I was browsing Steam for a monster collector over Christmas and happened across Moekuri. At first, I laughed and dismissed the game. I like generally anime, but I'm not particularly into the whole moe thing, and I was worried the game would stray more toward hentai than I'd prefer. But, then I noticed that it claimed to be an strategy RPG. The combination of strategy and monster collection was too much, and I gave in. I'm glad I did.

The story was cute and heartfelt, if a little simplistic. It didn't come across as exploitative at any point, as I was worried about.

The gameplay was quite fun. Most battles take place between your character and another summoner. At first, only the summoners are on the battlefield. However, you can use your action points to summon monsters who will join the battle after a few turns have passed. The summoners themselves have different abilities based on their class, which drastically effect the flow of battle.

I started my initial playthrough as a witch, focusing on status ailments and whittling down my enemies. I chose powerful monsters with fairly long summon times. It was enjoyable and allowed me to take full advantage of the variety of systems in place: zones of control which restrict movement, depletion of a monsters energy forcing them to unsummon, terrain that boosted different elements, and so on. I was surprised by the depth of the combat. In fact, I decided I'd prefer to restart with something a little more straightforward while I picked up said mechanics. I started over as an assassin and focused on creatures that would summon quickly or provide direct boosts to my main character. My strategy was simple: overwhelm the enemy before they could set up defenses. This led to fun, fast paced, nail biting battles that could be won or lost in the space of a few choices.

While the story was serviceable and the gameplay surprisingly deep, the art was a mixed bag. The battle-map sprites were of a uniform, if overly-safe style. However, the portrait art for the monsters were done by various internet artists, some of whom were more talented than others. Some of the portraits were quite poorly done, and some were actually quite interesting. The artist is clearly visible on the monster information pages, and I noticed that there were a few artists I consistently liked, whom I later looked up online. That was a nice touch. However, the artwork I didn't like ranged from just poorly done to "I hope no one walks in while this is on my screen". I refused to use a monster or two that would fit my strategy, simply because I didn't want a little girl with a camel toe on my screen regularly. Luckily, those monsters formed only a small minority of the available roster.

Despite the art issues, encountering new monsters was consistently enjoyable. The concepts for the monsters were pulled from different mythologies across the world, and they all include blurbs about the mythical creatures they were based on. This led to a wide range of styles in the available monsters. The monsters are also highly varied strategically. I frequently used included one who specialized in building walls and zoning the enemy (slow them down so I could finish the assassination in peace!). Another couple of quick summoning, low hp, low energy monsters were there to get the hurt out quickly. Yet another monster on my team specialized in stalling the enemies summon timers to keep things mano y mano as possible. Finally, a couple of monsters attached themselves to my main character, significantly boosting her stats while they were near by, but otherwise providing limited utility. And that's just the monsters who synergized well with my assassin.

The UX was overall poor. The game does not run in higher than 800x600 resolution, and I had some bugs when attempting to run the game in fullscreen mode. The controls are also fairly clunky and took a while to get used to. I did get over these things after a few hours and enjoyed myself, but I'm more ok with unpolished games than most.

If you just do the main story, you'll get about 15 hours out of the game, but there is a fairly extensive post-game with plenty of challenges. The replay value is also extremely high-- different classes and combinations of monsters allow for extraordinarily varied tactics. I've put a little over 20 hours into the game so far, but hope to come back to do more postgame content in the future or maybe a playthrough with a different class.

In the end, the game is definitely worth buying if you're into SRPGs and/or monster collecting games and can look past the interface, moe theme, and mixed quality of the artwork.