December 18, 2008
I am the worst Warrior ever.
So, after reading this post over on Gamespite, I bought Dokapon Kingdom for the Wii on the cheap to give it a try. Me and my friends have been known to play some Mario Party, and I would be all for a better Mario Party, you know? Anyway, Essner and I finally managed to sit down and give it a little trial, and I am going to share some of my wisdom that I have gleaned from that experience.
First off, this is a fun party game. I mean, like, seriously fun. The 1up Review was all down on how little interaction there is between the players? This is also true, but there’s more to it than that. This is a game of huge wins and huge losses. When you win, you win easily, and when you lose, you lose incredibly badly. If you’re in a group of people who enjoy trash talking and making fun of each other, the game is utterly full of fuel for that, and that, honestly, is where most of the fun is. Although, I would say that most of the fun of ANY competitive game with a small group of friends is this kind of talk, so…
Secondly, don’t play this game with computer players. The computer is like… good. Really good. And you have to watch every single one of its turns. Even on super-fast, it got kind of old pretty quickly, not to mention how much the computer just trounced us. Four Human players seems the only real way to enjoy this game.
Thirdly, man, I fucking suck at this game. I was in dead last the entire time I was playing, and my warrior kept constantly dying. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, but I was doing it VERY wrong. Still, I was having fun. It wasn’t frustrating. But goodness, it was horrible. But hey, at least I got “Anime Heroine With Punk Rock Dye” hair near the end of our session. I was losing, but at least I was looking good.
I still don’t quite get all the mechanics in the game. For example, what bonuses to Magic-users get? Warriors get random strength boosts, and thieves steal things, but we never figured out what the magicians get. What exactly does the SP stat do? I know it’s speed, but does it just affect dodge rating? Does it change both dodge and hit chance? I couldn’t find these answers in the manual easily. I don’t know if I was just missing them, or it wasn’t there, but it was odd.
I’ll be sure to report more next time we dive into the Kingdom of Dokapon, but, you know, at the very least I’ve learned that it’s worth trying to get us all together to dive into said Kingdom again, eh?