The New Denpa Men Review (Switch eShop)
Back in the days of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, some of you may remember the Denpa Men trilogy, which offered a series of cheap and approachable RPG adventures that felt like a great fit for the portable. However, there was a fourth title released only in Japan in 2014 which experimented with a free-to-play structure that proved reasonably popular. That game died with the ending of online services for the 3DS, so Genius Sonority has seen fit to retool it for the Switch era and release it worldwide as The New Denpa Men. It may not be one of the best free-to-play games available on Switch, but New Denpa Men still proves to be modestly enjoyable.
The narrative in New Denpa Men is hardly in line with the epic and occasionally drawn-out stuff that JRPGs are known for. Here, you command an army of Denpa Men—charmingly weird little dudes that look like a cross between a Mii and a Teletubby—to go on various quests geared towards helping various cutesy yellow creatures with long noses. The episodic structure works well with the bite-sized gameplay design, though it must be said that the localization here is NES-era levels of atrocious. Yet funnily enough, the broken English honestly adds to New Denpa Men’s quirky charm, as it feels strangely in line with the awkward vibe of the characters and world.
Gameplay feels a bit like a cross between a Dragon Quest and a Mystery Dungeon game. After you select a mission (which costs you some stamina), you are transported to a small town with a dungeon nearby, sometimes requiring you to explore a brief overworld before making it to the dungeon. Once you decide to dive into the dungeon, you then explore a few floors of rooms and hallways jammed with treasure, secret paths, and lots of enemies. The dungeon then culminates in a boss fight, and usually gives you a nice treasure as a completion reward if you manage to kill the boss.
Combat segments are where that Dragon Quest influence is most felt, as you engage in basic turn-based battles against your foes. You can individually order each party member to do a specific action or pick from a short list of generalized actions to make everyone do the same thing. This latter option isn’t quite a replacement for an auto-battle feature, but it does do a good job of speeding along the fights against trash mobs. And though each Denpa Man doesn’t exactly have a raft of different skills and abilities, there’s just enough variety in each character’s loadout to keep them from feeling too samey.
Frankly, New Denpa Men’s gameplay and combat isn’t all that inspired—this is about as basic and bog standard as a classic-style JRPG can get. However, there is a certain appeal to the simple ‘baby’s first RPG’ design. Anyone who’s looking for a palatable and accessible gateway into the genre will be well served here, as it doesn’t take too long to learn the ins and outs of team building and… well, it’s free. On the other hand, those of you looking for a lot more gameplay depth will find New Denpa Men perpetually stuck in first gear.
Adding fresh party members involves you playing an AR-style minigame that requires swinging your Switch around to ‘see’ the Denpa Men swimming in the air around you, which you then capture by firing nets. Every Denpa Man has unique stats and abilities to help give them a niche in your team, though the most useful ones are, of course, gated behind paying some real-world money to take a shot at them. We enjoyed this approach to team building, as it doesn’t take long to build up a solid bench of characters to train up, and it’s always exciting when you manage to land one with an ability you were hoping for.
Naturally, as a free-to-play game, New Denpa Men has plenty of ways it not so subtly asks you to pay to get ahead. The main currency here is Jewels (one of which will cost you about a dollar) and while you can get some Jewels for free as a byproduct of simply playing the game, they are never in abundance. Jewels can be used to purchase some rare goods in shops, they can be spent to give your party a full revive and heal if you get wiped in a fight, and they can also replenish the stamina that you deplete by going on missions.
Sure, you can theoretically get by without using Jewels, but New Denpa Men feels like its difficulty is balanced around the assumption that you do. If you choose to opt-out, there’ll be some situations where you’ll be forced to grind to overcome bosses that feel like they’re a bit above the current point on the difficulty curve, pushing you to towards needing a party revive. If you want the best shot at overcoming whatever mission poses the biggest challenge to your current party, you’ll probably have to pay a few bucks to make it happen.
On one hand, these freemium elements are nothing new, and New Denpa Men isn’t particularly egregious in how hard it pushes you to open your wallet. You can still reasonably get many hours out of this experience without feeling like you’re getting shafted, and those hours do offer a largely enjoyable (if simple) RPG experience.
On the other hand, the freemium elements do feel like they cheapen what could otherwise be an excellent RPG for players who want something light and easy. A certain mental toll gradually accrues when you have to close prompts for deals on Jewels and are faced with frequent reminders of what you’re missing by refusing to spend. You’re constantly reminded of how your gameplay experience is being tightly regulated by various financial and temporal limitations imposed by the developers.
Visually, New Denpa Men manages to satisfy, as it presents you with a basic, but consistent art style that reminded us fondly of games that came out in the days of the Wii and 3DS. Sure, there’s nothing here that’ll wow you as you explore tired biomes such as volcanoes and snowy forests, but everything runs at a rock-solid 60fps and the animations are all silky smooth as a result.
Conclusion
The New Denpa Men is pretty firmly in the middle of the pack when it comes to Switch’s freemium games. Simple, approachable gameplay makes it a great light JRPG for anyone looking for a basic introduction to the genre but, unsurprisingly, it scarcely holds a candle to classically designed games such as Octopath Traveler 2 or Dragon Quest XI. And though the microtransactions and freemium elements don’t get too in the way of progressing the story, they are nonetheless a persistent annoyance that can drag the overall experience down. Still, it costs you nothing but time to give this one a shot and, despite the drawbacks, this is still a fun little RPG that you may find yourself coming back to more than you’d think. If you give it a try and if you’re not too impressed, there’s a staggering number of excellent RPGs on Switch to play instead.