Temtem (2022)

Been a while since I said hello! I've lurked a bit, but I've been pretty busy with work and such. Hope everyone has been well. <3

I finished the main campaign for Temtem earlier! I'll need to work on a review at some point, but I mostly need to get back to Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which I haven't touched for like a month. Gotta finish this stuff before Pokémon!

Is anyone planning on picking this up next week?

I know I posted some about it when it was first publicly launched on Steam like two years ago, and I played for a while, but I ended up dropping it (not because I didn't like it, but...me and sitting at a PC to game) for the time being.

It's a shame it's launching so close to Pokémon, but I feel like it's something I'd sink time into over a while as opposed to just playing through a Pokémon game and then being done with it.

what i liked:

• magnificent creature collector already and it's still in early access.

• depth of combat is stacked. dozens of element types, type combinations and counter-types. most temtem having two types results in fancy dis-/advantages and a lot of diversity. two temtem per battle and side of the field, almost no rng in combat (no evasion or crit for example) - fighting (if you enjoy pokémon jrpg combat), planning and micro managing your team is a delight.

• great exploration. well designed routes and cities, a couple of quests here and there, chests hidden everywhere, many tamers to be fought and a decent amount of mechanics / tools to gate the region for backtracking, which you can come back for at a later stage of the game.

• many different areas with unique and diversified themes, designs and fauna.

• enjoyable soundtrack. very calm and relaxing music throughout the game, but not shy to bring up some flavor if required.

• decent customization options for your character. there are quite a few options at the start of the game and even more so in the game.

• story seemed like a blind copy of an already bad story (pokémon) at first, but there will be a lot of twists and turns that let it shine at least a little bit. tucma was ambitious! definitely not perfect and controversial at this point, but they've tried to change things up, made it a tad bit more mature and you gotta have to respect that.

• adorable creature designs, at least most of 'em.

• graphics are cute and decent looking. nothing too spectacular tho, just a solid design overall.

• i've enjoyed the higher diffculty and the resulting challenge. unlike pokémon, temtem has a lot to offer in terms of difficulty curve. many enemy tamer are using tough and well trained tems, making up for a good fight. especially the dojo leader are no joke and provide a decent challenge. the rematches are even harder to a point where it starts getting kinda frustrating. even tho the higher difficulty stands out in a positive way, i think there is still a lot of balancing to do, since some tamer are way over-/undertuned compared to others.

update 0.9:

• the sticktem! sticker album is in my honest opinion the most enjoyable inclusion. i do love collecting useless things, so gathering temtem stickers definitely scratches the itch for me. one possible downside might be the fact, that there are 200 stickers in total, but only a random, pre-defined pool of stickers for each player and not every drop will be a guaranteed mint condition sticker for the album. the upside, more possible player interaction since everyone loves trading collectibles! the downside is it could take quite a while to finish the album and it's basically all rng yet again. i don't wan't to think about pansun prices if the stickers are exchangeable this way.

• mounts being added in the latest update is a welcome quality of life feature in terms of traveling speed. using a mount will block off all random creature encounter in the wilds as well, fantastic. sadly these are gated behind the main quest and you have to finish the game as it is.

• trade houses are basically a must in any mmo kind of game and a decent addition to temtem. [strike]can't say much about the economy at this point, but i could see some horrendous prices for perfect breeds and lumas.[/strike] turns out the economy isn't as bad as i initially thought. lumas are mostly hilariously expensive of course, but the auction house tourned out as a decent option for new players to buy some perfect breeds without investing too much time and effort into breeding themselves.

what felt debatable to me:

~ rng with temtem stats, traits and for spawns ofc. yes, they've effectively reduced the rng in combat, which is great, but there is still a lot more to be faced with. captured temtem do get random svs, so if you wan't a perfect one or close to, good luck trying to catch it. it will probably take an absurd amount of time. on top of this, there is a trait system. all tems having a random trait from a pool of two. usually one is really good and the other one is pretty bad to unplayable or borderline playable / situational. it's a real pity. one could argue, there is breeding and yes, it's a much better possibility to obtain your perfect temtem, BUT you still have to grind out (or buy) some breeding candidates with the correct 50 svs and combinations, since you can only lock specific sv combinations like atk/spatk, def/spdef and so on. on top of that, the breeding item costs are absurd like all other items. same issue for tvs. i've didn't put this one in the con sections since this core mechanic is kinda part of the game and you don't need those perfect tems for pve at all. haven't played pvp tho, but it's probably worse there.

~ breeding in the super early game (second isle) was a huge mistake. should've kept that for the late game. you simply don't have the resources to afford breeding at this point, but you'll continuously feel bad for using "unoptimized" tems and putting a lot of effort into 'em, instead of perfect breeds.

~ grindy late game and almost no real late game content.

update 0.9:

~ crema doubled the temtem storage slots from 300 to 600, which is great, but gating the slots with a quest that starts in deniz (first area) and ends in arbury (late game) is kinda questionable. if you have already more tems than slots, the last ones will be locked until you finish the quest. problematic at best i'd say.

~ dojo wars, -housing and -park seems interesting at first glance, even though the "war" format feels unnecessary convoluted with these time zones and the park might be back-breaking if you have to play against images of the 11 best players with imagine a full team of competitive perfect breeds of the war finals, controlled by the strongest ai, crema has to offer. we'll see how this one's playing out in the long run.

what i disliked:

• damage bonus and multiplier through items or skills slowing down combat, since they're visually shown on your screen after every attack they're improving. this "feature" is getting quite atrocious at some point, slowing down the combat for no reason. especially if you're stacking multiple damage boosts for the same attack. they're kinda delayed and you're not able to skip it.

• i don't really get it, why this game is a mmo. there is almost no player interaction at all in the open world. there are basically only afk people standing or sitting around, mostly in clusters inside the center, around dojo masters and on rare tem spots. the overworld just feels odd and lifeless, despite having players everywhere. well and i'm just not a big fan of half naked pokemaster666 guys in my innocent videogames.

• rare and overpriced items. on top of that, farming currency is kind of a chore. the economy in temtem is atrocious at the moment, thanks to the mmo tag.

• absurd spawn rates for luma (shiny) tems. crema even lowered the spawn rates a couple of times - it started out at 1/6000 and is at a 1/10000 rate at the moment. horrendous!

• odd facials expression (it's simply not funny) and bad dialogues most of the time. pretty underwhelming conversations.

• konstantinos was such a pain to play against. this one got the advanced competitive ai, which will swap tems in and out based on their types and counter types. this by itself is kinda fine, not the biggest fan, but yea, it's manageable. the crumbling arena in this battle was basically the toxic cherry on top, making an already annoying fight even worse. imagine you auto lose by time, but your opponent is playing the delay game. i have no words how bad this fight was.

7.5/10

This early access Pokémon-like game has been on my radar for a long time now, but I just found out something interesting about it that differs from its inspiration. That change is that it has entirely left out randomness in battle such as critical hits, missed attacks, etc. in an attempt to make the game more skill-based. I actually don’t feel like this is as good of an idea as it intuitively sounds, and it’s sort of an interesting topic.

Some of the most exciting moments in RPGs are things like lucky critical strikes or dodges, or like your Pokémon snapping out of confusion or waking up early, etc.. For one player to get that, someone has to be on the receiving side of it, which sounds unfair, but in the long run the best players should be able to skillfully overcome the odds more often than not. Removing that kind of uncertainty from battle sounds to me like it would make battles become stale more quickly, drop a whole extra dimension of risk/reward strategy and surprise from the game, and rob the game of a different kind of skill of being able to adapt / plan / work around unlucky rolls.

Thoughts? I guess the thing just becomes, if you want your game to be static and predictable in a vacuum like chess so you can focus on mind games and pure strategy instead, it had better actually be exciting enough on its own merits to make that lack of random chance make sense. And for that I guess I can’t comment on this game, but for Pokémon, I think random chance is certainly not a bad addition to spice things up in a simple formula that’s mostly balanced in favor of player agency over luck.

Wanted to do a short(ish) update now that I've had 30 minutes or so to actually get into some battles, capture some Temtem, and experience some other things. This really isn't spoilery, but if you intend to play and don't want to know anything about it, I guess don't read this?

~Battle music is hella good. Actually, the music in general is nice, but the battle theme stands out.

~Capture animation is really cool. Temtem are kept in cards (kind of reminds me of a digitized Card Captor). I haven't failed in catching one yet, so I'm not sure how that looks.

~My team just hit 6, and so far, most of them have some pretty cool traits (think Pokemon abilities), like being immune to poison or sleep attacks.

~Battles are smooth and the animations are really nice. They're all double battles as well. So far, anyway.

~Stamina and the wait option. So you have stamina instead of PP, which you can raise by having the Temtem wait a turn, and then deplete stamina with attacks. This is what I've gathered, anyway. It hasn't been officially explained to me.

Only issue I've run into is tamer and random battles making me think that the game is crashing. You'll be immobile in the grass for a good 15-20 seconds before the battle starts. This happens with just about every battle, though, so after it happened two or three times, I realized it's just a buggy aspect at this point. Not a big deal. The battles themselves are fine.

I picked this up for the early access on Steam yesterday. I'm not an MMO fan, but from what I've gathered, I don't think I'll really dislike that aspect, if it's forced, when it comes to this game. I might even actually enjoy multiplayer. It was also kind of an excuse to use my PC more, because I'm predominantly a console gamer but built a tank of a PC a couple summers ago and barely use it.

Between the capacity limits and trying to address some things on my PC and laptop (and do typical adult duties around the house), I didn't get very far. I made my character, followed the professor to his lab, and picked my first Temtem. All of that ran quite smoothly with no issues, but I haven't even gotten to a battle yet.

The capacity thing itself wasn't too terrible. First time I started it up, around 5:30EST, I was around 11,500 in the queue, and only waited about 10-15 minutes. A queue of around 6,000 a few hours later took a bit longer. I read that there were a lot of connection issues earlier in the day, but I didn't run into any. The devs were throwing out updates all through the evening and early morning.

I've been looking over type charts, and the match ups are pretty interesting. There are 12 types, some of which are mirrors of the Pokemon equivalents (like Nature being weak to Fire and Toxic, and strong against Water and Earth) and some that are original, like Digital and Crystal. Gonna take a bit to learn them all, but that's kind of exciting.

I know the Pokemon comparisons are going to be unavoidable, but I think this already has enough customization options and personality that it's going to be able to stand on its own eventually, without the Pokemon crutch.

Edit to add that I was using a PS4 controller to play. I used mouse and keyboard when starting up and making my character, but quickly switched over. This isn't really a jab at the controls--I'm just not much of a PC gamer, so mouse and keyboard just isn't comfortable to me.