Game Revolution Review Page

by Johnny Liu

Lets face it... PokeMania has swept the nation. I don't know when the backlash will begin, but sometime in the future, people will hate Pikachu more than Celine Dion, her damn Titanic song, and Barney the Dinosaur all put together. But at its roots, before Pokemon became the multi-marketing super-juggernaut it is today, it was a simple RPG that introduced the elements of catching, collecting, and trading. Those elements set it apart from any game that came before, and made it a lot of fun.

Jade Cocoon can best be described as Pokemon with a folklore style plot. This story is set in a fantasy world environment of traditions, religion, and magic. The people of your village have myths and tales that are a mix of Native American folk tales, Biblical elements, and fables.

You are Levant -- though you are still young, you are to become the next cocoon master of your village, as your father before you. The Omnibubu, the angry beasts of the forest, have swarmed your village, and in their wake, they've left most of the village trapped under a sleeping spell. In order to save the village, you must learn how to become a Cocoon master, and bring peace back to the forests.

You move your character through pre-rendered backgrounds, along mapped trails. Control of Levant is similar to Resident Evil with walking or running, and turn controls. The enemies are visible, so sometimes you can avoid an attack by quickly navigating around them. When you do hit an enemy, you enter battle mode and bash it out.

Battlemode is turn-based and menu controlled, in classic RPG style. In early fights, you take on the creatures yourself. After they are weakened, you can capture them using your cocoon powers. Later, your captured minions can be summoned in battle to fight for you.

All your battling creatures have an elemental base: water, fire, air, and earth. Each element has a strength and weakness against the other elements -- water creatures do extra damage to fire creatures, but are weak against earth creatures. The creatures are a mix of bug and lizard-like things. Though they have their individual characteristics, nobody is going to print up a poster of the whole 150+ of them.

In retrospect, I would have liked a more complex battle engine, perhaps allowing control of more than one summoned creature at a time. Classic turn based combat is fine on the Game Boy, but I wanted something more substantial and original out of the fights.

After you've captured your cocoons, you bring them back to the village, where your wife, Mahbu, performs Nagi purification magic on them. After your cocoons are purified, you can equip, merge, or spin them. You are limited to equip only three at a time (I would've like to have more). When you choose to spin a cocoon, you create silk which can then be sold in stores.

However, it is the third option that is the strongest point of Jade Cocoon: merging your creatures. After all, Pokemon will never let you see the result of Pikachu and Jigglypuff's drunken one-night-stand: their bastard child, PigglyChuff. When you merge creatures, defense and magic levels can be raised or lowered depending on which two you merge. Also, experience levels are compounded, allowing you to boost a weak creature's level more quickly. It is even possible to merge already merged creatures indefinately. When you merge, the color mappings of one creature are cast onto the wire frame of the other one. They've managed to do this really well, so its always interesting to see what kind of monster you end up with.

After you've finished the main game, there's an endless random forest that you can go to that lets you catch more creatures. Then you can have big creature merging parties (don't forget the Tequila). There's also a match mode, where two players can access their game saves and have their creatures fight one another. But there isn't any trading, and collecting all the creatures is not so important because creatures are less individualized with all that merging going on.

Graphically, I have to give props to the beautiful forest renders. Initially, there are four different forest areas, and they've managed to give each a distinct look and atmosphere. But after you pass through these four, many of the backgrounds are simply reused with new color schemes, to create the 'nether world'. Character designs are done in the style of Hiyao Miyazaki (Mononoke Hime), and fit the game well.

There are many places where the frame rate was too slow. In some initial dream sequences, they dropped the frame rate for a cool blur effect, but during normal fights, I wish things were just a little smoother. Another gripe I have is that the cocooning scene is always exactly the same.

While there isn't any grand epic soundtrack, the music excels in its subtleties. Most of the musical tracks have an environmental noise quality, using minimal instruments. And for once, we have a RPG with voices that aren't half-assed. The voices convey emotion and carry personality effectively. But they've left out the most important voice: Levant's.

Making the main character silent is a device for placing the player into that character's shoes (i.e. Chrono Trigger). That same device is used here, but it takes away from the game. Because Levant is from such a different world, knowing what he actually feels would have made the story stronger. All the events of the story are directly related to him, and he just stands there, dumbfounded. Because of this, you never really find yourself immersed in the world of Jade Cocoon.

However, the biggest problem overall with the game is the uneven flow of the story. Things take place in a strictly linear direction, broken up between big chunks of story and cut-scenes, and big chunks of minion catching and level building. The story, with its many ends and details, loses its overall sense of continuity.

Jade Cocoon has strong parts, but the sum of them don't add up to quite enough. The uneven gameplay hurts the most, and the original merging element just isn't enough to make up for it. For those wanting to graduate from Pokemon, Jade Cocoon is worth a try, but as a standard RPG, it scores only mildly above average.