Idea Factory brought Dokapon Kingdom back from obscurity earlier this year with the release of Dokapon Kingdom Connect on the Switch. This re-release took the PS2 and Wii hidden gem and revamped it with some balance changes and the addition of online play. When the Switch release was first announced, it seemed like a perfect fit there - but being on PC opens the door to even more players and that’s a good thing for the game as a whole. The core formula is perfect for online play and Connect featuring it ensures that the game will have a long lifespan.
There are a lot of board games on the market for PC, with it being a pretty dominant platform for them and a natural fit for on the go sessions and their ability to run on pretty much any hardware configuration on the market. That kind of flexibility bodes well for Dokapon Kingdon Connect on PC since it already runs great on the Switch and the up-ressed graphics look fantastic on even the Switch’s small screen - let alone a larger PC monitor or portable PC like a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, where the colors should really pop.
The game itself is fantastic in both longer and shorter play sessions, with longer sessions being great for when you want to advance the “save the princess’s kingdom” story, and shorter sessions working well for when you just want a little bit of character interaction and want to focus on the board game side of things. There’s nothing else on the market that blends a board game’s formula with an RPG, and here you have a regular turn-based combat system right alongside old-school RPG character classes, making it feel like a complete throwback to the past while being a modern release that is also a re-release.
It’s an interesting blend of old and new because even when Dokapon Kingdom was a new concept on the Super Famicom, the character classes in play were just normal and now they’re a blast to the past for RPG fans. The RPG combat itself is fast-moving, but it being rooted in a board game means that it can be very difficult because there’s so much RNG at work that you may’t just map out a single strategy for every battle. It’s a challenging game and a very fun one when everything clicks into place. We’ll know more about the Steam release when it draws closer in the fall. For now, you can enjoy the game easily on theSwitchas well and that may be the platform of choice to go with if you have a lot of Switch-playing friends.
