Over the years, even if I haven’t (obviously) played them all yet, one of my biggest sorrows with the Game Boy Advance’s library is the lack of dungeon crawlers, especially limited to ones released in English. And I’m not limiting myself to first person, old-school dungeon crawlers like Mazes of Fate, but just… anything like that. One day, when I was just scrolling the vaunted Wikipedia list of GBA games, my eyes fell upon Dokapon: Monster Hunter, and I was befuddled - how would Dokapon, the weird, RPG/party board game work in a single player setting?

Wait… it’s a dungeon crawler? A mystery dungeon styled one, at that!? Sign me the heck up!

Sadly, despite the allure of its genre easily hooking me like the sirens of yore, reality was just as harsh. Dokapon: Monster Hunter was a bother to engage with from start to finish; its over-reliance on RNG and flat-out chance, coupled with brutal consequences from dying makes this otherwise intriguing game an exercise in frustration at the best of times. Buried deep within its poor translation and poorly-explained systems is a good game, but there’s simply too much friction - both intended, and likely not - in the way to ever really hammer home.

Dokapon is very light on the storytelling; you play in a world where, upon turning eleven, children can attempt to become adventurers, explorers who plunder the depths of deep dungeons and fight for fame and fortune. It’s like Pokemon, but with, uh, more suicidal tendencies. Anyway, you’re playing as a little kid does just that (becoming an adventurer, not the other thing), getting into incredibly low-stakes hijinks with laughably inept robbers and other monstrous weirdos. Look, I’ll be frank - not only is the story the most barebones RPG tale you can imagine, this game REALLY needed another pass on the localization and translation front. Like a lot of other games, it’s readable… with some effort. It’s just full of grammar and punctuation mistakes that just makes the whole product feel a hell of a lot lazier and rushed then it should be. Skills and abilities are poorly described, and it’s just generally uninformative at the best of times - a pretty cardinal sin, considering how tough this game can be at times.

But when it comes to the game itself, rather than the board game/RPG that is Dokapon’s core, Dokapon: Monster Hunter pulls elements from the parent series to mix into a roguelike, mystery dungeon mold. The easiest analogue I can make on the GBA is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, though there’s a tad more going on in the battle department then in this one. The dungeon crawling is pretty simple, moving through themed locales from a top-down perspective - even glancing at a screenshot will tell you all you need. As you progress through the game, you’ll enter a variety of randomly generated, themed dungeons, filled with endless hallways, loot, gear and, of course, monsters ready to ruin your day. And they *will* ruin it, that I can guarantee, because when you’re defeated in combat, you will lose *everything* on your person. Gold, items, and your hard-fought gear are lost, like tears in the rain. Rougelikes - genuine, old-school styled rougelikes - do not play around, and in that sense, Dokapon is very old-school… for better or worse.

In true roguelike fashion, gear is ephemeral and temporary, with your only permanent form of progression being in simple RPG level-ups. Despite its ephemeral nature, gear is critical to success. Whilst you can buy some basic gear at a shop, the majority of your weaponry, armour and usable items are going to be found in the dungeon - and if you die in the dungeon, you lose EVERYTHING. You *cannot* put all your stocks into a single weapon; if you die, it’s gone forever. The only other way you’re getting out of a dungeon with your stuff besides clearing it is with the ‘Homer’ item (I guess it’s a play on home run?). So if you’re on a run and finding a decent stash of weapons and armour you’re not actively wearing, it might not hurt to warp back to town and store these extras in storage - this game can, and will, cut your legs out from under you at the drop of a hat, so having backups for when you lose your best gear is important!

So yeah, so far… sure, the story isn’t that interesting, and the translation seems… iffy, to say the least, but it seems like a pretty stock standard roguelike dungeon crawler so far, no? Well, get into a battle, and that’s when the cracks begin to form - and by cracks, I mean entering a battle is like having the Grand Canyon open up between your feet.

Rock, Paper, Rock, Paper, Rock, Rock, Rock, Scissors!

Rather than active, turn-based combat in the field like Shiren The Wanderer or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Dokapon drops you into a bespoke, RPG-style turn-based encounter. Battles in Dokapon are… unique, to say the least. Each turn, each player will have a chance at being the ‘Attacker’ and the ‘Defender’, each with their own set of skills attached to your weapon and armour, respectively. You’ll have four skills, three of which each represent Rock, Paper and Scissors, and a fourth which, from what I gather, generally always activates unless the other character also uses it. After selection, a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors takes place, with the winner utilizing the move, and the loser having theirs totally negated.

Ostensibly, the game encourages you to learn what monsters favour which option, but I felt it was more luck of the draw - and a bit of BS - than anything else. I remember once, I tried to use a Rock attack four times in a row, and the monster replied with Rock four times again, negating us both. Convinced he just always rolled Rock, I decided to go Paper and… BANG! He used Scissors. I think it’s pretty clear enemies are weighted to certain decisions, but it would not surprise me if a tad of input reading comes into play at times. It’s a unique system, to be sure, but there’s nothing fun about just… not getting to have a turn. And if you get unlucky enough, you can just… keep not having a turn, again and again and again.

The RPS elements are probably the biggest element pulled from Dokapon’s main series, well-known for its board-game random chance that could swing your favour in any direction, so it was a shoe-in that it’d be implemented here. But in the context of an RPG dungeon crawler, they just don’t fit, nor work that well. I won’t go so far to say it outright doesn’t function, but it’s riddled with so many little, annoying issues. RNG not letting you even attack or defend yourself is maddening at the best of times, and having a more complex style of turn-based battles can make even the simplest of battles slow to a crawl.

Outside of the RPS battle system, there’s also a weird difficulty curve going on; in the very first dungeon, random enemies didn’t (and they shouldn’t, really), pose much of a threat, barely managing to put a dent in me. But when I got to the first boss fight, I got the living tar *pounded* out of me, sending me back to town weaponless and forcing me to level up a little more on the way back to the boss. I don’t mind the jump in difficulty, it’d just be appreciated that it was signposted a little bit better. And this issue continued throughout the game - bosses feel almost insurmountable unless you’ve got the perfect set of skills on your gear, but as you move on, even normal enemies will test your skill, luck and patience. With such a focus on levelling up your gear and personal level from battling enemies, you *need* to engage in them, but when battles can be so unfun, and dare I say it, unfair, the whole structure of the game falls apart.

Skills and the Beasts

Skills make up the bulk of how you plan your mode of attack and survival in the dungeon, and it’s here that I’m genuinely impressed. There is a huge variety to play with - ones that’ll attack multiple times, or do a set percentage of damage. Raise specific stats, or cure certain status, and having them on both your offensive and defensive movesets helps really tailor what you want to do on each phase of a turn. Any given weapon and armour will come with their own set of skills, but you also have the ability to level up your gear by just using them. Upon leveling up, they’ll get a flat stat boost, and sometimes the chance to swap one of your current skills for a new one. Nifty, huh?

I just wish it was clearer *how* you get these better, higher-tier skills. Do higher tier weapons - i.e, weapons found in later dungeons - naturally have better skills? Do the better skills solely come from levelling your gear up, rather than just already being on the weapon? As far as I can tell, no enemies in this game specifically require a certain skill loadout to beat, but there are certain skills that’ll make your life a LOT easier. Like so much in this game, it seems getting the skills that’ll really help you thrive is nothing more than random chance - just a touch more info would’ve been greatly appreciated.

Upon entering the third dungeon, you’ll gain the ability to lay traps, allowing you to capture and recruit enemy monsters. In battle, ally monsters generally act as an additional potential ‘attack’ during your turn, with a unique skill or two they’ll sometimes throw out seemingly at random. Taming and collecting the beasts of the dungeon is a cool wrinkle on the genre, but the RNG way in which they sometimes came to my aid in battle - frequently in landslide victories they weren’t needed - and sometimes just let me suffer - even more frequently in hard-fought wars of attrition - drove me insane. If they just conveyed if and when they’ll attack a little bit more, even just a percentage meter or SOMETHING, it’d go a long way in making the system feel more satisfying, but like battles themselves, monsters feel too random to be fun to use.

RNJesus ain’t looking down on you

Ultimately, the biggest issue with the RPS battle system is just the matter of luck. You can avoid enemies as much as you can, plan out your suite of gear and skills, but eventually, the dice just won’t roll in your favour, and thy doom shall be sealed. The straw that broke my back was when I got hit with the ‘death penalty’ affliction whilst trying to do a x2 attack; when afflicted, if you don’t clear the status, or defeat the enemy in the next action, you will die and be sent back to town, just like any other death. Not having any items that cure ‘death’ (I’m not even sure if there *are* items that do that), I go to use the ‘Recovery’ skill on my ‘Defense’ turn, which is a Scissors-skill. Lucky me, they use a Rock-skill, my recovery is negated, and I die. Even if there is an item that cures death, it didn’t exist in the 3rd dungeon, so I had just been screwed by RNG with 100% no recourse. My best gear, gone, and even with the handful of levels I’d built up on that run, I was left using weapons far below the par set by the gear I lost.

And I understand that, sometimes, RNG in roguelikes and mystery-dungeon games will screw you. You’ll roll bad, you’ll hit a roadblock, you won’t get the gear you need… but having played a few mystery dungeon-style games, I’ve never felt so disconnected from what’s happening on the screen. Unless you’ve really, really screwed up in these kinds of games, there’s always a way out, always a solution - but sometimes, Dokapon just says… ‘nah’, and it’s back to town with only the clothes on your back. It’s frighteningly old-school, but there’s just too much RNG attached for me to like it.

Everything I’ve described thus far would be at least somewhat more tolerable if the game was more forthcoming with how its bevy of systems worked. But not only does the tutorial only exist squirreled away in one of the houses in town - perfectly missable, and permanently if you chat after the first dungeon - but like I opened with, the translation of the game is underwhelming to say the least. And with the little documentation it’s seen online, and the fact that it lacks an easily accessible manual, that makes it all the worse. Yup, it joins *that* exclusive club.

At the very least, the game does look quite good, especially for such an early title in the GBA’s library. It’s bright and colourful, with the in-battle sprites for the monsters looking particularly good. The sheer variety in monster designs also stuck out for me, though I wish that variety was showcased in the dungeon crawling sections, too - you generally can’t tell what you’re about to fight, or capture, until you’re actually in battle, but it’s a nitpick. The music is quite grand, too, but it suffers from having a lack of variety, especially in the battles that go far too long, and the dungeon themes reset after each battle which doesn’t help them at all.

There is a good game beneath all this - maybe not a *great* game, but something interesting and unique, for sure. There are few dungeon crawlers on the GBA, and even less roguelikes, but I don’t think I’d be remiss in describing Dokapon as one of the worst. Nearly every element, except maybe its audio-visual presentation, is lacking or features some fatal flaw, but it’s the RNG and random chance that’s so key to an already challenging game that kills it for me. You’d be better off just playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - or if you’re craving something truly old-school, maybe hunting down a translation of some of the other Mystery Dungeon-styled games only released in Japan. Hell, I almost think playing them in Japanese would be easier than dealing with this localisation!