Website: Monster Forest

How I Found This: My friend Leviathan introduced me to this game a little back (read her blog when you have the chance). I decided to try this game out as it has been awhile since I have played an actual online game and I wanted to play with her rather than just chatting online.

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Monster Forest is a cross between Monster Rancher (it lets you have your own place or so-called 'miniland') and Pokemon (the monster has a metamorphosis state or 'evolution tree') 

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This game is turn-based which is a nice system for those like me that like to do other things on the side like finishing/starting projects. 

It has an automatic function which I LOVED. Whenever you were given a new quest, they would give you a link to the monster that you would have to defeat or the person/object you had to find. When you would click this link, your character would be doing the walking for you! It also let you have an automatic battle system which would let your monster do the fighting for you and it would actually choose the best of the options (your monster would do it's special and strongest attacks instead of just defending letting the enemy monster slowly suck your life away)

It gives you a 'things-to-do' list which serves as a good goal planner. You would receive certain points for completing actions. For instance, one of the goals was to raise your monster up to lvl 10 and after you have done this, you would receive special points. This list not be confused with quests, they should be thought of more like a progress bar of how far you have gotten and an attempt to try and keep you playing the game. What I liked to do was pick one of the things on the list and keep playing the game and finish playing for the day once I completed one of them. 

Eventually, I found this game to become repetitive because all of the quests were very similar; 'seek-the-target' objectives. I quickly lost interest in it only after the second day of playing.

When I play a game, the first thing that I judge if it is good or not is the moe factor. I try and find a really cute NPCs that I can goggle at whenever I pass by. The 'moe' in the game was mediocre. There was only one girl in the whole game that could even be considered as being 'cute' and you only got to have the chance to see her when you finished a quest and were sent to the game's inn.

As for the character that you were able to be yourself? You look like one of those nasty 'PixelBee' dolls. Now I am sure that sort of thing is popular for you girls out there, but for guys like me - we usually are not into 'giggles and rainbows'. The only hair color that they give you as a guy is pink. Granted, it is better than the ordinary and dull color of brown, but they need to give you more options in the customization department.

As for the graphics in general, I guess I couldn't complain much there. There were no bits of pieces that shouldnt originally be there just because of a game glitch. They kept it very precise and constant even when you would get very close to your character and turn in whichever direction.

One other thing that made the game lose my interest is that there were no 'cut scenes' of epic actions or close-ups of the people that you would talk to. If you don't have moe in a game then the least you could do to make up for that loss is to put bunch of action-packed clips right?

The sound was not unbearable as I kept the sound on during my play time. I don't believe there is an option to turn off the game sound unless you mute your entire computer system though.

The battle music doesn't change much though and all of the monster attacks sound very similar. I wouldn't recommend buying the soundtrack for this.