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Dokapon Kingdom: Connect

It's a game alright!

Dokapon Kingdom: Connect is definitely one of those games that's more about the experience than the game itself. It's miserably balanced, mechanically monotonous, and drags on for entirely too long, yet somehow still manages to be a fun experience with your friends.

Wild Encounters

This seems like an odd place to start, but it's easy enough to express my thoughts about.

Combat in Dokapon Kingdom: Connect has about the depth of a golf ball dimple. If you have significantly better stats, you win. If you have significantly worse stats, you lose. All other encounters boil down to glorified Rock Paper Scissors.

Once you've picked your build, you pretty much just use the same strategy in every encounter. If you dumped magic, hit them with magic. If you dumped attack, hit them with a weapon. Which spell? Which weapon? Irrelevant, you've only got one.

By mid-game, wild monster encounters are pretty much just a waste of time. You either win instantly or take a bit of damage before you win instantly. There are some interesting abilities like "Seal Magic" which can change up the flow of these encounters, but it hardly happens frequently enough to mention.

Claiming towns is so similar to fighting wild monsters it doesn't warrant its own section. It's a little less one-sided for a little bit longer, and, in the early game, even provides an opportunity to strategically use the strike button or your class-specific ability, but this too quickly is lost in the mid-game.

PvP

PvP combat doesn't differ that much from PvE, but there is at least a little more dimensionality to it. Your opponents get stronger at a similar rate to you and there is always a chance you will lose.

Playing glorified RPS against a human is dramatically more engaging than playing it against a computer. That said, it's still just glorified RPS. Not to mention if you dumped attack and your opponent dumped Magic, the RPS is reduced to a coin flip, as whoever goes first will likely make short work of their opponent.

Still, battles against other players with similar stats are engaging with the exception of those semi-rare cases where both players are presented with the same choice every turn: prolong a stalemate or die. This issue would likely have been more prevalent but the game somewhat disincentivizes PvP seeing as combat with another player is one of the riskiest things you can do, and the most punishing should you fail. That said, the spoils for winning an encounter are rather beneficial, but myself and my group largely decided not worth the risk most of the time.

Builds/Classes

The game appears to offer a variety of builds based on which stats you want to focus, but the importance of leveling magic in the early game should not be understated.

Since the Magic stat is used for both Magic attack and magic defense, it is far more point efficient to pump magic and defense. This way, you are resistant to all types of attack, and can still deal decent damage. Conversely, if you wanted to make a build more focused on physical damage, you need to choose if you're going to be vulnerable to Magic attacks or Physical attacks, because pumping all 3 stats will spread you too thin, especially because Speed and HP are important regardless of build. Magic builds also have a distinct advantage in all combat scenarios since spells cannot be evaded.

There are some drawbacks to a magic-based build in combat, mainly that magic can be sealed, and should the player with the magic build somehow lose their spell, they are incapacitated until they can visit a magic shop to replace it, making them easy pickings for any player with a decent attack stat. However, these factors are somewhat mitigated since the former only applies if the opponent posses the "Seal Magic" ability, and the latter only applies if your competition can reach you before you reach a shop, which becomes less practical as the game progresses and the playable area becomes larger. Not to mention that you pretty much only lose your spell after falling in combat.

The primary boone to a magic build is field magic, if you pump magic early on, you can basically just delete any opponent who failed to follow suit on a whim. This isn't as rewarding for you or punishing for them as defeating them in hand-to-hand combat would be, but it still sets back their progress and can prevent them from engaging you in combat at an inopportune time. Of course, if all of your opponents have a similar magic level to you, this becomes far less effective.

I should say here that my Dokapon compatriots have insisted that magic falls off dramatically in the late game, and they provided enough reasons I'm inclined to believe them. They still hard-countered my build but that may have been more my fault than I implied here.

Items and Field Magic

I don't have much to say about the items without going into details on each one. Some of them are pretty cool and some of them are completely game-shatteringly broken. Unlike equipment, you could find usable items in any item shop at any time. There were better items in certain shops, but the 2 spinner never became worthless.

Field magic is a unique mechanic that just seems really poorly implemented. As mentioned above, if one of your opponents failed to pump speed or magic early on, it can be incredibly powerful, but assuming all the players are aware of this, I hardly see how it's worth having. Especially in the late game, any player with field magic had an 80%-100% chance of killing my AT/DF build instantly, and a 0%-10% chance of dealing 1-3 damage to any MG/SP build. The low success rate also applied to non-damaging field magic, which I think would lead to the entire system being relatively useless if all players had high SP and MG.

Since only players with low MG are hurt by field magic, and since those players have zero recourse to combat field magic, the mechanic ends up either being stupidly unbalanced or utterly worthless. I suppose the exception would be a case where multiple players have decent MG but low SP, allowing at least the non-damaging spells to be effective.

Darkling

The Darkling, or "arbitrary game duration extender" is an ability that grants the losing player an absolutely stupid amount of power in exchange for their every mortal possession (except castles). It serves no purpose but to wreak utter havoc upon the board state and "level the playing field" so to speak.

The losing player seldom has incentive NOT to take the opportunity to do as much damage as possible, dragging out the game duration by forcing players to scramble to reclaim towns to retain any standing in the game. This ability is offered frequently enough that it could theoretically extend a game indefinitely.

The only time it does not make sense to become Darkling, is when a player is close to defeating the final boss, as anything you do will just increase their odds of winning... ASSUMING that you are unable to collect 100 dark arts points before they are able to defeat Rico, in which case you can simply drag them out of hell by the balls and set everyone back to square one.

Spells/Equipment

Unlocking new continents and areas means unlocking new shops with better spells and better equipment. The issue is that the spells and equipment carried by other shops is static, so if you get a good spell on the most recent continent, but then die halfway across the map trying to complete some sort of quest and lose it, your only recourse is to settle for a shitty early-game spell, or schlep your sorry ass all the way back to the shop on the new continent and then once again back to the quest you were trying to complete.

I honestly think the game would be better if all shops got upgraded equipment and spells when the new continent unlocked. There'd still be plenty of incentive for players to explore the new continent as soon as it became available, and, should they find themselves stripped of their equipment or spells, they need only trek to the nearest shop rather than the one specific shop that's the only one in the game that sells the best gear. Albeit this is kind of the only balance against magic builds, so I guess there's some merit to that.

The Dokapon Kingdom Experience

While basically every major mechanic is fundamentally flawed, there is still fun to be found in the Kingdom. Sending the thief or the robot assassin after someone was fun and created a little suspense, cursing or blackmailing your opponent was the same. Finding a stupidly powerful item was fun. Robbing or pranking your opponent after winning a battle was fun. Becoming the Darkling and ruining everything was fun. It was fun to see the little graph at the end of each week, along with the obscenely large numbers for everyone's net worth, and the way the whole economy of the game could swing in only a handful of turns. It had great comedic value, even if all the design choices were clearly made by a sociopath.

Other Notes



Final Thoughts

Dokapon Kingdom: Connect sucks. The gameplay loop is bland and repetitive. There is basically no balancing whatsoever. All the NPC voices are obnoxious, and you need to listen to the same lines far too frequently. The combat system could've been made by a toddler. The animations were lazy. Even the unique combat encounters were basically just a stat check and a luck check with little to no strategic play possible. It's doing the same monotonous tasks on loop for 60+ hours, and I don't think I could point to a single "good" game design decision.

And yet, somehow, it was fun. All the stupid little things that happened along the way were fun. The interactions between the players when something was unfair were fun. Watching someone get trapped between two road blocks for the umpteenth time was fun. The game would constantly fuck you over, but it had a way of fucking everyone at once. It was hilarious, it was enjoyable, and I had a wonderful time playing.

This game was deeply flawed, but in a way, those flaws are what made the experience what it was. Those flaws are where the magic happen, and set it apart from better made, yet still less entertaining games. Never have I seen a game that so cleanly fits the description "so bad it's good".

At the end of it all, when the final scores were displayed, more profound than the sweetness of winning or the bitterness of losing was a sense of catharsis, that it was all over. Everything that we'd enjoyed, endured, mocked, and disdained had come to a close. And although we'd been opponents for the last 60 hours of this gauntlet, it still felt like an adventure we'd all set out on together. And that's the real beauty of it all. I would recommend this game to anyone who has 3 other idiots to suffer with.

Maybe, the real Dokapon Kingdom is the friends we betrayed along the way. Genuinely, unbelievably:

7/10

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