Dokapon Journey

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 Official Site

Dokapon Journey should be a game that you want to play over and over. It mixes some of the more addicting video game mechanics out there. Essentially an RPG board game, Journey isn’t as complex a “board game” as Culdcept Saga nor is it a terribly complicated RPG. It is simple but not in the ways that matter. Its story and mission structure may err on the side of over-simplification, but it is unintuitive and uncompelling in its execution and interface.

Journey begins with RPG standards, like class selection, stat selection, and a choice of avatar. Your skills and abilities matter over the course of the game (as they relate to combat, travel, item use, etc.) but only in the most unexciting ways. You’ll never acquire a new skill and feel the sudden boost of new power. This is min-maxing at its least exciting devoid of fancy new powers or abilities. The game starts as so many RPGs have: with a band of bland players setting out to defeat a kingdom’s newly arrived monsters.

To do this, you’ll travel around a map, accumulating money, items, and alliances with neighboring villages. There are two important elements to gameplay: exploration and combat. To aid you in these two endeavors, you can accumulate spells, items, and employ your class skills. Combined with the constant threat of other players, this can make for extremely hectic matches.

You travel around the board, fighting monsters in random encounters, avoiding enemy players and boss monsters, and trying to make enough money and experience to survive. What with all of the warring characters and monsters, the game would seem to offer a deep, varied single player campaign along with especially fun options for single and multi-cart play. The problem is that none of these aspects are handled in a way that is remotely enjoyable. It’s not that the game is uninteresting or not fun, but it comes very close to being both.

The game’s menu layout and interface confuse the point of every action and every goal. Creating a character isn’t difficult per se, but despite the game’s comprehensive guide and documentation, the way in which actions are carried out within the movement map and the combat map is clear, but the purpose and result of those actions are hardly ever as apparent.

The combat system deserves special mention. In combat, you can either attack or defend first based on a random decision. From there, you can either attack, strike, use a magic attack, or cast a spell. The defender must guess the nature of the attack and counter with the appropriate brand of defensive stance. Thus, every combat encounter becomes a not impossible but definitely uncertain test of foresight. You can often guess that a creature will use a certain attack (a mage will often use a magic attack or cast a spell), but enemies often switch up their attacks to fool you. Likewise, no attack launched by yourself is guaranteed to hit. An enemy can often block or even counter your attack, doing extra damage to your character.

This might sound like nothing. Many board games rely on random card draws, dice rolls, and other events (Journey itself relies on random dice rolls and item and money drops). It’s part of the fun of board games to never know when an unexpected event will level the playing field. Dokapon Journey’s problem is that it mixes these randomizing elements too freely with what would normally be highly controlled game elements. I enjoy not knowing when disaster or fortune will strike, but when they strike often, without warning, in the central mechanic of the game (one that all other game frameworks revolve around), it mars my experience terribly.

The issue is that you have little actual control in the game. Moving, leveling, item collection, combat, death, and virtually every single element is a minor choice that takes place within the strict boundaries delineated by various random computer generated outcomes. I fight monsters with regularity and their defeat allows me to choose which skills and attributes I’ll enhance, but my success against them is almost completely decided at random. There are encounters where you’ll face enemies significantly below your character’s rank. During these encounters, you often find yourself taking more damage (and dealing less damage) than you’d think possible. This is often a direct result of your complete inability to guess the correct response in combat situations.

It’s excruciating to experience failure and negatively augmented progress through a game due to no actual failure of your own. If I sound irate, it’s because there’s no reason this randomness had to be there at all and no reason that it had to be allowed to ruin the game. Most of Journey is fine, and the entire experience could have been as good as the sum of most of its parts. Instead, it’s a constant exercise in defeat. You can win, and you will win but not always because of your own actions.

This shouldn’t be the element that overrides the rest of the game, but it is. Simply put, Journey, without its combat, is a very simple, mildly interesting board game RPG. It needs a compelling combat and leveling system to make it anything but extremely ordinary. Luckily, it possesses a highly unique combat system. However, it can make one session into a frustrating, annoying, and lengthy experience. We’re not talking Bioware length here, but for this kind of time investment, I want a little bit more pay off in the form of powers, story, or just about anything. Dokapon Journey never delivers any of these. It’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it.

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