On the surface, Mongil: Star Dive looks like a Wuthering Waves clone but after playing the Closed Beta Test 2, I strongly feel it targets a very different market, which I think can roughly be summarized as "casual monster collector".
Even at CBT2 I think there's lots to be desired in terms of mechanics and fine tuning progression rates, but here are the key takeaways in terms of what features I think they are promoting to get the niche target market they want:
- You collect monsters
- There's a sort of sticker book (the Codex) to fill out with details on the monster.
- You can "breed" (combine) them to collect the best traits you want.
- You have to combine them to find some mutations you can't simply find in the wild.
- Combat is easy and casual
- With a solid 5* banner pull you can very easily clear all content if you focus on a single character.
- Interrupts are important, and way easier than Wuthering Waves. You have a huge window to interrupt and there isn't really a "perfect dodge".
- Instances like Dungeons have a Quick Battle alternative.
- Once you defeat the difficulty level just one time, you can always just spend the daily energy to just collect rewards.
- Saves time and prevents repetition.
- Crafting your own gear requires a huge amount of grind.
- Obviously not a good "feature" but I think this might in fact be intended -- someone with a collector mindset will play the game to collect things long after all the combat challenges are done and story is exhausted.
- Quick Battle means you can easily check in each day to try to farm the materials then go do other things, so it's not tedious per se, it just requires a lot of patience.
- The overland is not level scaled.
- There isn't the concept of "World Levels" to suddenly add levels to every monster.
- So when you get a new character, even without using resources to improve them, you can play them right away somewhere on the map.
The above adds up to front-loaded time unlocking instanced content, and then settling into a relaxing session of roaming the overland to collect monsters with relatively easy fights.
This is the real end game -- not tough fights but chill collection.
After you've exhausted the current content, you just check in and chill each day until the next content drop.
And you need to do this in order to collect monsters to fill the Codex, Combine into Mutations, and just Combine into making better monsters.
But there's no huge urgency, and you don't have to be so focussed on min-maxing your characters.
As mentioned, there are still lots of features which I would like to see changed. For example, when you Combine two monsterlings, their color grade (grey, green, blue, etcetera) might go up but the result seems to always be level 1, so some investment you had in levelling them is gone.
Which in turn means you might not actually use a monsterling until you finally settle its final color grade, rank, and traits, and that could take a long time and a lot of gold.
But even if these issues aren't polished away
- the core of the game has a relaxed vibe
- and if you're a casual player who doesn't have too much time each day or each week
- and you like chill combat to collect monsters
then Mongil is definitely worth a look.
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