Abomi Nation

great nuzlocke-styled game! i wish i could change the UI color, but otherwise the rest of the game is great!

For a game that is essentially a reoccurring blood war fought fight for dominance every 100 years, it's overly charming. The aesthetic and sound is goofy and gives off Freaky Forms (3DS) vibes which is just a fantastic throwback to me. Gameplay is pretty straightforward for any monster collector. 4 moves, characters learn moves (You can see the level they learn moves in their party menu), however, your TEAM has a level that all your abomi are, there is no need to level up each guy individually. Super effective, resistances, x2, x4, 1/2, 1/4, with 8 different typing's. The really nice thing I enjoy about the combat is the game does all the calculations for you AND YOU CAN SEE IT. There is a formula displayed on the side when you select an attack and highlight the enemy you're choosing. No more "does this item improve this ability? Does my ability increase the damage of X attack?" It clearly lays out what is happening so there are no more surprises or guesswork about any modifiers. You don't as much "Catch" creatures in this, as you do save a randomly selected guy (Based on seeds, which you can share with other players or replay yourself) in each different zone you enter between towns. You're given limited creatures of varied or not so varied typing's to finish the game with. Permadeath on is how the game is meant to be played (story explanation to it) but can be turned off. [Spoiler]There is a point in the game around the 2nd-3rd boss where you can summon an abomi from another person's games which adds a nice little "add my guy to your game" connection with friends. You can copy their codes either from when they die, or after you complete the game in the past run sections of the main menu to send to other people. You can only add 1 abomi from another person to your game per run. They keep their nature and their names. Here's a few of my favorites if you need some! Snappycara[1D1DA16E66E5GC0E56E86E5E5C0G66GE5G1919GA1 Plasmoth[1D1DA16E66E5GC06E1986E5E5E5G66GC0GE5GC097 Taranther[1D1DA16E66E5GA19786E5E5E5G66GE5GC061GC0C0 [/Spoiler] There is a custom game menu where you can adjust the amount of bosses you fight, max levels, starting levels, even how you can choose the abomi that you meet along the way. You still get Temporal (currency used to unlock items/abomi/areas to chance appear in future runs) to spend from finishing the custom games which is a great. Typical runs can take a few hours on standard mode. I usually finished mine over a few day of playing. Game took about 40 hours to 100% while playing casually (Not turning off animations, reading text, talking to everyone) Overall great cute little game world that can best be described as an upside down smiley face.

This game is actually so awesome it has good difficulty that you can play with to your liking, the designs are glorious. controls are smooth, and it has a pretty interesting story line! Very good game I am gonna have many runs in this for certain Give it a shot if you enjoy permadeath with funky critters and rougelike elements!

I love this game for taking the nuzlocke style of gameplay and just SPRINTING FULL FORCE with it. I know the next game is coming out soon but I still find myself coming back to this title over and over always clamering for that next BEEG RUN, will I have some of my favorites this time, will i be able to manage my items correctly so i can beat the final boss? every time I load up I never know what's coming and I love that about it. also this game REALLY makes you feel like when a creatures dies because there is no trainers you are just a group monsters accepting others to join and along the way they all talk and get to know each other. its beautiful and can be very sad when its someone's time to go

A little simplistic but does scratch the itch of roguelike creature collector very well. I wasnt expecting it to be structured with towns and little events and minigames. It's a lot of fun and the sequel seems to be shaping up well too.

This is a cautious positive review from me. If I had the option, I would choose a neutral rating instead of an upvote or downvote. I originally wrote a negative review of the game complaining of choice. I praised the game's creature design and overall mechanics, which tend to mirror Pokemon's in terms of battle system but a roguelike in terms of progression. I explained how the rigid adherence to a "Nuzlocke" style was problematic to me because type matchups tend to dictate success or failure, particularly early in a run where additional options are not readily available. Moreover, Abomi Nation differs from Pokemon because you receive each new monster from a randomly generated large pool and the bosses you fight are not static -- they change with each run. Thus, a run could easily be sabotaged due to unluckiness from RNG. In a normal playthrough of the game (running the game on normal difficulty with normal setting), you could easily get RNG blessed or screwed at the start, which would massively affect the success or failure of a run. For instance, if your first 3 monsters are all grass types and you are up against fire bosses or air bosses, you will have a hard time. In fact, my first two runs playing the game mirrored this kind of experience. On my fourth run I finally had a good team and basically cleared the game without any losses whatsoever, largely due to good luck in terms of my starting monsters at the start. It was during the middle of this run where I wrote a negative review because I felt the game was too luck contingent. I stated that my preference with roguelikes involved player choice in terms of how to handle their run progression. The developer responded to my criticisms explaining that there were options to tailor the game more to my liking. So I finished up the run I was in and then started a new playthrough. Specifically, the difference maker was turning on the option to choose from two different monster choices for each new party member. I do think that turning on this option makes the game significantly better. I wish it had been the default option. It allows you to better custom tailor your experience. It is not a perfect solution to the problems I described in my initial review, however. In my first try with this system, I started with a water monster and for my second monster, it gave me a choice between two water monsters. I decided to just delete that file and immediately start over. The potential still exists to get RNG-screwed in terms of your team composition if you have the option enabled to select between two choices of monsters as you progress through the game. However, it is about half as likely to happen as if you played with default settings, which is a nice improvement. I do have a few other critiques of the game. I encountered some bugs during my fourth and sixth (the fifth being a rapid abort) runs. For some reason, this game seems to crash any time I launch it with an external monitor. I have never encountered this issue with other games before, so I am not sure what is causing it. However, if I launch it from my laptop and then plug that into an external monitor the game works fine. Another issue I had is that at one point I received some kind of abort error pop up message as I defeated an enemy monster, and the game instantly crashed. However, I did not lose much progress as a result of this issue, so it was not that big of a deal. I tend to find that the strategies that I used during the course of my winning run and in general were not very diverse. They usually tended to revolve around just simply exploiting the enemy weakness and using bulky hard-hitting monsters. Speedy sweepers did not tend to be as useful, and it seems almost impossible to outspeed the final boss due to his high stats. Since permadeath is a thing, it felt like the risk of using these kinds of monsters hugely outweighed the pros. Aside from this, I felt stat debuffing was much more viable a strategy than any other potential support option. Stat buffing took a lot more setup and could be interrupted by critical hits (unless you have two characters with medium level bond). I did not find status effects very useful. This does make the game kind of repetitive. I had a chance to try out temporal shop bonuses, but I do not feel like these greatly impacted the diversity of a run or made subsequent runs significantly more interesting. I feel like meta progression in other roguelikes is a little bit better in terms of making subsequent runs spicier. That said, I still find the basic formula to be fun and challenging at times. Pokemon has a decent foundation in terms of its battle system and mechanics, but the problem with Pokemon is its lack of difficulty. Abomi Nation fixes the difficulty problem, and if you play on custom settings with 2 options of party addition per route, it also gives a decent amount of choice for progression for building up your team composition. For these reasons, I have changed my review from a negative to a somewhat lukewarm positive. I think the game can be enjoyable, particularly for players who enjoy Pokemon, roguelikes, and who may have less of an issue with a "Nuzlocke" sort of style than myself.

Absolutely like it! Has type weakness chart which is helpful for boss and wild Abomi fights. 10/10!

This game is fun, charming, and yet can be tense quite easily if you're not careful. Thankfully, you can check the enemy and what moves they might have- at least in terms of typing. You will not know until they use it first. Yes, there is permadeath (Unless you turn it off,) and it has consequences you would not foresee on first play- including some who evolve based on if they see someone die- or even themselves die. Easy to see by checking how their evolution works.. If you enjoy rogue-like games and the custom settings you can make for each run, this game will be an enjoyable addition.

Game does not have resolution scaling so I couldn't play it without it being really small on the screen. Though bigger thing is this just does not live up to the other games from this studio, also one of the starters just being a reference to bug fables just made me think "wow this is really not as good as bug fables"

This game is such fun. I love so many of the little critter designs and their name puns are great, which is always important for a game like this. There's a wide variety of customization options along with the basic difficulty choices, so whether you want to take away the level caps for bosses or change around the settings for what will spawn you're free to. The battle system has hold items that function like pokemon (either healing or stat boosting consumables used at low health or permanent items with a small but consistent effect) but the battles themselves, while technically 1v1, aren't quite the same. Your first three Abomis are all in the battle, and can be affected by some stat boosting moves on your side and certain attacks from the enemy as well as things like poison. So swapping them out of the actively attacking position doesn't automatically mean they're safe. You do have up to six party slots, though, and the three who aren't in the midst of things won't be in danger. So if you have the means (and friends) to tuck someone who needs it away out of battle it can be a lifesaver. Energy and HP are restored by a bit after each battle, which saves constantly running back and forth from towns or using up your limited stock of items when leveling. Your team level is applied to all Abomis right from recruitment so everyone levels up and gains new skills at the same time, and you can swap out moves both mid battle when something new is learned and freely from the menu at any time outside of battle. Evolutions always requires an Evolution Crystal item, as well as fulfilling conditions that are unique to the critter. Some of the conditions are pretty interesting, like needing to KO a specific Abomi or be hit with (x) attacks of a certain element, but depending on how things go this can be somewhat difficult. It does seem, from my limited experience, that often the really easy conditions are paired with a higher required level so it does balance out some. It can be really tricky starting out if you aren't used to things like trying to Nuzlocke pokemon games, but you can unlock all kinds of different hold items, some new biomes, and variants of a bunch of Abomis with different typings using the permanent currency you get with each run and there are multiple save slots so if you have a really good run going you can still do others on the side.