Dokimon: Quest

I'd like to recommend this game but it was largely a miss for me. The story wasn't very compelling and there weren't very many creatures that I liked. Those are more of a preference thing, but what tipped the scale into do not recommend was the lack of polish in some areas: - Most egregious is a targeting bug in double battles that makes you attack the wrong mon, and considering that many of the end game battles are doubles, it becomes a constant headache. - There were a number of moments where I was walking on top of sprites instead of behind them. - The battle fast-forward feature is kind of clunky and awkward to use. - There wasn't a way to reorganize moves as far as I could tell, which meant that I had to go through this awkward process of replacing them with moves I didn't want before relearning the ones I did want in the right order. - The battle animations are few and the ones that exist aren't very appealing to look at. - You can talk to your mon in the overworld but it's the same interaction with every mon. It would have been more fun if there had been some variation instead of all of them simply showing a heart. - In other games, a lot of mons have distinct strategies you can use them for. All the dokimon felt very samey and repetitive to me, and it didn't really matter which ones I used so long as I took elements into account. This means that every mon is pretty viable, which is good, but it makes them all much less interesting at the same time. - I haven't finished it yet, but the post-game is mostly just a time sink because it's little more than a back-and-forth scavenger hunt for obscure objectives. - Achievement hunting aside, the standard experience is very short considering the price tag. If you want this game, I'd only buy it during a good sale. All in all, most of the issues I had with the game were minor annoyances but they really stacked up, and the double battle bug nearly made me drop the game before completion. The only thing that pushed me forward was that I could tell I was almost at the end.

MAN did this game looked like it was going to be a love letter to the old Game Boy-era Pokemon games, and honestly, the pixel art is beautiful. You can tell a lot of effort went into capturing that classic handheld aesthetic. Unfortunately, that gorgeous art couldn't save the game from being an absolute buggy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. I ran into so many issues that it became hard to enjoy anything. There were times when I just couldn't even evolve a Dokimon properly? Like it would evolve that Dokimon in my party... THEN PROCEED TO EVOLVE EVERY SINGLE DOKIMON IN THE GAME AND THEN CRASH. Music bugs were constant too—I had tracks overlapping every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time I switched the music to the piano soundtrack which... honestly sounds like they put the music through an AI music convereter... The controls are also surprisingly frustrating. Moving around the world feels clunky, and backtracking becomes a chore. The game makes exploration feel more annoying than rewarding, especially when you're trying to revisit older areas. The story doesn't help either. The characters are about as memorable as road signs, and most conversations from NPCs felt like filler rather than meaningful worldbuilding. What really hurts is that there are countless Pokémon fan games, fan projects, and ROM hacks (WHICH ARE ALL FREE MIGHT I ADD YOU.) out there that feel far more polished and content-rich. Dokimon Quest has a charming visual style, but beyond that it feels shallow, unfinished, and held together by the phrase "good enough." ♥♥♥♥... man did I really want to enjoy this whole experience but just felt like ♥♥♥♥ throughout all of it...

Over time the bugs have been addressed, but there are still too many to be enjoyable after a while, especially as battles become higher levelled. The frustration of consistently having an attack in a double battle hit the wrong enemy because of a targetting bug that has been around for months really gets grating after it happens enough times in a row. I didn't find the story interesting. As someone else pointed out. It's trying to have a darker undertone but really doesn't live up to it. Only get on a very deep discount. The art is beautiful, it's just the game that it is attached to is very rough in a lot of areas.

This game looks very pretty and as a pokemon fanatic, I felt obligated to check it out. I got it on dirt cheap sale because I wasn't going to pay that much for a game that looks like it could very easily suck...and it...does, but not in the ways you might think! It seems like a confident enough RPG, the pixel art is gorgeous, it has a lot of what most people look for in a pokemon rom hack shy of actual pokemon of course, but I found the battle system to be confusing and the art can only carry a game so far before it's ultimate pitfall and the reason I won't be playing it anymore...The story is really cringingly bad. It was so hard to be cool and dark and edgy and it just comes across as corny. I kept waiting for it to really lock in and it didn't. Are the Dokimon dangerous? Everyone talks about them like they're murderers, and what was that one throwaway line about so much of the human race dying!? Like come on...Establish your world better and take the story a bit more seriously. I think this is a great pixel art and game starter pack if someone wants to develop with it as the developers have offered as an option, but I think this game is just irredeemably bad without a story change. p.s. The character hero art when people are speaking are gorgeous and I wish mainline pokemon had that. It looks SO GOOD.

EDIT: I have changed my review to positive due to the Developer's response. They took criticism in their stride and responded gracefully it's clear they genuinely care about the game. I feel with how recycled and terribly made the newer pokemon games are making a successful clone of one shouldnt be that hard, especially with how cheap this game is. To Dokimon's credit it certainly nails the look has a great crack at creating its own pokedex. However it has a lot of minor annoyances that prevented me from enjoying it and overall not completeing it. Firstly the story and how it interacts with your character is woeful. Story in pokemon games has never really mattered to me or to most people I imagine as we are all there for our little companions but this game has a habit of just telelporting you to different towns for story beats including if you haven't fully explored an area. The worst example I experienced literally sends you from the very bottom to the very top of the map instantly... There's also no character at all to anyone. Everyone is a "Ranger" or an "X'er" and even then theres no names or personailty beyond that from what I could see. another annoyance is the amount of roadblocks and how clunky they are to navigate. At first they make sense: You get cut, surf, rock smash and then an invisible barrier that's passable with another item. All pretty standard stuff but then you realise that blockades respawn after every battle. So you can rock smash, take two steps, get into a battle then once you come back out the rock is up again. This partnered with the fact that the prompt is on "no" whenever you interact on something so when you want to spam through the 8 text boxes that come up every time you want to get past one there'll be at least one time you select no. Why is there all that text anyway? why give me the choice? do you think I want to find out what species of tree it is or maybe politely ask the rock to move this time after murdering its whole family including it not 2 minutes ago?? I know the old pokemon games did it but christ its been 20 years and even back then it didnt respawn as soon as you sneezed. Surf is also incredibly clunky to use. You can only start surfing from piers which is certainly a choice of all time which means you can only stop surfing on certain bits of land otherwise you wouldnt be able to start surfing again. It does not tell you which is which as even some beaches with piers wouldnt let me back on land and also means that you can see NPCs on islands of which you cant interact with leaving another thing you have to keep in the back of your mind to come back to once you've been teleported to another city. On my way to the main city I found two different types of log which I'm sure will need two different types of gadget to move which adds even more to this mental map that hasnt had time to set becasue of the constant teleporting and my patience was at an all time low. Got to the city and the hospital which is needed for main story progression has the same gimmick as a cave earlier in the game and I lost all faith of anything new happening if they were already recycling. On my final straw I went into a department store and found pokeballs which you could use in trainer battles to take other peoples monsters and from the depths of an "It's so over" I found a "We're so back". I bought 20 of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and immediately went to steal the pokemon of people I had already fought and....they didn't work. Tried some new trainers I hadn't faced before.... Didn't work either. Game got unistalled. It was indeed, so over.

For note I played this mostly on the Steamdeck and only once on PC/keyboard controls. If you can, I'd recommend using a controller or your Steamdeck for this game, as I personally think the controls were much better, but PC/keyboard controls weren't terrible all things considered. TLDR; Cute game. Doesn't waste your time, for the genre. Monsters all looked unique. Active dev who helps and communicates with the community. At first when I bought this game, it was quite buggy and difficult to play. This is all the more reason I have full respect for the dev team as they've been addressing these problems over time and, when I got back to the game, it was not only much less buggy but actually really fun! This is not to say it's perfect, for example on the Steamdeck the 'fast travel 'mechanic is really finnicky, but much better devs than most medium to larger titles in addressing issues. The story isn't that long, only a couple of hours, but I feel that is perfectly fine as the amount of grinding you need to do to get to an adequate level in the game is much less than a lot of Monster Catching + Turn-Based games. I think I spent maybe 4? 5 hours on the main story? Also, the writing wasn't all that bad. It's not always super serious with the enemy team. Creature designs and overall design of the game was really nice. Apart from one or two designs, they were all coherent and really fun. I'd say my only issue with the game was getting some of the 'blockade' removing items were a huge pain to get, and to get them took me a tedious amount of time to find out what the game was waiting for me to do in order for a character to give me what I needed. I'd also like to mention the dev is in a lot of discussion pages actively talking to and supporting players, addressing bugs and players who are stuck in parts. I have a huge amount of respect for that. I cannot recommend this game enough. For this genre, it's a title that doesn't waste for time and gives you a lot of look forward to. It's currently on sale, as of writing this, for a CRIMINALLY cheap price. If you can afford it, give it a go.

Love the game! Amazing art, interesting story and characters, awesome monster designs! Dev works very hard to fix bugs too. If you like the old style games, I highly recommend this one. It makes you really think while you play and there are plenty of monsters to catch and train.

I really wanted to love this game, and I truly think I did for the first few hours, but my God, this game is just a Temu version of Pokémon with more bugs and a boring story. The art style carries this game, but after 9 hours, I'm starting to really dislike it. After having the game crash on me twice, followed by a section of the game that doesn't explain anything at all, I started to feel frustrated. I'm currently in the final area and feel like there's a massive bug preventing me from progressing to the final boss. It says I can't pass because I have a bound Dokimon, but after checking, I don't have any bound Dokimon in my party. I thought, "Okay, I'll go get the flight license," and I did, but it only works about half the time. This game is honestly disappointing to me. I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price, maybe pick it up on sale instead.

As a retro gamer, I was interested to see how Dokimon holds up when hearing about it now and then. The story is rather straight-forward and you know what's the main goal, throwing a few other things in here and there. It's nothing ultra-fleshed out but something one can work with. Only a few NPCs stand a bit out, the others mostly for random conversations or giving places a bit of a feeling of being alive. I do like the graphics as they're very related to the GBC times but with a better resolution. I only noticed a very few issues with layers which didn't affect anything bad to me. Gameplay-wise, you have a good range of Dokimon to add to your party, some showing up in multiple places, some only in specific areas so I felt the variety was acceptable. You can adjust their stats to your liking the more they're comfy with you, and switch out moves whenever you want so it has good options for customization. Shared exp is something you can turn on or off, only one point of the game really required me to grind some levels for like twenty-ish minutes or so before I was in a comfort zone again. Opponents which aren't disappearing after a battle can be fought again so the need to run around in grass the entire time isn't there. The music is what I expected to be on GBC levels as well, comfy and suiting tunes related to this era of games, just not a lot of different tracks available. Roughly said, below twenty different tracks or so. As the game still seems to get updates, the game has some flaws. I've noticed early on that the balance of certain things is a bit wonky, move pools being very similar which is probably due to the number of different moves not being on the highest end. But it's a bit odd when Dokimon meant to be used physical learn their special moves, or the other way around, reminding me of early Pokemon gens and their move set and pool problems. Enemy AI is a bit odd with them often using status and buff or debuff moves more often than needed, and may never attack in the end, also a bit of a reminder of old Pokemon gens. Looking at the world map, I expected the game to not be the longest, and the pace was kind of fine until the endgame started. Suddenly, others are like ten levels higher than you, fully evolved, a certain difficulty spike being noticeable which got me into the little grinding session mentioned. It didn't take too long to catch up, but I feel the endgame was rushed and not honed enough to flow into the general pacing it had until then. Despite the final boss being like 20-30 levels higher than my duo, I booped that one within two turns, looking like a threat but got steamrolled. It was a bit odd how conversations with opponents are and then get a yes or no option if you want to battle them. It often made no sense by what the conversation was about. Double battles often made me wonder if I misclicked and picked the wrong targets, targeting often not resulting in who I wanted to attack. To sum it up, it felt like it wasn't playtested enough or rather only playtested by the dev themselves. Overall, I still can't say it was a bad experience, simply feeling like the first attempt of creating a game, going the "baby's first monster taming game" route to gather experience. And for the price of almost nothing when on sale, I can't really feel negative about it. Some of the flaws may disappear with future updates. It's a shorter ride and if you can forgive the wonkiness it has here and there, it's still enjoyable in its own right, wishing the dev good luck with the work on Yami Kids, putting the gained knowledge into good use.

The dokimons are super cute, as well as the style of all the game. And something I love from this title: enemy mons are not absurdly buffed like other creature collection RPG's.