After my first session of Dokapon, I put a review up on this site maligning how I had been dead for about a quarter of the playtime thus far, beset by a whole pile of RNG bullshit and being fucked over by every other player in the game. I was having a fun time but sheesh.

Oh, how little i knew.

Dokapon Kingdom's sheer chaos starts at a level that makes Mario Party look like checkers. From week 1, straight up murder is on the table, with all players having the ability to fight both each other and enemies within a RPG battle system which is, of course, heavily luck based. All the while you're meant to be clearing towns of monsters and doing quests to earn the highest monetary worth.

And then things get worse.

The sheer amount of things that WILL fuck you over in full playthrough of dokapon, often completely out your control, is remarkable. The game will both continually mess with you with random events, broken enemies, stupid locations which are hard to get to, random drops, etc, whilst also giving your fellow players all the tools to make it worse. Want to send a killer robot after your friends? Sure. Want to nuke your friend across the map with magic? Go ahead. Want to ruin two sessions' progress for everyone by forcing them to your current position? Yeah.

With Dokapon, it's not a question of will you get fucked, it's when, and how. And somehow, I have no idea how, the game constantly one-ups itself. Just when you think it can't get any more stupid, it does. This is partially due to the map opening up slowly throughout the game, giving access to more places to lose, more insane dungeons to get caught up with, more places to be crabs in a bucket together. And it's an absolute riot.

I think the genius of Dokapon is that it gives you just the right amount of control. It's an RNG-fueled madness festival for sure, but the game lets you influence things, lets you play in enough different ways, lets you go about enough diferent means to progress and raise your own stonks that there's a true tension to when the best laid plans of mice and men fall apart, or very occasionally, don't.

During the 30 hour ish playthrough we did, there were just too many great moments to count. So many story arcs of each of us all murdering each other as we pursued one goal, so many times where we just murdered each other for dubious reasoning, about 10 different truces and agreements broken, a lot of lying, a lot of begging, a fair amount of stealing, a few times sparing people by exchanging their deaths for putting poop on their head and only two or three complete collapses of the economy.

I could not begin to tell you how fun it is. After a first session where i was feeling kinda peeved at the game, I slowly began appreciating the absurdity, and when it was at my expense, I started laughing more. And somehow, between all it's randomness it did tend to even things out and make for a game that was tense and surprisingly close the whole entire time, even after 700 turns - which is a testament for how good a manged chaos it pulls off, and maybe also a testament to how much we enjoyed fucking each other over constantly.

Of course the game has plenty of problems. Many of which are intwined with it's benefits. If you don't have the right sort of environment for this I think it could legitimately make you lose friends (which to be fair, is advertised). There's a level of camraderie needed at some point, and you kinda need to understand that being murdered is really quite funny. If you take this game too seriously, and focus too hard on the ultimate winner, you will not have the best of times.

There's also just a fair amount of broken stuff, and weird balance. There's a handful of routes to effectively infinite money that you basically need to ban as a house rule, Magic is either incredibly busted or useless iwth no inbetween as a stat, and a couple of the super secret classes are weirdly useless despite being a massive pain in the arse to even obtain. It's kinda dubious and i'd chalk up a lot of it to this game effectively being a straight remake of the original Super Famicom Dokapon - warts and all.

A natural consequence of the game system is also that the endgame gets a little stalemate-heavy if you're trying to guarantee first place. Because the game finishing relies someone beating the final dungeon and getting the big final reward, but that also takes quite a while, it creates a game state where it's arguably best to let some other fucker do it. It's not a huge issue, but I think it's something i'd probably house rule around in the future.

But who cares about that, because this game is incredible. It really did not take long for Dokapon Kingdom sessions to become the highlights of my week, eventually trying to sneakily suggest the sessions happen more often than usual in our group chat and finding that, for some fucking reason, everyone was as ok with that as I was.

I have outright never had as much fun in a Multiplayer game. It's a game where i got 30 Hours plus of scheming, dying, killing, and most importantly, laughing my ass off. Yes, you probably a group that is level-headed enough to not actively want to kill each other afterwords. But as a lens for sheer absurdity, comedy, and extracting the best moments out of group interactions, I am not sure i will ever experience something again quite like Dokapon Kingdom.

It is an absolute masterpiece.

Special shoutout to fellow players:
Sombes (This was her fucking idea)
Arnust (Schemer and no balls)
Tacos (Banged his head on the table at least once this playthrough)

Unironically one of the worst game experiences I've ever had. Painful for all parties involved, and not even in a funny way. The game actively encourages stalling the game and destroying all progress, and punishes anyone who dares try do anything like actually progressing forward in the game or trying to win. If your game allows "hold the entire game hostage until you win" as a valid strategy (and it does, because that's exactly what I did to win), it's probably not very fun. Did I mention that this whole torturous endeavor takes 20-30 HOURS TO DO A GAME OF? If you are lucky enough to have 3 other people with that much time to kill on a game together, play LITERALLY ANYTHING BUT THIS. Me and my friends didn't even hate each other by the end of it like how everyone says this game would, we all just breathed a sigh of relief that it's finally over. Avoid.

mostly paraphrasing what one of my buds observed when playing this because i agree but i think luck based party games work best when play sessions are like 2-3 hours max and one night long and not 20+ hour long multiple session grindfests where the gap between players becomes so vast by hour 15 you know there’s no hope.

there’s fun to be had, and i absolutely love the concept behind this game, but multiple nights of being beaten down by poor luck robbed every ounce of joy my group had when playing.

didn’t finish this session because most of if not all of us were just tired of it by the end.

It’s hard to put into words how thankful I am that my friends were willing to suffer through this with me, because this game is nothing if not brutal bullshit front to back. But as we’ve all maybe learned through a session of Mario Party, there’s no such thing as good or bad luck, it’s all simply relative. What causes the success of one causes the downfall of another, and it’s a zero-sum game to the point of causing everyone to become a Kissinger-level political realist working their hardest to destroy all goodwill to become king of the crab bucket. And I am never leaving the bucket

The trick of a bullshit luck game is to ensure that the players feel like they’re able to manipulate it and suffer through it to win. The issue with games like Monopoly is that they may as well be totally pre-determined from the start. You simply roll, buy, and work within the extremely limited options you have and hope to lady luck you win. There’s very little you can do to sabotage other players directly beyond random chances from community chest cards and so on. Hell, the latest Mario party games fall into a similar problem where all you can do is hope the player in control picks something for you to do whilst you’re railroaded towards the end. There’s very little if any player agency in these beyond the mini games, a common reason they’re cited as the worst games in the series.


Dokapon is extremely luck dependant. If anyone says otherwise, they’re the kind of GameFAQs user I’d stay far away from, especially when Undertale was declared the best game of all time. Every roll you cast determines where you can land, what enemy you fight determines your chances of winning, hell even what the AI decides to use in combat can be what secures your victory or defeat, as I have learned many times in the final area. And you beg and hope that luck won’t fuck you over in the final moments fighting the area boss, hoping to at least get 1 village before it’s all taken away. And all the while you still have a sense of control over how you approach this luck and navigate through its system towards the end. It’s not polished, it’s not a smooth experience, it’s certainly not balanced, but it’s a game that builds stories between players like few others. It’s one of the few games where every session of play we’ve had some grand narrative weaved between each of us and looking back on it at the end, it’s a hilarious trek that’s extremely unpredictable, front to back.


The JRPG systems at play somehow blend well with the board game approach without hampering pacing to the point of exhaustion and boredom. Turns rarely take more than a minute, sometimes even just 30 seconds, which helps when you’re playing with 3 other people. And each player’s turn is exciting to follow to see and plan around for your own strategies in the future. There’s an encouragement to follow and counter their plans at the same time as you work to establish your own foothold on the board. Alongside that they’re likely to be screwed over by luck just as you were a minute ago, giving a strong schadenfreude.


Giving the player tools in the form of items they can buy to both sabotage other players, in the form of field spells to directly damage or hamper progress, or spinners and crystals which allow them to “tactically” plan their progress through new zones gives enough activity that’s usually not found in this style or format. The fact that the player is dependant on luck still forces them to make backup plans, and plans within plans with plans, ones which can be equally sabotaged by so-called “friends”.


The games systems are not polished enough to avoid snowballing at all, and the developers seemed keenly aware of this, causing the inclusion of the greatest asset of the game, The Darkling. When a player is in last long enough, they will become the most powerful character in the game by a country mile for a period, with special abilities allowing them to reset the board entirely. Lending the player, the ability to enact revenge in such a clear coded “you’ve been in last for a while, let’s spice things up” way, one which still gives opposing players the slightest ability to avoid through hiding in other areas lends a dynamism you don’t get with traditional Mario party rubber banding. It does have meaningful issues still, as the global reset can cause a stalemate where gaining towns may weaken someone’s position long term actually and causes the final act of the game to become a hell state of inaction because of certain players (Like me). All the same the tools and strategies cause fascinating forms of in game storytelling.


Players shift states from hero, to villain, to underdog, to doomed fool all in the matter of minutes it can feel as a result of both luck and conflict. It’s hard to find games which can escalate tension to this degree in a party setting, one which is also still so entirely dependant on luck. There’s comedy, anger, and sadness, all the while being placed in a ridiculous setting made ultra-ridiculous by your friends revealing themselves to be Machiavellian psychopaths of the highest degree.


The endgame has serious issues no doubt. Spells which can destroy equipment can seriously put players in a state of fatigue and if you run a magic build like I did you’re just not allowed to have fun, but god this is still one of the funniest games ever made, and it all comes solely from player interactions. The fact that my friends suffered through this with me for all those sessions maybe says something about this game. It’s a shame others in this style don’t try to emulate it but maybe it’s for the better, I’d rather not have more broken controllers on this planet.

I genuinely think this game is fun even solo, but it's definitely 10x better with friends. Take a typical jRPG, give it rock/paper/scissors combat, put it on a board, and let loose. It's fun to balance all these elements like getting towns for better income, getting rare gear and even some involved job unlocks, and of course everyone loves messing with their friends a little bit. There's a fair bit of freedom with ways to play this game as well with the ability to set up games where you start at a certain level of progression and only play for [X] numbers of turns, but if you have the time in your life try setting up a campaign game with some friends using netplay (or wait for the switch version coming out) because there's genuinely not really a game like this.

Really long for a Mario party-like multiplayer board game adventure. Though, it’s absolutely worth it.
There is absolutely no game on this planet that tests friendships like this game.
You are never safe, you can never hide.
Your friends will find you, kill you, give you a funny nickname, and you will like it.
I’m genuinely so glad I got to play this game in full with a few friends. It was such a blast all the way through.

(Not completely related but TheRunawayGuys’ letsplay of this game was also legendary)