Monster Fantasy lets you ignore the monsters entirely
3 min read
Monster Hunter meets Animal Crossing is a pitch that only works if both halves are real. Monster Fantasy puts around 50 giant monsters on one side and fishing, mining and cooking on the other, and lets you pick.
Two games, one save file
You are an amnesiac hero in the Kingdom of Eldoras. You can follow the classic path of an adventurer, hunting monsters for materials and rewards, or you can spend your days fishing, chopping wood, mining, cooking and crafting your own equipment. The store copy is explicit that both are the game.
Around 50 giant monsters wait to be challenged, and each has its own behaviour, so learning their traits is how you win rather than out-levelling them. They can be fought, tamed and ridden, which means the same creature is an obstacle, a goal and eventually transport.
The four classes — Warrior, Mage, Archer and Martial Artist — sit on top of that, along with online co-op. It is a large surface area for an indie release, and the honest risk is that a game which is two genres is sometimes neither.
What makes it credible is that the life-sim verbs feed the hunting ones. Cooking and crafting are how you prepare for a monster, so the quiet half is not a separate mode you visit.
Why the join is the design problem
How to combine video game genres is the reference, and its warning applies here. Two genres stapled together give you two shallow games. They only become one game when the systems of each are inputs to the other.
The rise of the systemic game is what that looks like when it works. Monster behaviour, materials, equipment and food are four systems that can all talk to each other, and a hunt that was won in the kitchen the night before is the best version of this genre.
The tell will be whether you can genuinely finish the game without hunting. If the life sim is a pleasant sidebar that runs out of things to give you, the pitch was marketing. If it is a real second path, it is the reason people will still be playing in a year.
What you actually get
Monster Fantasy is by Jotoyo, self-published, listed for 2027 on Windows, under Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPG and Simulation. That genre list is unusually long, which is either the point or the warning.
2027 is a long runway, and for a game this size that is the right call. Fifty monsters with individual behaviours is a content problem before it is a design one. Every one of them needs an animation set, a tell you can read, and a reason to be worth fighting twice.
If the appeal is playing an animal instead of fighting one, Stray Dog: nobody cares is the other one on this list — a nameless hound in a burning medieval fief, with parries, backstabs and nobody who cares.
