If you can’t tell immediately from the “mon” in Nexomon: Extinction‘s title, this is a game/series inspired by Pokemon. I grew up with Red and Yellow and have fond memories of both, but I burned out on the franchise before it had even left the Game Boy Color, and the intensity of the number-crunching I’ve seen from die-hard fans has successfully kept me away ever since. My lack of experience with the Pokemon series’ modern releases makes me unqualified to claim that Nexomon: Extinction is superior to them, but its large cast of adorable goofballs and unexpectedly competent worldbuilding play to the strengths of the classic jRPG genre (which this monster-catching branch of gameplay is derived from) while largely avoiding its pitfalls. This may look like an amusing jaunt in a crazy world, but by the end, you realize that an unexpectedly epic journey has snuck up on you.

Nexomon: Extinction takes an “angry bull in a china shop” approach to its fourth wall

You begin the game by selecting your appearance and name, after which you start the game at an orphanage. When these kids come of age, they’re brought into the woods and tasked with capturing their first Nexomon to begin their journey with the Tamer’s Guild, which more or less keeps the balance between humanity and nexomon. Nexomon: Extinction is a sequel to Nexomon, in which a bunch of large monsters known as Tyrants—led by the king of the monsters—tried to take over the world and were defeated by a tamer. In this game, that’s revealed to have ignited a furious, thousand-year war between the Tyrants to determine who will be their next king, leading to the Tamer’s Guild being overwhelmed and underequipped to deal with the escalating threat. Despite being a sequel, I found all of Nexomon: Extinction‘s lore easy to follow as a new player.

Part of the reason it’s so easy to follow is that lore is drip-fed to you. You’re never overwhelmed by information that you haven’t yet been conditioned to understand, with many of the quests that you complete allowing you to get your feet wet with concepts like Tyrants and anti-guild “renegades” long before they become important plot points.

Another thing that helps is Nexomon: Extinction‘s refusal to take itself seriously. The main character is a silent NPC, but he’s joined by Coco, a fellow orphan and talking cat who serves as his mouthpiece throughout the adventure. Coco’s reactions and dialog feel straight out of comedy RPGs like Cthulhu Saves the World, with him frequently remarking on the ridiculousness of situations and recognizing that this whole thing is a video game. Most zaniness is filtered through Coco.

Every character is funny in their own way, though, and a lot of effort was put into keeping things light and humorous with different types of humor. Before long, you’ll have a large cast of fellow tamers, orphans, clients, and people you’ve rescued in some way playing off of each other. Even some of the Tyrants have fun personalities. Despite this, the lightheartedness sometimes gives way to seriousness, and these rare moments of despair and determination succeed because of how they contrast the playfulness of everything else. Plus, Nexomon: Extinction avoids veering into its seriousness long enough to wallow, using it for worldbuilding and character motivations before someone lightens the mood with humor. It’s a great balance.

Of course, if you can’t get past the fourth-wall breaks, then you’ll probably check out long before the breadth of the conflict and significance of your part in it become apparent. This is a “your mileage may vary” situation; if you can get into more jokey RPGs like Breath of Death VII, you’ll probably manage to stick around long enough for its more epic qualities (which are similar to Final Fantasy 6-era jRPGs) to reveal themselves. If, on the other hand, you can’t stand fourth-wall breaks and are looking for something entirely serious, then Coco will probably be like nails on a chalkboard.

Throwing onigiri, bananas, and pyramids at random nexomon in the wild is addictive

Since you start out as a low-ranking tamer of the Tamer’s Guild, you’re required to take on jobs for clients every so often, which is how many of Nexomon: Extinction‘s characters are introduced to you. NPCs with a yellow star over their head have a quest for you, but only some of these move the story forward. Others provide you with useful money and items, including vault keys that are necessary to finish some postgame quests. NPCs with pale blue stars over their heads can be traded with. Many of these trades provide you with different types of whistles (which increase your chance of capturing certain categories of nexomon) and experience boosts, which are passive bonuses that stack so long as you have them in your inventory. You’re not only exploring Nexomon: Extinction‘s world to capture creatures, but also to find these items that grant long-term benefits.

There’s admittedly something addictive about capturing nexomon, though. I’ve never been one to obsess over completionism when there are hundreds of things in need of collecting, and yet I made sure to always have a bunch of nexotraps (this series’ pyramidal take on pokeballs) on hand in case something interesting crossed my path.

Part of the appeal boils down to scaling, with the levels of wild nexomon increasing every time you push the story forward. That means that anything you catch can be slotted into your team without the need to grind. If you struggle against a wild opponent, there’s nothing stopping you from capturing it and making its strengths yours.

My nexomon team was constantly changing until I hit Nexomon: Extinction‘s halfway point and settled on a team of monsters with freakishly dangerous skill loadouts. Nexomon learn these skills by leveling up, but the worldwide monster level rising as the story moves forward means that you won’t have an opportunity to catch some of them at a low level, meaning that there’s a lot of variance in which skills each nexomon has. If you’re lucky, you can find monsters with some truly frightening skill combinations. One such nexomon was my Harectic, who ended the game with a strong water attack that had a chance to freeze foes, a physical attack that could cause sleep (to use against foes strong against water), a skill that restored 30% of Harectic’s HP, and a skill that restored 50 stamina points. My Harectic beat entire endgame teams of monsters by itself.

Another monster I found had a skill that allowed it to drain 20% of my opponent’s stamina. Where my Harectic could survive until its opponent expended all of its stamina, this other monster actively drained it. Running out of stamina results in a turn where that monster is “tired” and gets a small amount of stamina refunded to it, leaving your opponent with one weaker attack every two turns. I even found a plant-based monster that was similarly untouchable; plant-element monsters may seem weak at first, but this one had an absurdly powerful vine attack in addition to a skill that made it invincible for two turns. So long as I had items in my inventory that could restore its stamina, it was able to survive any amount of damage. Some of Nexomon: Extinction‘s fights can be brutal, so capturing a bunch of monsters and learning how to best leverage their skills is part of the fun.

Catching nexomon is an entertaining process that involves increasing your capture odds by reducing enemy HP, inflicting them with a status effect (if possible), feeding them foods that they like, and throwing a trap matched to their element (which results in a quick QTE capture sequence that I don’t really love or hate), but the thrill of discovering an overpowered skill combo is what had me most excited to capture every new monster I found.

Nexomon: Extinction‘s random encounters can become really annoying toward the end

Random encounters don’t exist in most of Nexomon: Extinction, with wild nexomon shaking in the grass to show you which spots result in a battle. It’s easy to avoid them if you’re so inclined, which really helps if you’re trying to move from point A to a boss battle at point B without any of your nexomon taking damage before the big fight. There are a few areas where random encounters do exist, though, with caves being the most frequent offenders. These caves are filled with elemental shards (which can be sold, traded to blue-star NPCs for items, or used to construct equippable cores that can raise anything from attack stats to experience gain), so random encounters make sense to balance out the reward with a bit of risk.

Later areas include random battles just to be annoying, though, with opponents draining your health fast enough that you have to run from most fights to avoid having to burn through expensive items or run back to a healer. That’d be tedious enough, but you can also fail to run from opponents three to four times in a row, taking loads of damage in the process. Then there’s the one point where Nexomon: Extinction commits one of the jRPG genre’s cardinal sins: puzzles that have to be solved between random encounters. This is easily its lowest point.

Going through a teleport maze puzzle that requires remembering where you are and which teleports lead where is bad enough. I’d go so far as to call teleport mazes a pet peeve and one of the worst “innovations” the genre has produced. Nexomon: Extinction‘s art style also made it weirdly difficult to tell where the door forward was.

Other rough parts include a mercifully short but nevertheless mandatory stealth sequence that provides you with no indication of how far enemies can see, some typos/missing words, and cosmetic quirks/bugs that can result in the audio having one last gasp between scenes or a portrait getting stuck on the screen for a short time. There’s also one point late in the game where you’re given five sidequests that can be knocked out in quick succession, with each raising the worldwide monster level. It kind of sucks leveling everyone up to match the worldwide monster level, then having your work undermined 15 minutes later. Ordinarily, things move slowly enough that grinding keeps you competitive for several hours.

Both the art and soundtrack have big positives somewhat offset by lesser negatives

My first impression of Nexomon: Extinction‘s art wasn’t positive because I was trying to play at 4K, which didn’t look right. It appears that the game upscales all of its art once you’ve gone past 1920x1080. Besides that, the opening indoor area has a look I can only describe as “generic-RPG.” Those early impressions of the art were every bit as inaccurate as my belief about what the story would end up looking like, though; this game’s visuals are outrageously colorful while still capturing that “chibi characters out on an adventure” vibe from early Pokemon games. The portraits and colors remind me a lot of 2019’s Indivisible, actually, which is a good thing. Many overworld assets look upscaled even at 1920x1080, though, and the lovely post-processing sometimes obscures a pathway. As for the music, it didn’t surprise me when the credits revealed that a bunch of different people worked on it. There are some serious winners here, but the quality is all over the place. It’s like a mixtape—lots of variety but little coherence.

Story: 3/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Nexomon: Extinction review. It took me 34 hours to beat the game and then another 7 hours to finish up the postgame quests. Still, I only caught half of the nexomon.

Nexomon: Extinction review – Deeper levels of mon poking first appeared on Killa Penguin