland. It actually manages to completely miss the point of what made Pokemon work. Remove all strategy from that series, make the artwork more crude and amateurish, and take away the childlike sense of wonder, and you would have a game ill-suited towards teaching kids the kind of skills needed to be the starting quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Indiemon: Earth Nation was developed by RicolaVG

80 Microsoft Points think a Pokemon parody, similar to Doom & Destiny or Cthulhu Saves the World, could work as an XBLIG in the making of this review.