Monster taming RPGs are common favorites, and while Pokemon might have kickstarted a craze for them in the 90s, Dragon Quest Monsters and Shin Megami Tensei made kids fall in love with them even earlier. Monster Crown: Sin Eater is a title that hearkens back to those days, when you could pop a cartridge into your Game Boy Color, catch some crazy demonic entity, and then beat up on some tyrannical overlords involved in some greater wrongdoing. While the story leans on dark tropes a little too hard when juxtaposed with its colorful GBC aesthetics, this is still an exceptionally competent creature collector that outshines its previous entry by a considerable degree.
Plot Ahoy!
Monster Crown: Sin Eater puts you in the shoes of Asur, a young rancher who is surprised by a sudden visit from his brother, who had left home to become a Tamer. Not long after Asur’s brother Dyeus returns home, an Inquisitor enters their house to accuse him of sedition. Dyeus’ only monster is killed, and he is subsequently captured. Asur vows to rescue him. Leaving home with nothing but a handgun, Asur’s journey is about becoming a Tamer and seeking revenge against those who captured his brother, up to and including slaying the god of their world. The story is a bit on the overly edgy side, but the real meat and potatoes here is running around and capturing literally every single monster you can see.
Review Notes
Monster Crown: Sin Eater wears its inspiration on its sleeve. The visuals are designed to emulate the look of a Game Boy Color title, with creatures and environments using simpler color palettes that make imaginative use of limited shades for detail and depth. Sin Eater is not trying to specifically imitate Pokémon, as the creature collection, story, and gameplay loop feel closer to a Dragon Quest Monsters or Digimon Story adventure. You can freely explore the Crown Nation to tame new monsters using Pacts that function suspiciously like Poké Balls, so beating on a creature will increase its likelihood of coming along with you on your journey.
Monster Crown: Sin Eater lets you get your first little monster from a dealer who has a bunch of critters lined up in cages, one for each of its five types. Attacking a monster weak to the type of attack you are using results in 50% more damage and vice versa. With being able to carry eight creatures with you, there are good odds you will have an attack in your party that can target an enemy’s weakness, though story bosses may not always have one. There are only around 75 attacking moves in the adventure give or take, so you will be seeing a lot of the same skills at a fairly constant rate as you proceed through the story and side quests of Sin Eater.
Monsters learn maybe one or two new moves as they level up, if that, but this is not really an issue in this due to the focus on the breeding and fusion systems you are meant to leverage while playing. Fusing two monsters does exactly what you think it does. It takes two monsters and turns them into one, merging their stats, averaging their levels, and combining their move lists. So, if you have one monster with high attack and defense but another with high magic and resistance, you can fuse them together to make one monster that is strong in all categories and keep pace with the level of your current fighting team. It is actually funny how quickly overpowered you can make your crew by leveraging breeding and fusion, especially if you start experimenting in the early hours just to see what can be done.
Breeding does something similar, but instead of improving an existing creature, you create a whole new monster at level one. So, you can make one powerful ally, or you could breed two monsters from those already in your party and then fuse the hatched creatures back into your lineup to create two even stronger monsters or more if you want to do a little grinding in a dungeon to raise a new squad. It is worth mentioning that you cannot always have the absolute best of every monster’s stats when you are fusing and breeding because the Genome System means you need to keep a 50/50 split when it comes to the resulting creature. Even so, proper use of breeding lets you have remarkable control over a monster’s stats, abilities, move set, and even its portrait and colors. Sin Eater is basically a customizer’s dream.
One of the early fusions I lucked into came from buying a bunch of chicken monsters. The shop only had one of each critter except for Kroodle-Doo, so I bought four of those. Normally, fusing monsters together yields the same base as one of the monsters you started with, but the Kroodle-Doos fused into a new monster called King Kroodle instead. Well, that piqued my interest, so I fused another King Kroodle, then atom-smashed those together and made a weird alien king chicken called KinKroo. So naturally, I bought even more chickens and fused the two KinKroos together, which produced an even crazier alien chicken called Kroo. It had higher stats than anything else I could find at the time, so, of course, I turned that wild little space chicken into my breeding stock and spread its solid stats across what would become my party for most of the early adventure.
Venturing through the Crown Nation and finding new creatures to catch, er, enslave to my will was always fun because what if this new crazy demon I found at the bottom of a dungeon had the magic, attack or speed to justify another round of breeding and fusion to dramatically improve my team with a little bit of effort? For those who play creature-collecting RPGs like hoarding simulators, Monster Crown: Sin Eater has nearly 200 monsters to catch, each with its own permutations depending on the resultant type from breeding and fusion. There are also form changes, rare shiny creatures called Brilliant Forms, and even three different factions that slightly change parts of your main quest. There are three difficulty settings as well, though I personally found the adventure very easy even on the highest Monster Crown difficulty. Still, having those options for players who want an easier ride is always nice.
TLDR
Monster Crown: Sin Eater is an enjoyable creature collector styled like an old Game Boy Color title for maximum nostalgia. A lot of the monster designs are cute, cool, or overtly creepy, but that only adds to the charm. The challenge largely flies out the window if you take advantage of the breeding and fusion systems, but there is something so inherently novel about being able to control the exact coloration, type, and portrait your little monsters use that the customization more than makes up for it. If you enjoy creature-collecting RPGs, Monster Crown: Sin Eater may be just the pick for you.
