Intro

As you might have read in my Pokémon GO blog, I’m a big fan of the Pokémon franchise. Nowadays, however, the Pokémon games have lost a bit of their shine. The latest Switch entry Pokémon Sword sits unfinished in my Nintendo Switch case and while I did beat the elite four in Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu, it did not really scratch that Pokémon itch.

When I saw Nexomon: Extinction for the first time, I was a bit sceptic. The art style seemed a bit childish to me and maybe even a bit cheap, like it was some sort of mobile port. Also, I’m not really into turn based gameplay anymore so that doesn’t help either.

But after reading the positive reviews and watching some gameplay videos, I decided to give it a go.

Story

The game starts with a vague opening scene where you fall off a flying airship. Even after finishing the game, I still don’t know what that’s about. You choose a name and character (there’s quite some choice) and you’re good to go.

Guild of Tamers

You’re living in an orphanage and this is the day you become a Tamer (read: Pokémon trainer) for the Guild of Tamers. The Guild of Tamers try to maintain the peace in a post-war world. The war was about a Nexomon king, a Nexomon himself called a Tyrant, trying to destroy the human race. The king has been slayed leaving the other Nexomon in disarray and in search of a new king. That’s something else than becoming a Pokémon master…

You choose your first Nexomon (from 9 options instead of 3) and you set out for your journey with a group of fellow Tamers. You are always accompanied by a talking cat (possible reference to Meowth?) because your character never speaks (which does not goes unnoted by other NPCs).

Humor

This is where the developers’ sarcastic humor begins as they love making fun of the more traditional game mechanics. When you receive an item or achievement, your character will make a 360 rotation before holding the acquired item in the air. This is normal for us gamers, but imagine it when someone does that in real life. That’s the approach the developers took. So every time your character does that, your cat comrade and other NPCs in the vicinity will ask you to please stop doing that.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. This game is drenched with this kind of humor (which certainly made me chuckle a few times). Here’s another example. At the very start of the game you encounter an NPC which explains the basics of Nexomon battles: “You let Nexomon beat each other unconscious, then you heal them and do it again.”. Your cat companion will then reply that this game is really messed up.

I made a screenshot of one of these moments.

To wrap up the story part, I would like to say that I really liked the story of this game. Even without all the humor, it felt really original. And it actually is the only element of this game that’s completely different from the Pokémon games.

Story rating: 8

Gameplay

Pokémon

The basics are copied straight from the Pokémon games. You walk through patches of grass to randomly encounter wild Nexomon of various elements (fire, water, etc.) which you can catch with a Nexotrap (which is pyramid shaped, but has the same colors as a Pokéball) and add to your team of max 6 Nexomon.

Your Nexomon gain experience and level up by battling in turn based battles against wild Nexomon and other Nexomon Tamers. Each Nexomon has a max of 4 moves, has elemental advantages and disadvantages and some evolve at a certain level. There are more than 300 Nexomon so “gotta catch ‘m all” also applies here.

So far the Pokémon basics, here come the twists.

Open world

Nexomon: Extinction truly has an open world. Right from the start of the game, you can choose whichever way you want to go. The main story goes to the right put nothing forces you to go that way. You can ignore the story and explore every corner of the map without anyone telling you what to do. Of course, you’ll encounter some inaccessible areas here and there, but knowing you can return there later when you’ve required the appropriate powers only adds to the fun.

Controls

Nexomon: Extinction is a grid based game so it’s only logical that your character can only move in four directions. It is done in many games this way (and certainly the Pokémon games it’s based on), but somehow it feels outdated in this game. I don’t know exactly why that is, maybe because of the modern graphics and the lack of a normal directional pad on the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons.

Quests

The world is filled with people who want something from you. And that’s a good thing as this makes the world more lively. Most of the quests require you to provide some items to the quest giver in exchange for some other items or money. Some quests, however, are about finding one or more specific Nexomon for an NPC, which offers a nice change of pace.

Elemental shards

Everywhere in the world, you find rocks you can mine with your pickaxe you acquire at the start of the game. These rocks provide elemental shards which you can use for various goals:

Sell them for money.
Trade them with NPCs (quests).
Craft elemental Nexotraps for higher catching changes.
Craft cores for your Nexomon (see next chapter).

As you can see there are a lot of possibilities with these shards and the best part is that the rocks respawn after some time. It adds an extra layer of interactivity to the world besides catching Nexomon and battling other Tamers.

During my gameplay, I didn’t feel much for crafting so I mostly used them for quests and sold them all by the end of the game for extra money for potions…

Cores

In the Pokémon games, you could make a Pokémon hold an item to give it a certain advantage during battles. In Nexomon, you can make a Nexomon hold up to 4 of these items, called cores. Some cores give the Nexomon more health, others more XP, others more money, and lots more. This opens up a lot of strategic options, which I probably should’ve used more. I didn’t invest a lot of time in these cores and equipped everything I had randomly to my team. This often resulted in some Nexomon gaining more XP than others making the leveling harder.

Difficulty

Speaking of which, Nexomon: Extinction is a lot harder than the Pokémon games. In battles, almost all attacks do damage, no Tamer uses moves like ‘Growl’ and ‘Tailwhip’. On top of that, you almost never do a one hit K.O. so you’ll always receive at least one counter attack. Wild Nexomon are around the same level as your team, so these battles are no walk in the park, either.

All cities have “Pokécenters” where you can heal your Nexomon for free and on routes, you’ll encounter healing rocks here and there which will instantly heal your party as well. Like elemental rocks, these will respawn after some time.

However, because of the harder battles, I already required healing after one or two battles. I had three options:

Go back to a healing point after each battle.
Use potions after each battle.
Avoid every other contact with Tamers and wild Nexomon until the next healing point.

Option 1 would seriously take the pace out of the game and option 2 was not an option because I lacked the money. So for a big part of the game, I avoided Tamers and wild Nexomon which I think is not really the goal of the game. This caused my team to be under-leveled by the end of the game making it a lot harder to finish it. There where moments I only survived by throwing all potions and elixers I had at my Nexomon…

Stamina

De combat system is largely the same as in the Pokémon games where you attack each other every turn with one of four available moves per Nexomon. There’s one big difference: where a Pokémon can use each move a fixed number of times, a Nexomon has one stamina bar which every move uses.

For example: a weak attack uses 5 stamina and a stronger one uses 10 stamina. If your Nexomon has a total stamina of 100, you could either use the weak attack 20 times or the strong attack 10 times. Or, what’s more probable, a mix of those. When your Nexomon runs out of stamina it will skip a turn which restores a little bit of stamina.

I think this is a nice improvement over the PP system of Pokémon as this forces you to overthink your combat strategy.

Catching Nexomon

The basics of catching Nexomon are the same as in any Pokémon game: you weaken a Nexomon by battling it, you throw a Nexotrap at it and then you wait for it to stay inside the trap or not. The developers, however, made some attempts to make this process more user friendly.

Rarity indicator

Every Nexomon has an indication how rare it is. This varies from ‘common’ to ‘mega rare’ and even ‘legendary’. So when you encounter a wild Nexomon with the indication ‘mega rare’, you know you just have to catch it. If it’s something less than ‘rare’, you’ll likely encounter is more often.

However! I kept encountering the same ‘mega rare’ Nexomon I just caught. It may be a coincidence, but I got the feeling ‘mega rare’ wasn’t so ‘mega’ after all.

Capture chance prediction

When you’ve selected the option to catch a Nexomon, a window pops up showing how big the chance is the Nexomon stays inside the trap. These chances are shown in percentages spread over multiple categories like how weary it is from the battle, what trap you’re using and what food you have given the Nexomon. There or many types of food in this game and every Nexomon likes a different type of food. Feeding it before capturing it increases the capture chance.

Button press mini game

When you’re satisfied with the capture chance, you throw the Nexotrap to the Nexomon. A time-limited “mini game” follows in which you have to press a series of buttons in the given order. The trap is thrown when the timer reaches zero and if you’ve managed to press all the buttons within the time limit, the capture chance is supposed to increase even more.

I’m saying “supposed” because I didn’t really notice a difference. Also, the mini game didn’t respond very well to my input. Often, the first button in the series did nothing when pressed. Only when I pressed the second or third button, something happened and by then, the timer was already halfway down.

Items and food

There are quite some items to collect in this game. They can be roughly divided into two kinds of items: passive and active. Passive items stay in you inventory and have a small impact on the general gameplay while active items require you to actually use them.

Some examples of passive items are whistles that increase the capture chance of certain elemental Nexomon, discount vouchers that give a discount in shops and charms that restore some health or stamina of your Nexomon after a battle. Most of these items can be stacked. This means that the effects of these items are multiplied if you find more of them.

Active items are items like potions and other items that restore or revive your Nexomon. Food also belongs to this category. Donuts, peaches and many types of other foods are hidden everywhere in the world or can be bought from vendors. Normally, I wouldn’t touch a donut that’s been on a tree trunk for a long time, but in this game, that’s perfectly normal. Maybe that explains why you can only give the food to wild Nexomon in the hopes of increasing the capture chance.

There are some items that qualify a bit for either category because they require you to equip or unequip them from your inventory. One of those items is the Repel Spray. It’s unequipped by default when you collect it but it can be equipped at any time when roaming the world and stays that way until you unequip it again. And unlike the Pokémon games where the repel only repels weaker Pokémon, the repel spray repels all Nexomon. This takes away the frustration of encountering a wild Nexomon every few steps when exploring a cave or building.

Chests and vaults

As I mentioned before in my Immortals: Fenyx Rising review, chests are the best inventions in games ever! And guess what? Nexomon: Extinction has them, too! Chests are scattered everywhere through the world and mostly contain useful items. It feels really rewarding to find a chest while exploring.

And the developers even took this to a new level by adding several hidden vaults to the game. These vaults require special keys to open which can be obtained by completing side quests. A vault always contains two large chests sitting between large piles of gold coins. You can pick up these coins as well (but not the whole pile, unfortunately).

Gameplay rating: 6

Graphics

The graphics in Nexomon: Extinction are simple, yet beautifully crafted. No fancy 3D stuff, but clean and crisp hand drawn art. The animations are somewhat basic and lean a bit to the mobile games genre, but are efficient and ensure a solid performance.

I find most of the Nexomon designs not very appealing, to be honest. The dragons and tyrants are looking great, but the majority of the other Nexomon were not worthy for my team. And this is not because they are poorly drawn, because visually all Nexomon are nicely crafted. It’s more about the monster choice. I’m not really into monsters that look like an ice cream or light bulb.

This is something the Pokémon games also struggle with since generation 3. Maybe it has something to do with growing older…

Graphics rating: 7

Audio

The music and sound effects in this game are decent. Every region has its own background music and all Nexomon have different cries. It’s pleasant to hear and adds to the game experience but it doesn’t stand out and certainly isn’t memorable.

Audio rating: 6

Memorable

When thinking of Nexomon, I inevitably think about Pokémon along with the nostalgic feeling of Pokémon Red and Blue. Nexomon: Extinction is far from that feeling, but the open world implementation and sarcastic talking cat are the things I will remember.

Memorable rating: 6

Conclusion

Nexomon: Extinction has its own character despite being a Pokémon clone and that is a compliment. It’s very hard to build upon such a successful franchise without getting the “rip-off” label or giving the players the “been there done that”-feeling. The developers implemented some fresh ideas which, in my opinion, Pokémon could learn from.

Played in handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch.