Mists of Pandaria – Pet Battle!

As well as adding the Pandaran race, a new continent, the new Monk class, and an overhaul of the Talent Calculator, the Mists of Pandaria expansion also brings with it a pet battling system.

There’s a review of the system on MMO Champion.. collection, levelling and training of pets, battling and stats, which sound a little like Pokemon and Geomon, two ‘pet’ collecting and battling games I’ve been playing a bit of recently.

Pets will now be tradeable, even once trained.  Some pets will only be out in the wild during certain seasons or weather conditions, so trading will be a nice option for those pets you can’t find yourself.  This reminds me rather a lot of Geomon, where I’m a little frustrated by the idea I can’t collect all the Espers myself.. and I like to aim for a full collection once I start!

I particularly like the idea that pets will become account wide.. I have a great collection on my main character, Kirria, including many which were gifts from friends, and I wouldn’t fancy my chances at collecting them all again.  I look forward to trying the system out for myself when I eventually get enough spare time to make it worthwhile re-subscribing to WoW.. but I’m not sure about naming all the pets I’ve collected!

Geomon

Geomon is a role-playing game for the iPhone or iPod featuring collectible spirit-creatures called Espers, which you need to fight to capture.  You play the part of an Agent in the EsperCorp company, charged with capturing the Espers to study.  Espers can be found at different locations around the world, and the game uses geolocation to determine which Espers appear for you.  Some also only appear at night, or when it’s raining.. so collecting them all may be impossible.. I’ll have to see.

A friend was involved in the creature design for this game, so despite my initial resistance to a game which can track my location, I decided to take a look.  The game is currently free.. I’m not sure if some elements will turn out to be paid, or if the company have a plan for merchandising later on.

Anyway.. I started the game up, and was asked to choose an Esper from a small collection.  Each has different stats, strengths and weaknesses.. such as the ability to use toxins or fire, or being weak to physical attacks.  I chose the shadow wolf Varg..

The Varg’s strength lies in Shadow: sneaking and debilitating attacks, and whose weakness is light.

This is where the info falls a little short, or at least relies too heavily on game-genre knowledge.. which I don’t really have!  The information I get here tells me that Espers using light rely on healing and shielding.. but tells me nothing of what the weakness would be.  Does the Varg have less healing?  Will he be less able to penetrate an enemy’s shield?  Guess we’ll see! 🙂

After choosing and naming my new pet, I was given a radar screen, with little blips showing me nearby Espers.  Clicking on any blip allows inspection of the Esper, which tells me what the Esper is, as well as providing a difficulty rating.  All the Espers on my first screen were rated as “fair” difficulty.. I’m guessing that harder fights are left until you’ve passed the first few levels and know what you’re doing.

The fights are very easy: you choose an attack, which is applied to the enemy before they take a turn at you, and so on until you defeat the enemy.  The Varg’s special ability at this point is a Curse, which in addition to taking away some HP, also has a chance to apply “Afraid”, which I guess makes the enemy miss a turn, or fail to attack.

After the second fight I found an item.. a Flawed Quartz.  Crystals can be used to capture other Espers, when you fight and weaken them first.. and so I collected my second Esper!

So now I have two Espers in my party, which can contain up to five.  I’m guessing they can all come to fight at the same time too, maybe with the option to select two to send out, though I’ll have to capture more to see 🙂

To collect more, I can fight everything I see, or even trade with people, assuming they have different Espers.  I believe this is all very similar to the Pokemon games.. but I’ve not played that for myself so I’m only going off what I’ve been told.. for now.. 😉