Nintendo Okie

A few weeks ago I heard about a game that was coming to iOS devices called Little Masters. Many people who had seen screenshots and video of the game called it a Pokemon rip-off and wondered how quickly Nintendo would have it pulled should it make it to the App Store. Well, that day has come and Little Masters is available to download for free.

Being the curious person I am I downloaded the game to find out for myself just what it is and, while it is very clearly “inspired” by the Pokemon franchise, it doesn’t really scream blatant rip-off to me.  Based on my time in the first few minutes it’s more or less a free-to-play game where you do battle with monsters, who very closely resemble Pokemon, in turn based battles in an attempt to capture more and more creatures.

The biggest drawback I already see is that it has many of the same trappings of every other free-to-play game.  You have limited amounts of actions you can take before you need to “rest” and earn more actions.  You can speed this up with in game coins, which can of course be purchased with real world money.  It also wants you to spam your friends with messsages to get them to play as well.  It also seems to take away many fun parts of games like Pokemon, namely exploration.  I haven’t once been able to leave my yard and all the battles are done by sending out friends to capture monsters for me.

I’m going to play some more to get a better feel for just what it is, but you can check out this more than 15 minute trailer of the game and judge for yourself.  What do you think? Is it a Pokemon rip-off or just inspired by the franchise?