A few months ago I found a project online that at first made me pretty happy, pretty excited actually. A project called ‘Revomon VR’ that had been designed by the same team for Pokemon VR, a wildly popular Sidequest game that allowed players to go through the Kanto region from Pokemon, with all species available. Revomon however, was incorporating NFTs and Cryptocurrency. It sounds incredible on the surface, but there are many issues under the hood.
There is no further negative criticism on the project aside from the occasional upset comment on their Twitter, but this is not because it is a good product. Most people playing the project are almost under a trance at times. They will not think beyond the point that this project is a beta and that NFTs are still gaining headway in the mainstream audience, and that excuses a percentage of the problems. Game glitches, spawns, moves not working correctly, all of these would be excusable if the product itself didn’t try to rehash everything from the old project it could without facing copyright.
The Revomon are well designed, but the movesets, abilities, base stats, sometimes typing, and learnable TMs with the exception of several lines are cut and paste from Pokemon, this includes the starters being exact replicas of the Kanto Pokemon starters. Gorcano is Fire/Rock, why can it learn Roost and Wing Attack? Many moves outright don’t work, and despite this being known for months there have been no adjustments. How do we know how they are supposed to work? Oh right, their descriptions have been copied from Pokemon as well. There are few exceptions to the lazy templates or inspirations the team is using, and though they are making more unique designs, if I was an investor I would feel very discouraged by the starting Revomon being Legend of Zelda references with those aforementioned red flags. Gorlit, Zorelle, and Dekute? Looking like a Goron, Zora, and Deku Nut? Another red flag. It seems like they’re putting in just enough effort to avoid copyright lawsuits. Some Revomon are glitched 3 months after introduction, and cannot be leveled up (Frostoast).
Legendaries had started as being a potentially profitable venture, but no longer are worth it at all. this was driven solely by the players and their flooding of the three maps (of which only 6/10 are actually zones with spawns) where legendaries spawn very rarely, but decreases with each player on the map. With the amount of people seeking solely these Revomon, the game would very easily lag, chaos would ensue, and crashes would be common with only 6+ people on the map at once. How does this project expect to handle hundreds of players? They say it’s a map size issue, but that only handles player density not what the servers can handle.
The community can be hostile in-game, players would cover spawns with the models of their Revomon to prevent others from catching spawns, they would consistently teleport to one another, or yell and curse when a rare, shiny, or legendary was found. Its not uncommon to hear of those who would cycle through these same maps for 6+ hours a day and then lie to others about the money potential, just to get more hype for the game and maybe drive the price higher. However, from .92 at it’s start, the currency itself has dipped down to .32 after a abrupt announcement from the head development team that burning values for Shinies was being cut by half.
This tore the community, as there was no explicit mention of a floor price being altered only a month after the burn feature was introduced; and several other blunders that will be covered; and no announcement prior to the change so people could take advantage of one more day of normal trading costs
With this in mind, and the statements of individuals on their team such as ‘Sora’, the funds from $Revo go directly back into the game. If this is the case, and they are having this many issues already, I question if they can even make a functional economy and a successful coin. They seem to have taken the base lessons learned from Pokemon VR and instead of trying to make a good game, they just wanted to make a quick buck. The team themselves have stated that they were a small team and were struggling to hire further developers, but would not clarify if it was a financial issue or just a lack of good candidates.
On the topic of graphics and gameplay, it’s what I would expect. Aim ‘Orbs’ to catch Revomon, Battle if you so wish, Run if you don’t want to do either and another Revomon spawns. This ends up causing hours upon hours of the same arm motion and running from everything in sight just to try to get a rare spawn, because the lock system makes it so you may not get one unless you clear enough. On that same topic, if a Revomon is locked to you but you don’t reach it in time, others can grab it. This can be done with rares, legendaries, or any other Revomon in the game. Many times a search will continue for several extra hours due to someone else grabbing an expensive rare tagged to you.
PVP is fun, except the majority of people run the same 6 – 7 Revomon most of the time and XY (Sometimes Sun/Moon) Smogon tactics work unless you need Taunt, Baton Pass, or any number of functional non-damaging moves. Some, such as Sucker Punch don’t work at all. If you’re going to rip something off, at least make sure that it works.
The majority of cities and zones are small but well designed (minus the seasonal map being a direct copy/paste but with snow ), minus the massive level jump from around level 5 to level 20 between the first and second cities, and no healing in the second city but no mart in the first city. Love the logic here, make your players consistently run back and forth or just catch the very same things again but leveled up. The Day/Night function works well and the timed spawns are quite welcomed.
All in all, it’s an alright proof of concept and I have confidence in this team to eventually create a good game, but the NFT and cryptocurrency aspect needs to be pushed aside. The game can’t support as many players as it wants to reach and $120,000/month to the community was apparently more than it could sustain, resulting in the drop of the value of shinies.
The attention needs diverted, the designs and Revomon need a full overhaul, and the development team needs to focus on making a good product, not a good economy solely. What economy will be there if there’s nobody to play the game? “Truly own what you earn” is a commonly stated slogan, but this is a lie in and of itself if as evidenced, those same NFTs you ‘own’ can go up in smoke at a moment’s notice. Hopefully the developers can pull their head out their ass before the project becomes just another Nintendo lawsuit, or another Youtube video about a dead game.