I’m a casual Pokemon player, and I found Temtem on Steam, and the gameplay is similar to Pokemon. So I bought it and tried to play it with the expectation I’ll feel a similar experience to Pokemon
(flow chart1) The core loop of grinding
Basically, the core loop to leveling in Pokemon and Temtem is similar they roam, battle (trainer or wild pokemon) to get experience points, and level up the pokemon. And pokemon already been standing in the Turn-based game for about 26 years. So pokemon is a good game to compare to Temtem.
now we’ll breakdown all the points that affect the leveling progression:
Experience Points
The most important thing to leveling is exp because we need to gain exp to level up. and we need the battle to gain exp.
(Image 1)Temtem Exp to Lvl. 100
(Image 2)Pokemon (Charmander) Exp to Lvl. 100
To get to level 100 in Temtem, the monster must gain 1.000.000 exp, but Pokemon need 1.640.000 exp to get to Lvl. 100, but still why is pokemon easier to grind?
Battle Duration
The battle duration is the most crucial thing in building the player experience. And it makes the grind experience directly to the player. The battle duration is affected by monsters’ statistics, the stats give the monsters a gap between levels. So the bigger progression the bigger the gap in the stats. the more the gap, the easier and faster the monsters fight the monster that has levels below them.
The Battle & Monster stat
The battle is affected by monster stats, and the stats affect the duration of the battle. Now let’s see the difference between these two games.
(Table 1) Pokemon starter base stats
(Table 2) Temtem starter base stats
There are different stats between Pokemon and Temtem, Pokemon don’t have stamina in their monsters. so this is the stat Temtem without stats.
(Table 3) Temtem starter stats without stamina
Now we can see the difference between those two games, at the first phase of the monster, both Pokemon and Temtem have the same total of base stat, but when the monster evolves to the second phase, the monster in Pokemon have about 50 higher base stats values above Temtem’s monster. In the third phase, the monster has about 130 higher base stat values above Temtem’s monster. On the other hand, the evolving monsters in Temtem are way harder than evolving monsters in Pokemon. Because in pokemon they have fixed levels to evolve.
(Image 3) Pokemon evolution chart
But in Temtem to evolve the monsters they need to gain a certain number of levels from the level since they caught it.
for example, if we meet Houchic at level 20 we need to get to level 49 to evolve to Tental, because 20+29=49. And from Tental to Nagaise we need to get it to level 73. but the stat gap for each phase is not really big, and for me, that does not make me want to grind to get to the next phase. But we need to put a big effort to get to evolve the monster. So, for me, I feel the reward from the hard grind isn’t worth the number.
For Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard has different exp table.
But temtem just have one exp table
From here we can conclude that even Pokemon have a bigger exp to grind than Temtem, but pokemon have the equivalent reward after the big grind and that makes the player feels more appreciated and keep engaging the player.