How’d you miss that!? (Dokapon Kingdom)
- Vincent DiFusco
- Aug 30, 2017
- 6 min read
Today we’re going to dust off that $12 piece of plastic called the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo’s attempt at beating the competition, not with graphics and power, but with innovative gameplay and familiar characters. Today’s story isn’t on my feelings of that system however. Our journey today doesn’t feature any faces you’ll know, instead as the theme of this series, a game you most likely missed. November 22nd 2007 saw the Playstation release of Dokapon Kingdom, today I’ll be focusing on the Wii version (the only reason I still have a Nintendo Wii haunting my shelves at home) released on July 31st 2008.
The best way to describe Dokapon Kingdom at a quick glance is to say its Mario Party mixed with Rock Paper Scissors with a healthy amount of hating all your friends by the end of the night. That being said, please only play this game with friends, unless you like eating humiliation by the fistful. We’ll get back to that shortly.
A unique feature of Dokapon’s is that you only need one controller, during turns and fights you hand the controller to the next player when done. Controls themselves are as standard as you can get. First of all, turn your Wii-mote sideways if you haven't already,Use the UP and DOWN arrow keys to select thing. The 1 button cancels choices that you've made but aren't quite ready to commit to. It will also bring up info such as your stats, current standings, towns, etc. but only after you've spun and are about to move. All that information can be found in the Data option though. The 2 button is your select button. Also, once you spin and are getting ready to move, you can press this button to bring up an auto route. All this does is show you potential places you can move to. If you get high numbers, do everyone else a favor and use this option, it saves a lot of time. Pressing A will let you look around the map at will, pressing A on Spaces will let you view their function. This is especially useful on Weapon Spaces, Magic Spaces, or Item Spaces because you can view their wares without actually entering the shop. Pressing B brings up the world map. All the blue stars represent towns that need to be liberated, any red stars represent towns
you have already liberated. The + and - buttons only really serve to cycle between your items
and field magic in your bag.
The story of Dokapon Kingdom is simple: The great kingdom of Dokapon is being attacked by monsters, the king decides that whoever can bring the most peace back to his kingdom shall be allowed to take his daughter's hand in marriage. Kind of awful when you think about it that way, but hey when you’re king you get to make the rules. From there you and your friends embark on a board game style adventure to take castles, earn money and stab each other in the back.
At the menu there are 3 modes to choose from Story, Normal, or Battle Royal. Story gives an over arcing narrative to your adventure, adding a pre-gameboard area in which you can gather equipment for your journey forward. The game only ends when you kill all the Main bosses. Normal mode jumps you and your friends straight into the game, you set an amount of in game weeks you’d like to play and it throws you down to get right to the frustrating party. Taking castles earns you money, the richest person at the end of the set amount of weeks wins the hand of the princess. Battle Royal is much like Normal mode but now you have common objectives to fight over.
Now that you have Game mode selected you’re going to need a character. At start you’re given the choice of Male or female and three jobs (with an eventual total of 11). Warrior gives you extra attack, while with Magician you get extra spell damage, and thief grants you more speed, which enables you to dodge more, and due to being the weakest in attack and magic also has the steal skill, when you pass another player on the board you can take one of their items. Once you pick a name away you go.
Dokapon Kingdom is at its heart an RPG, with experience gained from defeating monsters, money used to buy new weapons, and stats that change based off of equipment picked up and level.
When the game begins you’re on a game board that when zoomed out is the entire real world. You start in Asia and adventure counter-clockwise over the globe. To move you have a spinner, labeled 0-6 and you move that many spaces, simple enough till you realize that this is a huge map with many branching paths, worse yet the monsters strengthen based on the area you’re in.
The board itself is littered with a few different types of spots. Yellow are battles, sometime event, good or bad. Green money bags are item roulettes, green books being one shot spell roulettes, red negative spaces that may have a very awesome reward surrounded by very bad items. Shops are also spaces you can land on giving you the ability to purchase new weapons, armor, magic or items respectively. Here you can use the money you’ve earned or you can try your luck at literal Rock, Paper, Scissors to rob the merchant, but be careful if you lose you get a bounty placed on your head, which makes you a target for other players.
The last important space are the towns, these are your objectives, taking these give you the most weekly money, but are guarded by either purple Mini-bosses or Red for the Area boss. These are no Small joke, come unprepared and things will go sour quick.
This brings us to the bread and butter of the game, its fighting system and the downfall of all your friends. Fighting is done Rock, Paper, Scissors style and works the same way if you’re fighting a monster or fighting a friend. Battles start with both players having a card in front of them, the one who started the battle gets first choice of cards, the card you pick dictates if you attack first or defend first.
Once the order is decided the attacker picks an attack on the D-pad, and then you pass the controller to the defense player for them to choose their action. When on offense you'll have, Right = Attack, Up = Magic, Left = Strike, Down = Skill
When on defense your options change and it will look something like this...Right = Defend, Up = Magic Defense, Left = Counter, Down = Give Up
Battles play out like Rock, Paper, Scissors as stated before with attacks having counter blocks, it becomes a game of knowing your opponent, Attack --> Defend, Magic --> Magic Defense, Strike --> Counter, Down on the D-pad for defense is give up.
Once one of the fighters either run out of health or gives up comes the fun stuff. If fighting a monster, they get money, experience, sometimes an items, and if it’s a mini-boss or boss they liberate a town. The fun stuff comes when you beat a friend… upon winning you're given multiple options to mess with your victim. You can choose to Forgive them (boring!) or to prank them, with this you can change their hairstyle, draw shame on to their face or change their name (always a favorite option). Now those are all pretty fun, but not very mean, let’s say they’ve up set you, killing you sends you back to the starting castle which is annoying, but now you have them in your grasp you can choose to rob them. This opens 5 other options, you can decide to steal their on-hand money, you can cripple them by stealing some of their equipment, an item, one of their one shot field magics, or most damaging, you can steal a town from them.
There are a lot of other surprises to be had in game, but I won’t spoil them here, events that will make or break your day, even the chance for the last place player to become a super overpowered god but to find those out you’ll need to grab some friends and venture into it for yourself.
One last piece, and that’s on the subject of A.I. Do yourself a favor and don’t play with any computer opponents. Not sure if it was by design or just a crazy glitch but even on the easiest setting the computer turns into a perfect player, rolling everything it needs to land on whatever space, always guessing the right option during combat and only getting good events. My thought is that this was the designers’ way of saying “Go out and make some friends”. I tried many times to face the Computer and just trust me… you don’t want that pain.
So, there you have it, my description of Dokapon Kingdom, a true gem of systems long past. If you’re lucky enough to stumble upon it I highly suggest you pick it up, you won’t regret it, and if you have three too many friends but are bad at goodbyes, well invite them over problem solved.
-Vincent “LeftfootGreen” DiFusco
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