Moco Moco Friends: Cute but unpolished

I'm done with cute Pokemon-like dungeon crawler Moco Moco Friends after... well, an undertermined number of hours of play, since MMF doesn't provide the player with a timer. This oversight somehow sums up the entirety of that game: Moco Moco Friends is cute, charming and addictive, but it's also lazy, unpolished and superficial. The game's undeniable qualities are tarnished by numerous shortcomings that prevents it from reaching gaming greatness; instead of a cult classic or even a excellent game, we have a palatable one that is certainly enjoyable but by no means extraordinary. Without further ado, here's the enumeration of Moco Moco Friends' positive sides, along with the flaws that mar them.

—The small dungeons are perfect for sweet and short bursts of crawling. It's like the very essence of dungeon crawling, i.e. exploration, looting and fighting, has been extracted and repackaged in a pint-sized version. Each dungeon hardly requires more than ten minutes to be cleared, but these ten minutes provide plenty of roaming, fighting and looting. Especially looting, because MMF is anything but stingy with items. Cherry on the cake, all the dungeons are gorgeous—those vivid colours!—and sport upbeat theme tracks that make one want to run around joyfully. What a pity, then, to see this fulfilling crawling experience spoilt by an uninspired dungeon design that doesn't make room for traps, puzzles, hidden areas or anything that could spice up the roaming. Even a trick as simple as making one of the resident Plushkins hold the key to the next floor until they are defeated would have pleasantly livened up the monotonous roaming of these never-changing succession of rooms and corridors. And it certainly doesn't help that dungeons are so tiny: with two floors only, they barely qualify as dungeons. It's pretty obvious that the developers indulged in as much laziness as they could get away with and that they would have gladly implemented single-floor dungeons if not for the fact that the game would have become a mere platformer in the process.

—Fighting is a stimulating, fast-paced and streamlined affair that never gets old despite its simplicity. I was really fond of the shortcut system that allows to choose an action by pressing the D-pad and the lush fighting animations were a feast to the eye. Seeing the stuffing pop out of injured Plushkins was nearly too adorable to handle, and their cute little voices made me melt. And let's not talk about their looks: all these fluffy creatures were so incredibly charming that I wanted to recruit nearly all of them on the spot, especially in the late stages of the game. (These foxes and deers were so elegant!) Yes, you read that right: the serial solo runner wanted to play a full-party run. Alas, it turned out that the game wasn't exactly in the mood to indulge me. For, lo and behold, recruitment in MMF is totally random. There is no device à la Pokeball to capture the Plushkins, who decide themselves whether they wish to follow you. And unfortunately, they do not wish it that often. And when they do, they turn out to be mostly useless anyway. Let's face it: the party dynamics in MMF are terrible. Not only are all the Plushkins significantly weaker than Scrunchie, but they are also affected with arbitrary level limitations; and whilst Scrunchie evolves automatically, other Plushkins can only evolve through the use of ridiculously rare items that are a pain to obtain. Maintaining an efficient party in that game requires much more effort that it should, and it wasn't long before I was cruising with Scrunchie alone and using other Plushkins solely as Training fodder to level her up. Once at her peak level, she was pretty much unstoppable and could one-shoot most opponents without breaking a sweat, which was tremendously fulfilling. And yet, had the game been more accommodating and made party maintainance a pleasure instead of a hassle, I would have gladly roamed the dungeons with a full party.

—The crafting system is both simple to grasp and really original, and makes good use of every single collected item. There's something curiously addictive in the act of planting seeds in pots before literally reaping the materials that blossom out of these pots and taking said materials to the sewing factory to obtain items. It's efficient, it's productive, and it allows you to get your paws on tons of items. Too bad that 90% of these items are literally useless. The only items that are really useful—Rainbow Hearts, high-level Awaken items and the like—are also incredibly rare, and obtaining them require an awful lot of crafting, because the production of items is just as random as the recruitment of Plushkins. Every step of the crafting process will produce a certain type of item, but there is no way to choose precisely which specific item will be produced, which is an absolute pain in the behind. And since the selling prices of the local shop are ridiculously low, the mountains of useless items that come out of the crafting process can't even be used for shameless enrichment. Jeez, what a waste.

—The production values are excellent. We're talking about lovely graphics, lively soundtrack, adorable character designs and an overall lushness that makes the game quite irresistible. All that goodness makes the following shortcomings all the more surprising and disappointing. Why is the game world so pitifully tiny, making Gameboy-era Pokemon entries look like Skyrim compared to MMF? Why is the pacing of the missions so tedious and repetitive, alternating between Sealing Evil Vortex/Helping friends train/Retrieving important item—rinse and repeat ad nauseam? Last but not least, why was the ending completely blotched, sending the player back to the point before fighting the final boss even after said final boss has been beaten? That was understandable in older RPGs without postgame that didn't automatically save after beating the final boss, but MMF does save automatically after the last fight and grants access to a postgame dungeon; so why do all the characters keep acting like the final boss has never been beaten? Whether this is a glitch or an oversight, it is frustrating and ruins the pleasure of having cleared the main game.

—MMF has an addictive quality that made me want to play it over and over again. It seemed that I could never get enough of the fast-paced combat, the quick and flowing roaming and the productive looting, and I would gladly have explored more dungeons if they had been available. Thus, there was absolutely no need for the copious amount of fake longevity that was injected into the game. There was no need for this imprecise crafting system that requires tons of tries and retries to yield something useful, nor was it necessary to make the high-level Evolve, Bloom and Awaken items so insanely rare and difficult to obtain. And let's not even talk about the criminally stupid decision to leave Plushkins' recruitment to chance AND to make all Hearts but the elusive rainbow one basically useless in boosting up recruitment rate. If you want your game to be longer, fill it up with extra content, not with gameplay limitations that ruin the fun. 

Mind you, I actually liked Moco Moco Friends despite its flaws, and I do have very fond memories of it. However, I have to admit that I expected to like it more. The mix of Pokemon-inspired recruiting and fighting mechanics and dungeon crawling seemed like a match made in heaven, but the result was underwhelming and missed the mark on both sides. Neither the recruiting and fighting mechanics nor the dungeon crawling are fully satisfying, and the game suffers greatly from it. That being said, I think the formula is quite promising and could be easily improved on and yield great results. Make the dungeons larger and more cleverly designed, rebalance the Plushkins, add a couple of features to get rid of the need for fake longevity and voilà! This could produce the perfect mix between creature-recruiting and dungeon-crawling, and I certainly hope that such a game will come to exist and that Moco Moco Friends will be more than a one-shot game. We need new exciting RPG franchises, we do! Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!