Crystal Monsters DS
  • Publisher: Gameloft
  • Release Date: Jul 26, 2010
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  • Summary: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can see monsters (called Neo-Seeds) and those who can't. Neo-Seeds wield extraordinary power and battle using tamed monsters in grand tournaments. As a Neo-Seed who has just discovered his ability, you're about to set off on an amazing journey to collect more than 160 monsters and become the greatest Monster Breeder. Explore a vast world, meet new friends and rivals, and engage in dynamic battles that require skill and strategy. Master the nine elemental types, train your monsters through battle, teach them new moves, use team attacks and fuse them together to unlock their true potential. You can even customize three of your favorite monsters by putting friends' faces on them using the built-in camera.… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 3
  3. Negative: 1 out of 3
  1. Nintendo Life
    70
    Although it might be almost sickening to Pokémon fans to see how similar this is to their beloved franchise, we can't really be too critical of it.
  2. IGN
    50
    Mostly just a cluttered, clunky, unoriginal mess to try to get through.
  3. Official Nintendo Magazine UK
    43
    A shameless imitation of a game that's infinitely better in every department. [Oct 2010, p.94]
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  3. Negative: 2 out of 2
  1. ghorahn
    3
    Let me summarize my first (and, truth be told, only) hour with this game: I started the game and tried the direction pad-based controls and found them unresponsive and difficult to line up with objects or npcs. So, I tried touch-screen navigation, which worked better, but requires having the stylus in hand (which I didn't care for, come combat time). I got the little introduction to combat, and through that the chain and blocking mechanisms sounded promising. I did the little tutorial fight where you capture your second monster, although I was concerned that my a-button tapping (which, I admit, wasn't at all fast) got me a not-whopping 39% chance of capturing the creature (which I did). So, the next time I found myself wanting to catch something, I beat it down, used an essence core, then tapped my little heart out...and didn't catch it. And the essence core was gone from my inventory. Gah....apparently not tapping fast enough was going to use up the item I needed to catch something. And I supposed I'd have to buy new ones. Before long, I had no more essence cores and hadn't caught a third monster. Then I got to the first 'boss' fight....I level 10 monster against my L2 and L3 monsters. They were trounced. Clearly I would have to grind levels to get anywhere. But wait....(1) making grinding a necessity, (2) game mechanics that simply aren't going to work well for some players, and (3) losing inventory items when they're not successfully used...that's gotta be some kind of holy triumvirate of awful design choices. Nope, not playing that game any more. And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Upsides: It looks alright. I'm sure there's an audience for the game, made of people that aren't too jaded to grind levels or buy more essence cores when you didn't manage to catch something. However, that audience does not include me.… Expand
  2. Luigibarqs
    2
    Crystal Monters (also known as Monster Chronicle in Japan) is a DSi port of a japanese cellphone RPG game developed by Gameloft for Nintendo's DSiWare service. The game can be generally described as a Monster Raising Pokemon clone and not a particularly good one at that. The main problem and the most obvious one is the horrible controls when moving on the overworld, the d-pad is unresponsive and delayed and holding any button while pressing a direction stops all movement completely. The controls are more responsive when using the touch screen to draw a path the player follows but this gets tedious and uncomfortable rather quickly (in my opinion). Interacting with NPCs and objects like item chests is also a problem, you collide with NPCs to talk to them and you press A in front of a chest to open it and claim the item. Sounds simple right? Not quite. Due to really small collision hitboxes on NPCs and item chest, unless you are perfectly aligned on the horizontal axis or vertical axis they will not respond to you at all. This gets especially annoying with NPCs since some refuse to stand still and if you collide with them on the wrong angle, your character walks around them as if they where a solid wall or solid object blocking their way rather than talk to them and it gets old fast when you fail to talk to an NPC 2-5 times before succeeding just to give information that may or may not be useful anyways. The third problem is the shops, when buying items, you can't see how much of a certain item you are already carrying which usually lead to buying too much or too little of an item type. You can also not sell items in you bag which due to other problems I will mention later is an issue. The Item menu is severely lacking as well, you can only hold 50 items total at a time (excluding key items which don't count) and since you can't sell items you don't need, you need to drop them and unfortunately you can only drop one at a time. Lets say you have 15 medium sized potions you need to dispose of, you need to drop each one, one at a time from your inventory and trust me its gets tedious and wastes a large amount of your time. The RPG battle system itself works decently but not great. Attack moves are split into a few catecories: damage single target (Chain), damage multiple targets, negative status effect single target, stats up single target, stats up multiple targets, stats down single target, stats down multiple targets, heal single target, heal multiple targets. There is also a variety of types with different strengths and weaknesses: Animal, Fire, Water, Plant, Wind, Rock, Light, Dark and Spirit. From what I have seen is that stat altering moves and negative status effects either do not work at all or cause such a minimal difference in gameplay its usually not worth worrying about which means its best to stick with damage and healing attacks mostly. The music and sound effects are indeed good overall but since the same ones are rehashed so frequently they can potentially wear away at your nerves and start becoming really annoying after awhile. The Visuals are surprisingly very nice to look at, especially in battles but the tilesets on the overworld lack variety and looks somewhat bland and generic overall. The story is about a kid that learns he can see monsters and wants to learn how to be the best breeder to discover them all, he is sidetracked when a tournament he enters is attacked by enraged super monsters and sets out on a quest to calm them down, during this process he learns of a criminal organization who plans to take advantage of these super powerful enraged monsters to take over the world. It's a pretty generic and forgettable Pokemon-like story overall. With nothing particularly interesting happening in it. Some of the games good points are side quests and missions you can go on to find rare items, stronger monsters and grind for money and experience and The breeding system where you can combine two monsters of different genders to make a new one, possibly with stats and moves inherited form their parents, the downside is that you lose both parents permanently after the breeding process. Excluding completing the monster encyclopedia and completing all the side quest missions, the game has pretty much little to no replayability at all due to its shortness and lack of multiplayer support. Without completing any side quest missions and not caring about completing the monster encyclopedia, it can probably be beaten in roughly 3 to 5 hours depending how much you grind for money and items and maybe 10 hours at maximum for perfect completion. I can not recommend this game at all, I feel ripped off due to its poor quality and general lack of content in comparison to the asking price for the game. There are far better RPGs and Monster Raising games out there, it would probably be best that avoid this one and not waste you hard earned money. Collapse… Expand