

The game only blocks the bare minimum of locations to keep its narrative intact, and its progression-based monster strength and item availability means that going somewhere you’re “not ready for yet” is way less of a thing. You can also just take off to an island resort in the opposite direction. There’s a main story to follow, sure, but only if you want. There are traders with interesting items, and getting what they want in exchange is a sort of quest itself. Extinction is a big game with lots of freedom in both movement and action. On a larger scale, Nexomon: Extinction aims to deliver on the promise of an open world that Pokémon never delivers in its campaigns due to its constant gating and hand-holding. (Which, again, is good, because you won’t replace them very quickly.) Moves consume stamina, a fairly popular solution in the monster game community to the “stronger moves are always better” problem, and a more exaggerated accuracy difference makes those simple early moves way more viable. Monsters only have one type, and they generally level up and learn moves at a slower rate than modern games would have you expect.

And when you do catch something, you feel like you’ve earned it.īattles are streamlined, but also a bit more punishing than the base Pokémon experience. You’ll often need to consider when and what to catch. As a result, catching is more of an investment, both of effort and in-game currency. Of course, health and status conditions also affect it. There’s a quick-time catch sequence to help even more and make catching more active than hitting “throw” and holding your breath. There are passive items to earn to raise your base percentage for each type. There’s food, and each species has favorites that work better. Nexomon wants this to feel more involved and earned, with a host of factors playing into whether a catch works. It differentiates itself through its large-scale design ethos and its individual, small-scale systems.įor example: its monster-catching. It’s all very familiar, and intentionally so. Nothing about Pokémon’s general gameplay structure is really messed with here. We won’t waste your time explaining the basics of what you do in Nexomon: Extinction, because it is unabashedly one of those. Thankfully, Nexomon: Extinction offers quite a bit. So you can’t just be “one of these.” You have to offer something special.

While “here’s something you can play until the next Pokémon releases” has been a staple over the past two decades, it wasn’t this frequent since… well, probably 20 years ago. The monster-collecting genre that Nexomon: Extinction enters has become increasingly crowded in 2020.
