Animon Story

 

An action RPG has to have a few things in place for me to consider playing it: a good general system, a combat system that isn't too different from the non-combat one, and tools for making fun combat encounters on the fly. You have no idea how many times I've been disappointed on getting all three of these essential points. Pretending that systems that do not provide these three points aren't flawed is a special kind of silliness, but We here at All the Things Under Heaven and Earth try not to engage in spurious self-deception; only truly foundational self-deceptions allowed on this blog, and only for irony's sake!

So the premises of Animon Story is absolutely irresitible to me: it's essentially a digimon/pokemon nostalgia grab, with a promise of a working system for kid and creature creation, evolution system, and a working combat system. Does it live up to these promises?

Eh.

This may have finished off a fundamental love of storygames as most people understand them in my soul.

The book is attractive, feeling good in my hands. The art is appropriately cartoony without being simplistic. The visual design and flow of my eye is unobstructed. It's not the most incredible book I've ever held, but it's a darn nice one.

The character creation is really nicely done, well-organized for running with kids. I was able to help both children make interesting choices about their animon and their kids in a timely manner. My kids were super excited to make animon, and they were a bit weirded out at the thought of having as much detail on the kids as they did, but they quickly warmed up to it after I reassured them it was a good idea to have the kids be cool too. They're here for the monsters, I'm here to see if a game works! All should be well and good, right?

Well, sorta.

One of the problems of a storygame is that it asks players to hurt their characters in favor of the drama. Some players, like myself, are more than happy to do such things. There's a fundamental disassociation in my soul that lets me look at such mechanics with a more detached eye. The character is not me. I want a good story. I better allow the character to get hurt. Even as a child I understood this.

Try telling that to most children.

Go ahead.

Didn't work, did it?

These mechanics are built around the players hurting the bond between kid and animon, and then mending it. Children don't inherently want to do this. Adults don't, either. They want to think they're the kid, they want to have friendships with their creatures, they don't want to sit outside the construct and watch dispassionately. And so the kids bounce off. And I suspect more than just the kids will. Combat has similar things in it, where the pain of getting a good combat is pushed onto the players to create it. It's a bit jarring to see the philosophy for what it is and that I actually do hate it. The loop is too long to allow one to store up a bit of pain and then unleash it quickly.

All of this typical nonsense in storygames, but the real bullshit is that the game does not decide if its combat is sport or war. Combat as sport requires game balance, requires good tools for building encounters on the fly. Combat as war who cares??? Just try to kill the players and let them figure it out. But both require a good stable of opponents and even better adlib mechanics. And Animon Story has neither. The game just has levels and doesn't tell you how they factor in, as if combat was war, but there's a huge dissonance in that Digimon and Pokemon treat combat as sport. 

Oh, and you can't evolve in your first session. That's kind a staple of Digimon. Why is it slowed down here?

I really wanted to like this game. Zak Barouh seems like a nice dude and has a lot of passion for his game. I really appreciate that level of passion from anyone, even if I don't like their stuff. That doesn't make my distaste for the game any better, but instead makes it less palatable. This is a guy who clearly wanted to design something joyful. And maybe it does for other people!

But all I got out of this was disappointment.

Such a shame.