Monster Monpiece Review

Monster Monpiece… The game’s name may not ring any bells, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. Remember that crazy Japanese game where players wank their Vitas to scantily-clad girls? Yeah, this is that game. I never imagined it would get an English localization, but sure enough, it did. It’s rare to see games like this get localized, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I couldn’t wait to get my hands, quite literally, on the game. Does the game have any depth? Or is it just eye candy with no other redeeming features? Is it really that awkward to play in public? These are the burning questions I had before going into the game. Let’s see how they turned out.

About the Game

Genre: Card

ESRB: Mature

Developer: Compile Heart

Publisher: Idea Factory

Platform: Playstation Vita

Release Dates:

JP: January 24, 2013

NA: May 27, 2014

EU: June 4, 2014

In the world of Monster Monpiece, there are cards that summon monster girls. In the past, monster girls used to wreak havoc upon the lands, but after the goddess sealed them into cards, they started coexisting with humans. The cards are usually used to play a game simply known as “Battle Set”, where humans summon small armies of monster girls and do battle.

The main heroine of the story is May Esperio, a fledgling summoner that’s studying to become a master of Battle Set. Although May is very strong and has a lot of potential, she lacks confidence and usually fails things because she gives up before she starts. Everything is hunky-dory until one day, a mysterious woman attacks May and her friends. During the fight, the mysterious assailant brainwashes one of May’s friends and turns her into one of her minions. Under the assailant’s control, May’s friend starts attacking city after city. Wishing to stop her friend, May sets out on a journey to find and free her. In order to do so, she is forced to believe in herself and grow into a stronger person.

As much as I’d love to, I can’t really delve any deeper into the story. It’s not because of spoilers or anything—it’s simply because I don’t remember much of what happened. The game’s story is very trite and forgettable. The all girl cast is very forgettable, and all of the characters are just your usual anime tropes. Most of the time, I found myself just skimming over the dialogue and just mashing X until I got to the next part. One thing that I did not expect, however, is that the story featured barely any fan service, save for the obligatory bath house scene and the usual other tropes. Considering fan service is one of the game’s main selling points, I was surprised there wasn’t hardly any. Not only does the game lack plot, but it also lacks PLOT—not that it’s a bad thing, though. Compile Heart could’ve simply gone with story full of smut and fan service, but they didn’t. I commend Compile Heart for trying to make a story with some depth, but it’s definitely the game’s weakest point. Fortunately, the gameplay fares a lot better.

Monster Monpiece’s gameplay can be broken down into four parts: story/dialogue, overworld, deck construction, and battling. The game’s story is told like a visual novel—static character portraits over backgrounds with text overlay. Nothing special, but it works and gets the job done. I really liked all of the character designs. The artwork is great, and all the girls had their own unique look (I wish I could say that about their personalities). Like the game’s story, the character designs are rather modest and not overly sexualized. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing is up to you—just an observation I thought I’d point out. While the character portraits were great, the backgrounds were rather bland and nothing to write home about. As a whole, it looks pretty nice, especially on the Vita’s OLED screen (if you have an original model, that is).

Pretty much all of the game is voiced. All of the spoken dialogue is Japanese—sorry, dub fans. This isn’t much of a surprise since I’m assuming Idea Factory International didn’t want to invest too much into the game’s localization considering how niche it is. The voice acting for the story is pretty mediocre. I wasn’t super impressed by any of the voices, but none of them irritated me, so I can’t complain much. Where the voice work really shines is during the First ♥Crush Rub sequences—the thing where you stroke your Vita like a madman. During First ♥Crush Rub sequences, you touch and rub monster girls until you max out their “Tension Gauge”. I’ll go more into depth about the mechanics later; for now, I just want to comment about the audio.

During the sequence, you’ll get audio feedback from the monster girl depending on how and where you touch her. Now, I’m no expert at Japanese, but I’ve definitely heard a lot of the lines in hentai before, and I know what most of it means. Yeah, it’s extremely lewd. Unfortunately, the dialogue isn’t subbed, so sometimes you won’t exactly know what’s being said. I’m a little disappointed that it’s not translated since it’s what the game is infamous for as well as being an important part of the game. You don’t really lose anything by not knowing what they’re saying, but it’s something that I felt like should’ve been done. Subtitles aside, the voice work is pretty varied during the sequences. Monster girls have personality traits, such as “Big Sis,” “Tomboy,” and “Tough Girl” that determine their voice tone and lines. If the girls share the same personality, they’ll have the same audio. Fortunately, there are a lot of different personality types, so you don’t have to worry about hearing the same set of lines over and over again. There’s a personality for pretty much every anime girl trope out there. If you’re still not satisfied by the amount of voice types, you can even purchase more from the Playstation Store. I’m not gonna lie, I’m sort of tempted to buy the “Smart-Ass Sis” voice DLC just for its name. One last thing I’ll mention about the voices is that the audio quality is pretty good. There is a bit of compression, bit nothing terribly noticeable. Definitely not as bad as BlazBlue: CSEX’s audio compression.

The way you progress in the game is rather simple. You have an overworld map with multiple points. Whenever you move to a point, many things can happen: you can find money/items/rub points (used for First ♥Crush Rub), get card packs, battle opponents who wish to impede your path for seemingly no reason, or trigger story sequences. You go from point-to-point until you finally get to wherever the story wants you to go. Like most of the other things I’ve been mentioning, it’s nothing special, but it works. Now for the meat and potatoes—the gameplay.

Games of Battle Set take place on a 7×3 grid. The 3×3 zone to the left is your area while the 3×3 zone to the right is your opponents; between them is a 1×3 neutral zone. Each player starts with a hand of 5 monster girls and draws one card at the start of their turn. Each player can only summon one monster girl onto their side of the field during their turn. After a player summons a monster girl, all of their units except the one they summoned move forward one space—units cannot move during the turn they are summoned.

When a unit advances to the last square of the opponent’s territory, it attacks the enemy’s HQ. The amount of hits required to defeat your opponent changes throughout the game, but for standard versus rules, it’s 3. Of course, making it to the other side of your opponent’s field isn’t a cake walk—you’ll have to fight your way through. When two opposing monster girls are adjacent from one another, they engage in battle. Monster girls only attack during their summoner’s turn after they advance. Battles are fairly straightforward. Each card has an Attack and HP stat. As you can imagine, defending cards lose HP equal to the attacker’s Attack stat, and die when their HP hits 0. That’s pretty much the gist of how battles are done, but it’s much more complex than it sounds. There are four types of units in the game: melee, ranged, buffers, and healers. It’s pretty easy to figure out how each class works. Melee units don’t have any real special abilities, but they have higher attack and HP than the other types. Believe it or not, ranged units can attack enemies from a range. For example, units with a range of 2 can hit enemies two panels ahead of them; units with range 3 can attack up to three panels ahead, and so on. The downside to ranged units is that they usually have very low Atk and HP. Buffers and healers are your two support units. Buffers have an Intelligence stat that increases the attack of cards directly in front of them. For example, a buffer with 3 Int will increase the attack of an ally in directly front of it by 3. Healers, like buffers, have their own unique stat, MP, which is used to heal units in front of them. If the ally unit in front of them is missing 3 HP, 3 MP will be used to heal it. Of course, healers can no longer do their job when they run out of MP. Choosing which kind of units to play and when is very important. Of course, there’s still a lot more to it than that.

All monsters have a mana cost that must be paid in order to play them. By standard rules, each player starts the game with 0 mana and gains 3 per turn. The higher a cards mana cost, the stronger it is. If you run too many cards with a high cost, you may find yourself having to skip your turn. Another thing you’ll need to pay attention is the color of each card. All cards are one of four colors: red, yellow, green, or blue. When you play cards of the same color consecutively, you get a bonus. Two consecutive same-color cards will net you one mana, and three consecutive ones will give you three mana as well as boost all of your in play cards by 1 HP and 1 attack. The mana and stat boost can let you quickly turn the tables on your opponent, and it is the most efficient way to quickly gain mana.

Pretty deep, right? Well, there’s still more. All cards have their own species. Every card type has two species. For example, melee units are either Dragons or Demi-Humans, while ranged units are either Birds or Beasts. Instead of summoning a monster girl, you can fuse one from your hand with another of the same species (unless it has already been fused with another card). Fused monsters get their stats combined, so they’re an easy way to cut through enemy lines.

Finally, the last two mechanics are potentials and skills. Potentials are passive abilities. A common one is Hypersonic, which allows units to move the turn they’re played.  When units are fused, they gain all of the potentials of both cards unless they counteract. For example, let’s say you have a unit with Staunch, a potential that prevents a unit from moving. Fusing it with a Hypersonic unit will allow it to move. It does not work, however, if you do it the other way around—new skills will overwrite the old ones.Most cards with really good stats have negative potentials to balance them. By fusing them with cards that have their counteracting positive potential, you can negate their weaknesses. Finally, some cards have skills. Skills have certain triggers and cost mana. Effects vary from damaging monsters to boosting the stats of other cards. Most skills activate when the card is put into play. Unfortunately, you don’t really have a choice if you want a skill to activate or not—it’ll automatically trigger as long as you have enough mana for its effect. This is easily the most annoying part of battles. Mana is very important, and you want to conserve it whenever possible. For example, let’s say that you currently have 4 mana and have a 2 mana card and a 5 mana card in your hand. You can play the 2 mana card then summon the 5 mana one next turn (4 mana -2 to play the card, then +3 for mana regen). Your plans will be foiled, however, if the card has an effect that costs 1-2 mana. Regardless if whether the effect will work or not, the skill will go off as long as you have the mana. Obviously, this gets very annoying since you’ll often find yourself activating effects that won’t even do anything. Unlike potentials, skills don’t carry over when you fuse, so you don’t have to worry about them be activated then. At least skills can also mess up your opponent, so you’ll both be equally screwed.

All right, I think that pretty much covers all of the card mechanics… or not. There’s one more left, but I often forget about it since I don’t use it. Each player can bring three items into battle. Items can do numerous things such as give you mana, heal units, damage enemies, and even increase your HQ’s HP. There are no real downsides to playing items since it doesn’t cost you a turn to use them. So why do I never use them? They personally feel cheap to me. Oh, trying to swarm me? Let me kill your entire field. All my units about to be wiped out? Let me heal them. Sure, it may be a personal issue I have, but I think the use of items really hurts the competitiveness at times. The best way I can describe it is like you’re playing competitive Pokemon, but you can use items and they don’t make you lose your turn. It simply feels cheap. Fortunately, you can turn them off during network play, but most people don’t. It’s really annoying when you outplay an opponent only to have them use an item to turn things around in an instant.

Am I finally done with the battle mechanics? I would’ve said yes, but talking about things that annoy me online reminded me of the other major beef I have with the game. You automatically lose the game if you have no more cards in your deck at the start of your turn. You can have between 30-40 cards in a deck, so you may think you have awhile before you deck out. This isn’t a problem during single player since the CPU is piss easy, but a game can easily be that drawn out against human. Because of the deck out rule, the player who goes first gets a huge advantage over their opponent since they do not draw a card during their first turn. Lots of card games do that to balance out going first. Since the first person does not draw during their first turn, they’ll always have one more card in their deck than their opponent. A good player will use that to their advantage. Rather than trying to win the game, they’ll just stall until you lose. There are no ways to draw extra cards or return cards to the deck. Personally, I feel like it would be a lot better to just end the game after 40 turns. Of course, this would make it unfair to players who run less than 40 cards, but then again they’re even more screwed by the current rules. I almost lost an online match by decking out, and I would’ve raged if I did. After all, I did 2 damage to my opponent’s HQ while he didn’t touch mine. Update: I recently just found out there’s a versus option to fix that. If someone decks out, the game ends, and the player with the higher HQ durability wins.

Okay, I think I’m really done talking about the battle system. For real.

The last main aspect of the game is deck construction. There are only a couple of rules for you need to follow: decks must be 30-40 cards and you cannot run more than 3 copies of the same card. Like any card game, you’ll need to put a lot of strategy into building your deck. Building decks is pretty fun, and I enjoyed coming up with cool combos. Every time you complete a chapter, you are able to buy a new set of card packs. Most packs have about 15 or so new cards, so getting play sets of cards isn’t too hard. You can usually get a whole set in 5-8 packs. There are a ton of different cards in the game, so you’ll be able to come up with many different builds. Additionally, all cards have a +1 and +2 version, and in some cases, a -1 version. +1/+2 cards are similar to their normal versions, but have different skills, potentials, mana costs, and/or stats. So on top of there being a ton of different monster girls, each card has at least 2 other versions. The variation of cards doesn’t end there, however. Every card can be leveled up to two times. Like the +1/+2 variations, leveling a card changes its stats, potentials, and skills. My only real issue with leveling is that it can actually make a card a lot worse, such as adding a useless effect or increasing its mana cost for a very small stat change. Interestingly, +1/+2 cards and different level cards are considered different. So you can run three copies of a card’s normal version, +1 version, and +2 version. Factor in leveling, and you can essentially run 27 copies of a single monster girl. So if you really like a certain girl, you can make a deck that’s almost exclusively her. My only major gripe with deck building is that if you use a card in one deck, you cannot use it in another unless you have extra copies of it—just like in real life. This really hinders making multiple decks that share a color since you may find yourself short on specific cards. The only real solution is to manually remove the cards from one deck into another which is obviously very annoying. Oh yeah, one last thing; every girl’s card lists her three sizes as well as their artist. Compile Heart knows who they’re catering to.

All right, I think it’s about time I finally explain the First ♥Crush Rub aspect of the game. Why do you do it? It’s how you levelup your cards, of course. In order to initiate a sequence, you need to spend Rub Points. The stronger the card, the more points you’ll need. Fortunately, the game gives them out very liberally, so you’ll never really need to farm them. When you initiate a sequence, you turn you Vita sideways and hold it vertically. You’ll be treated to a nice close up shot of the girl. You then have one minute to fill the gauge to the left of the screen. To raise it, you need to touch, rub, poke, and pinch the girl in her “weak spots”. You can’t just spam the same weak point, however. Over time, the girl will become bored, so touching the same weak spot will stop working. One amusing thing that shows you how you’re doing is the seal above the gauge. Yes. A seal. The seal represents the girl’s excitement. It looks depressed when you fail at pleasing the girl and gets excited as she does. If you chain many different weak spots in succession, the deal/girl will go crazy, and you’ll trigger Extreme Love Mode. In case you haven’t guessed it, this is where you furiously rub your Vita like you’re wanking. During Extreme Love sequences, you rub both the front and back of the Vita. I give Compile Heart props for finding an interesting way of utilizing the system’s rear touch pad. Finding a girl’s weak points are pretty easy. 75% of the time it’s rub/poke breasts -> rub/poke groin. Yep, pretty deep. When those don’t work, you can just rub everywhere furiously until you find it. You have one minute, so you’ll pretty much never fail. While the rubbing is pretty frantic, I would recommend slowing down and taking your time to enjoy the view. The girls are animated very well. You can see them breathe in and out as well as how their body reacts to your touches. Rubbing their breasts cause them to slightly jiggle. It’s extremely interactive and very immersive. Unfortunately, there isn’t a mode where you can just rub the girls for the hell of it.

When you finish filling up the gauge, the card will level up and have much more revealing artwork. All monster girls have a different artist (or at least from what I could tell), so you’ll be able to interact with all different kinds of girls. Having different artists is great and keeps things fresh. There are girls of all shapes and sizes, so you’ll find plenty of girls that suit your tastes. For the most part, the art is very good, save for a couple cards. Mainly Jack Frost. Seriously, I have no idea who thought it was okay to put that card into the game. I can’t find a pic of her, but her three sizes are B:125, W:65, H:128. Yeah, she’s very gross. My only issue with First ♥Crush Rub’s is that it gets kinda tiring after a while. Got a ton of new cards? Time to spend up to 15 minutes leveling them. Yes, believe it or not, it becomes a chore. Fortunately, you can buy items to auto-level your cards.

All right, so how does everything come together as a game? Pretty good. The game’s battle system is surprisingly deep and fun. Unfortunately, the game sort of  becomes a grind after a few hours since you’re being challenged to duels every two minutes. All CPU enemies seem to play the same deck, so you’ll feel like you’re playing the same battles over and over again. This is quite a letdown considering there are hundreds of cards in the game. The CPU is also unbearably easy for the first few hours. Later on, you have option to give your opponent handicaps, such as making your HQ HP only 1, in exchange for better rewards. Even then, the game is still too easy. In fact, I’ve never lost match throughout the game, save for one story match where you’re forced to lose (Note: while it’s supposed to be impossible, I managed to beat it on a second try. I was very bitter about losing to BS story reasons). Midway through the game, the CPU finally becomes somewhat of a challenge, but is still pretty easy. The game never really becomes difficult until you beat it. The endgame battles are actually very challenging and fun, and actually require you to put in a lot of thought into your moves.

If you want to really test out your skills, you can play the game’s network mode. The game has three different lounges: normal, beginner, and no-DLC. The difference between normal and beginner is the rule sets. In normal, the host can set whatever rules they want, while beginner follows the standard rules. Despite being called “beginner”, anyone can really play in it. I’m not sure why it just isn’t called “simple”. As you can probably guess, players cannot use cards from DLC packs in the no-DLC lounge. I personally like hosting lounges with my own rules since I can set the rules to be more fair than the standard ones—no items and HQs only have 2HP (regular is 3). That way, I don’t have to worry about scrubs using items or deck-out stalling(there’s an option to remove deck out loss that I didn’t notice until after I wrote this). The game also has matchmaking, but I never really use it since I like setting my own rules. Playing humans is a lot more challenging than a CPU, and winning is a lot more satisfying. When you play online, you get items called “master rings” at  the end of the match. If you collect all six master rings, you can trade them for an online exclusive pack of rare cards or a seal stone. Some cards require seal stones in order to level up. The only other way to get them is to buy them in-game for an insane amount of money or via DLC for $.50. It usually takes 2-3 wins to complete a set of rings. This makes getting seal stones tedious, and you’ll usually want the rare card pack. I feel like Compile Heart made them hard to get so that players would buy them as DLC micro transactions instead. Kind of off-putting, but that’s how most DLC is now.

The last important thing I have to mention is that some of the cards have their artwork censored. Normally I’d say it can’t be helped, but Idea Factory chose to censor them before taking it to the ratings board. Sure, I understand Japanese culture isn’t the same as Western culture. But this is a game where you rub women in the crotch. I’m sure they could’ve gotten away with not censoring cards. While having them censored doesn’t really subtract from the gameplay, it’s certainly a big letdown.

DUDE, YOU JUST WROTE A 4500 WORD REVIEW. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ YOUR BOOK!

Yeah, kinda got carried away there…

tl;dr:

What I liked:

–          Surprisingly deep battle system

–          Lots of cards to collect

–          Great character art

–          Network mode is decent

–          Fapping your Vita is absolutely entertaining

–          Single player is decent length

–          Very creative uses of the Vita’s touch pads

What I didn’t like:

–          Story is terrible

–          CPU is terrible

–          Things become a grind after a while

–          Some gameplay mechanics are easy to abuse, like items and decking out

–          Soundtrack is borderline annoying

–          The game encourages micro-transactions (I personally see them as a negative)

–          Quite a handful of cards have their effects translated incorrectly (for example, one card’s skill says  that it boosts the MP of a melee unit rather than a healer)

–          First ♥Crush Rub dialogue isn’t subbed

–          Some cards have their artwork censored from the Japanese version

–          Screenshots are disabled for whatever reason

–          The game starts feeling a little stale after 20 hours

So should you buy this game? If the sexy girls turn you on, you’ll have a blast. There are tons of fan service games out there, but most of them have pretty terrible gameplay. Monster Monpiece is as risque as they get, but manages to be fun. I came for the sexy girls and Vita fapping. I stayed for the gameplay. Believe it or not, I enjoyed Monster Monpiece for its creative gameplay rather than the bouncy girls—they’re just the icing on the cake. Unfortunately, the game’s single player is very boring, and you’ll actually need to play it to get new cards. I couldn’t play single player more for than two hours a time because it became so cumbersome. A real shame, considering it could have been so much better. As I said earlier, get this game if you’re into cute girls and fun gameplay. If you get offended by extremely sexualized Chinese cartoon girls, then this obviously not the game for you. If you like card games and the lewdness doesn’t bother you, give it a shot. If you’re in it for the tits, you’ll have a blast playing a game that has more depth than just the girls’ cleavages. I recommend giving the game a shot, as long as you know what you’re getting into.

Final Verdict: 7.5/10 – A good game, but with flaws

Extra: Remember how I asked if the game was really awkward to play in public? Well I did. Was it awkward? Hard to tell, since I’m fucking awkward even without wanking my Vita. Anyway, here’s a video of me playing it in public. Please no bullerino.

Posted by skiddiks under Video Game Reviews, Vita | Permalink