If Dokimon interests you, it would be a good idea to pick it up soon, and then make sure you’ve created plenty of backups. Should it ever become popular enough, Nintendo’s lawyers are going to come after this thing hard and you wouldn’t bet against them. Thankfully for the developers Dokimon is not likely to have a Palworld-like impact that will make it worth the Nintendo lawyer’s hourly rate, but nonetheless this is end-to-end plagiarism, and it’s not subtle about it.
This review won’t be that long, because there’s not that much to say about Dokimon in reality. It’s a blatant clone of the early era of Pokémon. It has the same structure, it has the same gameplay. It even has an almost exact, word-for-word clone of the introduction of the game, with a professor introducing you to the “world of Dokimon.” You’ll get your starter ‘mon (fire, grass, or water!) and then proceed from town to town collecting and training new ‘mons so that you can end up with a large enough party with enough variety to always take advantage of enemy ‘mon weaknesses. It also looks the same, with the same style of character sprite and the same approach to world-building.
At the same time, Dokimon has none of the quality of Pokémon. The monsters themselves are amateurish in design, which immediately makes them less collectible than the Pokémon roster. The interface is clumsier, the writing clunkier, the music nowhere near as memorable. Animations are inferior and fail to convey the same precise feedback and detail that they do with Pokémon.
Of course, it would be ridiculous to expect Dokimon to approach the quality of Pokémon. It is, no doubt, made by a small team or individual enthusiast. They’re even using an RPG Maker-like engine (called “MonTamer Maker”) so there’s probably only so much that they can even do with it. And when you think about it, making a Pokémon-like game is a lot of work – this one has more than 140 monsters, 15 towns to visit, and will take around 15 hours to run through (before getting to some post-game stuff and tracking down the full catalogue of monsters).
On the other hand, the developer is charging $30 for this, which is the same cost of something like Nexomon: Extinction, a Pokémon-like that works very hard to offer something unique and differentiated within the genre. This is what surprises me the most about Dokimon – wouldn’t you rather do that? What’s the point of building something so slavishly derivative of a game you love that it’s only ever going to be seen as an inferior pastiche of that original? Why not use the game you love so much as inspiration and then strive out to add something to the genre and put your own creative mark on it?
Many (many) years ago, before social media, I was pretty heavily involved with fantasy fiction forums (remember bulletin boards?). At the time I was also such a fan of Raymond E Feist’s Magician that I was writing my own story which was essentially a clone of it. I remember reading on one of these forums that Feist participated in that he would send his lawyers after anyone who wrote fan fiction or cloned his work, and at the time I was pretty shattered about this. It wasn’t that I had any intention on publishing it, but it was a slap in the face to have a favourite author reject my desire to engage with his work like that.
Over time his reasoning has stuck with me though, with an argument to the effect of aspiring fantasy authors should focus on developing their own worlds, voices and visions. Was that argument just a carefully manicured attempt by Feist to justify being overprotective of his “IP”? Probably, but philosophically speaking it is, actually, a good point. By all means be inspired by the great works of art, in any field. But use that inspiration and material as a starting point, rather than the aspiration.
The basic reality is that a work as derivative as Dokimon is lazy. That’s not to say a lot of work wasn’t put into it. I’m sure the developer and whatever team they had spent many, many hours cobbling this together. But it’s creatively lazy and contributes nothing to the monster-taming RPG genre. And so all that work has ultimately gone to waste.
