Despite the clamoring of its fans, Nintendo still hasn’t graced Android or iOS with a real Pokémon game. Let’s face it, fellow Pokénerds — it will probably never happen. That void causes tons of developers to take a shot at making their own twist on the series. Nobody’s ever come very close to capturing the entire magic of Pokémon, but some have captured portions of the formula with resounding success (Puzzle & Dragons comes to mind). Egame Company has recently released their take on monster collecting, Pet Alliance, for Android, iOS, and Facebook.
When you start your own adventure, you can name your character and select an avatar out of four male and four female options. There’s a bit of a narrative intro, but you’ll soon be in familiar territory selecting your starting monster. Will you choose the water crab, the grass onion (seriously), or the fire leopard/wolf thing? It doesn’t matter too much because you’ll be able to get the others pretty early in the game. Fortunately, Pet Alliance lets you name your monsters to, so Oniony and I set off on our adventures through Mololand. I was destined to become a master pet trainer.
Pet Alliance is guilty of my biggest pet peeve in the realm of free-to-play RPGs — you can’t actually do anything in combat. Instead, you’ll sit and watch your monster exchange hits with its opponent until one of them passes out. There’s no skill involved. In fact, there’s no luck involved either. Once you’ve defeated a monster, you can skip any future fights with the same type of monster, instantly claiming its experience and loot. Some of the depth of RPG combat is present: monsters level up and eventually evolve, monsters learn multiple skills that can be upgraded over time, and there’s a typing system that pulls all 11 of its types directly from the Pokémon series. A short ways into the game, battles will escalate to 3-on-3 matches. This is good so that your grass-type doesn’t lose every match against fire-types, but it makes the matches last longer when you have to wipe out all those extra enemy monsters. Picking the three monsters at the front of your party is probably the most important decision you’ll make. They’ll claim all the experience and they’ll do all the battling. You’ll want three of your strongest monsters that offer a wide type variety.
There’s no overworld to speak of. Instead, you’ll tap a map location to indicate where you want to go and then you’ll tap an icon for what you want to do there. You can participate in the ranked PvP arena, go shopping, hatch eggs, fuse monsters, or head out into the wild. In the wild, you pick a location and then one of its five monsters. Once you’ve wiped out each of these five monsters at least once, you can access the Heroic version of that area, populated with harder versions of those monsters. Defeat those and you can move on to the next area. Heroic monsters remain defeated once you best them, but the standard monsters can be fought over and over again. Thanks to your monsters healing between fights and the skip button, you can literally blow through a pile of monsters by tapping Skip, Again, Skip, Again, Skip, Again. It’s a great way to level up fast. By “great”, I mean efficient — not fun. Of course, each battle you engage in takes up one of your 15 AP, but it regenerates slowly over time.
There’s a story to follow, but the writing is weak. There were a few attempts at humor that just seemed like the writers were trying too hard. At one point, my character exclaimed “Pikachu!” from sheer excitement and then wondered aloud why he would say such a thing in the first place. It made me chuckle just a little, but only because it was so bad. The characters say some strange phrases which is certainly a problem that arose in translation. Still, I appreciated that Egame tried to have fun with it instead of making the story completely flat and serious.
The game includes a booklet item that serves the same role as a Pokédex, documenting each kind of monster that you encounter and own. Collecting is an important mechanism in monster RPGs, for some players, the fun of finding, capturing, and evolving their monsters to acquire them all is the most important part of the game. Pet Alliance has nearly 230 monsters to acquire, but there are a few problems that make the thrill of collecting fall flat. First, there is no mechanism for intentionally capturing monsters. Instead, you get monster eggs as loot after a battle or as a reward for completing a mission. You can hatch eggs easily enough, but that’s not the problem. Being able to find monsters out in the wild and capturing them directly is a lot more satisfying than grinding away at repetitive battles hoping a monster finally drops an egg. The second problem is that most of the monsters feel terribly uninspired. They just don’t look cool enough for me to want them — and that’s a huge problem in a game that revolves around its monsters. There’s a baby chicken with a bottle of milk, a blue crab, an onion, a hamster with a lollipop, and a crocodile with a lollipop. I wish I were making this up. Why would I ever want two different lollipop-wielding animals to fight for me in battle? Not all the monsters are that bad, but for every interesting monster there’s several more that are completely boring.
Pet Alliance has good production values and an okay free-to-play system, but that’s really all it has going for it. The content is deep, but the gameplay just isn’t. The best players are absolutely going to be the ones who put the most real money into the game. They’ll be the same players who can afford the rare monster eggs and the AP potions that will let them keep playing without waiting for any timers. The battle animations actually look like the monsters are doing something, but that something isn’t very exciting. Even if the combat was full of explosive particle effects and other eye candy, it’d still feel pretty hollow because I’m not actually responsible for triggering any of the attacks. The game is mindless to play, but certainly that’s what some people are looking for. Unfortunately, Pet Alliance is a mediocre free-to-play RPG at best and does practically nothing to fill the Pokémon-shaped gaps on Android, iOS, and Facebook.
