You enter the Nexomon version of a Pokécenter and really see just how much of a blatant copy and paste of Pokémon this is. Or is it? I mean sure the inspiration is so obvious it's undeniable, but the game takes a surprisingly different turn in how they execute everything. What looks like the obvious stand-in for gym leaders and elite 4 get used in much different ways (especially the latter). It ends up with the story of this game being surprisingly decent, much better than I was expecting anything. It does kind of give thoughts of edgy Pokémon rom hacks, but that's not really this games fault in particular.

Unfortunately its genes as a mobile game do make the game look cheap, even if I think the environments, and especially creature designs are pretty great.

There's 310 Nexomon in this game, which was easily the biggest draw for me. All these new creatures to discover, to catch and evolve. Every one a surprise. That by far kept me going in what could have otherwise been an easily disappointing game. You might also be surprised to learn there's only 2 types of "Pokéballs" (nexotraps) here. There's a regular one, and a golden one, which is just a master ball. The former can be bought infinitely, but the latter is still surprisingly abundant in this type of game. Albeit a ton of them can only be found post-game, but if you go out of your way to get them all, I'd say you can catch a good 25% of the roster with these 100% auto-wins. Don't worry about using the regular ones though, just get the enemy in to red health and get a status effect on it and it feels like you have a good chance of catching it no matter what its rarity is.

Why disappointing? Because the battle system in this game is simplified relative to Pokémon to the point it's a joke.

There's only 7 types in this game. There's 6 elemental types, and then normal/neutral, which in this game truly is neutral - It is not weak to, or strong against anything. Every other type is strong to exactly 2 other types (both in offense and defense), and weak to 2 other types. So they really balanced the few types they have very well in fairness. There isn't even a stronger type just in terms of ones being more common, as when you look at the database (this games version of the Pokédex) you realise it's set up so that it divides the creatures perfectly, #1 will be neutral, #2-#7 will be different types, and then #8 will be neutral again, repeat until the end.

There are also no dual type Nexomon. This also means if you have a team of every type (minus neutral) you're guaranteed 2 counters to everything, except neutral itself. Even if you take a neutral mon, as I did, you still have at least 1 counter to every element. On the flip side, I imagine mono-type runs would be much harder in this game.

This makes the rock-paper-scissors aspect not only much more unga-bunga than Pokémon, but the type diversity is pitiful. I didn't test out every Nexomon obviously, but from my experience there are no unique moves. If you took every types total move count, you could probably distribute it among only 2 creatures of that type. And the actual moves a monster will learn is almost entirely limited to moves of their type, and neutral moves. If you're lucky they might learn 1 move of another type (I had an electric type bird that learned a single wind move). When you consider that having 2 different types covers 4/7 types - assuming no repeat super effectiveness - this really is way too powerful. Which is a problem because having just the smallest diverse movesets shouldn't basically make matchups almost impossible to lose.

Other issues with movesets is how bland the moves are. They all fall into almost 5 categories:
-Moves that do damage and nothing else
-Moves that do status effects/change stats and nothing else
-Moves that do damage and have a chance of doing a status effect/changing stats
-Moves that heal and nothing else
-Moves that will give you "invulnerability" meaning your opponents next move will do only 1 damage. You can kind of think of this as Protect in Pokémon. It's mostly useful for setting up when you have your opponent locked in a status effect so they can't break it.

Speaking of status effects, they might be the most overpowered part of the game. Let's look at the variety:

Poison and burn - They both just cause the inflicted to take damage every turn.

Sleep - The mon will miss 2-3 turns, but wake up immediately if attacked.
Bind - The mon will miss 2-3 turns.
Paralyzed - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Freeze - The mon will miss 2-3 turns
Confused - The mon will miss 2-3 turns AND damage itself.

You can see the issue here right? Not only is nearly every effect the exactly same, but sleep is just objectively worse because of the fact they wake up as soon as they take damage, but confuse is just so baffling more powerful than the rest it's crazy they made it work like this. It's not like confusing is any harder than any other status effect.

They're the most broken part in terms of being overpowered anyway. If we're looking at the truly broken aspects of the battle system, look no further than moves that try to change defense and "elemental power". Any single time a Nexomon uses a move that tries to raise/lower defense or "elemental power" it does nothing. They literally didn't program anything into the game there. No one even seems to know what elemental power is, because it's not an actual stat in the Nexomon's stat screen - there's no "special" and "physical" attack, just "attack". Some have theorised that it was supposed to affect super effective damage, but as it doesn't work, no one can confirm. This means anytime the enemy uses a move to change these stats, it's basically a free turn. The worst part is, even if the AI knew these moves were broke, I doubt they'd avoid them. Enemy AI in this game is...odd. I've seen them use healing moves at full health.

There's also the speed stat which is pointless. You're guaranteed to go first in 100% of battles, and every turn after just switches back and forth. Even if a Nexomon is knocked out, the turn will still go to the next person in the queue, which makes revenge killing super easy by the way. Apparently speed DID decide who went first in the mobile version and PvP on the console versions (the PvP feature no longer exists) so it's a nothing stat now. Oddly, any move that increases/decreases evasion is shown as a shoe icon in battle, which is also the icon for speed in the stat screen. Is that implying speed is tied to accuracy? But every move has its own accuracy, so how does that work? Is it some calculation between a moves accuracy and the mons speeds? I doubt it because I've missed an 80% accurate move on a level 100+ Nexomon fighting a level 5, 3 times in a row.

Accuracy is yet another thing this game just doesn't seem to get right. For moves with no secondary effect, their accuracy is just the accuracy of the move - great. For moves with a secondary effect, it seems they list the chance of the secondary effect occurring. So you'll have a 90% move if it's pure damage, but a 30% if it has a chance to poison. But what does that mean?! Does it mean the move has a 100% chance to hit? Or is there a hidden hit-accuracy along with the chance of a status effect? Why did they put move accuracy and status chance as the exact same thing so they can't both be shown on moves??

Outside of battles, the way the rarity system works is kinda funny. Evolutions are entirely dictated by rarity. Common has no evolutions (even when many of them look like they clearly should). Uncommon have 1 evolution. Rare, Mega Rare and Special (aka starters) have 2. Legendary has none. The funny part is, I learned when the game came out on mobile evolutions didn't actually increase stats at all - it was entirely for show. This meant that while higher rarities did tend to have somewhat better stats, they weren't massively overpowered. But I guess people complained or something and so the developers made an evolution give a flat bonus (I believe 15%) to all stats. This means that mega rare was already better than common, but they altered it so anything that could evolve just shot so far past unevolving Nexomon that you have no reason to use anything lower than a rare unless you want to purposefully handicap yourself. I get that rarity should equal power to some extent, but I feel labelling them in such a blatant way takes any fun out of discovering for yourself what's good or not. Just find the thing with the right label and you know exactly how many times it will evolve and that it will at least be stronger than anything lower than it.

OK one last oddity - the games trainers throw evolutions at you WAY too fast. Like literally the first trainers you fight will be using Nexomon that don't evolve until level 20 or so, but they'll be level 5. It's like if in Pokémon the first route trainers were sending out PIdgeotto's and Golbat's. I have no idea why they do that. When it comes to third evolutions they even put them at a much more appropriate point in the game, though some of them can be a bit under levelled too.

This game is so weird. Like if you get past the deceptively cheap, Facebook-ad looking graphics, there's a surprisingly well designed world, story and group of monsters to collect. But actually fighting with them is just done in the most undercooked, non-functioning revenge killing simulator I've ever seen.

One last thing I do like is how this game uses legendary Nexomon as TRUE boss battles. Until the post-game when you can catch them, every battle against a legendary will have them with a massively bloated HP bar, effectively making it a battle of attrition. Especially with the way this game works as moves deal a lot of damage, meaning unless the AI chooses its moves very badly (and to be honest, it often will), each of yours will get 1 or 2 moves off at most before going down unless you're super over levelled. Unfortunately these can be cheesed super easily if you get a status effect off, especially confusion. At least trainer battles, especially those with a full team, can't be utterly disabled with a single status move.