Monster Legends is a Facebook web game (and mobile game) developed by a company called Socialpoint
, creator of the similar game Dragon City. It bears many similarities to a number of Mons Series, particularly Pokémon and Monster Rancher.
Provides Examples Of:
- All There in the Manual: Every monster has a description that either gives some backstory on them, tells a funny joke or is a Shout-Out lampshading.
- More recently released monsters have extended backstories on Social Point's own forum site. Some of these shed additional light on parts of the stories that can't be elaborated on due to the limited length of descriptions.
- Art Evolution: A lot of the game's early monsters were a lot simpler, with generally more cartoony designs and shorter, stiffer animations. This style didn't last too long, though, as not long after, the art shifted to a more detailed, realistic style with much more fluid animation, and this ended up sticking until early May of 2020, where new monsters began to take up a noticeably smoother movement style that focuses on doing everything in one clean motion.
- Art Shift: Mop is a Legendary monster that heavily references old-timey cartoons such as Looney Tunes, and this includes in his appearance and animations. Unlike any other monster in the game, Mop has an extremely simplistic design, is drawn with a thick outline, and moves in a wacky and erratic manner.
- Ascended Fanboy: Youtuber PopularMMOs did a series of videos on the game. This resulted in him actually being added to the game in the form of the MMOnster, now Patrion, and later on his (ex-)wife Jen as Tijen and pet cat Cloud as...Cloud. In addition, Vanoss Gaming and several of his friends are now characters in the game as well.
- By now, it has become a trend to create a new monster based on a sponsored YouTuber every month or so, with monsters based on Armor Gaming (who makes videos about the game), UnspeakableGaming, MrBeast, and several more being released since the announcement of Mythic monsters.
- Bodyguard Crush: General Nishant has a female bodyguard who started following him everywhere.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory:
- Hatching eggs faster costs gems, building structures/removing obstacles quickly costs gems, getting more workers to build structures and remove obstacles costs gems, building certain structures costs gems, getting certain monsters costs gems, continuing on the Adventure Map after your stamina is depleted costs gems, and gems are nigh-impossible to get without paying. Luckily, it's only $2 for 25 gems, so it's not impossible. However, 100% completion is still not easy on the budget.
- You need gold to buy the starter eggs and most building. To level up you monster, you need food which is got by spending gold. To upgrade buildings, you need gold and food. To get access to the cooler stuff, you need to level up and thus get experience point which you obtain by spending gold. Basically, if you want to get anywhere you need gold and need a good method of producing lot of it.
- Cerebus Syndrome: Monsters released earlier in the game's life tended to have shorter, zanier descriptions that dealt with light-hearted situations or simply referenced another work. As the game grew in both age and roster, however, descriptions became longer and notably darker, raising the levels of
Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel and even building a sort of loose continuity. - Com Mons: The monsters of the aptly named Common rarity, which are the only monsters you can buy with gold instead of gems.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Several examples, usually in the form of joke monsters.
- R.O.F.L. is, simply put, the most ridiculous monster in the game. Not a thing about it is taken seriously, not even in-game, and everything it does is just a reference to various memes from the time it was made. However, all the same, it is still a Legendary monster, meaning it's very powerful relative to most others, and uses those memes to powerful effect, from crisping its foes with lasers to ramming them full speed (with Sanic, of course).
- Santerion may be a silly-looking robot Santa Claus, but he's also one of the best tanks in the game. Not only is he a Legendary too, but his Life stat is through the roof, and his trait makes him immune to status effects, and draws every attack the foes use (including AoE moves) to him, effectively making his allies immune to damage until he's down (unless the enemy has Pierce, but that's getting off-topic).
- Cute Monster Girl: While there are many female Monsters that this applies to, one of the most well known cases is the Light/Dark Epic Monster, Fayemelina, which ends up being very averted by her Corrupted self, Fayemalice. Which is still kind of cute.
- A Day in the Limelight: Commander Alvid wasn't referenced in any event even a single time since her creation for a long time. She eventually, finally, did get more lore based on her with the release of her father, Vandecken.
- In the game's Cosmic era, this happened to a ton of old Legendary monsters in the form of a Cosmic power-up, referencing monsters as unknown and unacknowledged as Tesaday, Ahran, Varuna, and even some non-Legendaries like Ophiuchus.
- Disc-One Nuke: Now has its own page.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first version of the game is almost completely unrecognizable from what it's like now. Some examples of how include:
- Old monsters had more cartoony designs and stiff animations, compared to the more realistic, smoother look of the modern ones. See Art Evolution above.
- Similar to Pokemon, rather than each monster having a unique set of skills, all monsters had 9 skills from a select pool. These skills were also very, very simple in name, such as Fast Attack and Lightning. Most monsters after the very first pool, however, chose instead to use their own exclusive set of more creatively-named skills.
- Speaking of skills, this old pool of moves included other moves of the Physical element, like the previously mentioned Fast Attack and Mass Haste. This trend also died fast, as monsters began to use exclusively moves of their own elements, save for their default Physical move. This was eventually subverted by Warmaster Ragnarok, whos Death Door move is Physical, and Physical moves became a lot more common during the Mythic and Cosmic eras.
- The Metal element didn't even exist for a while. That's why there's no Metal Legendary monster that takes moves from the old pool, unlike every other element.
- Dr. Fakenstein: Dr. Viktor is a Mad Scientist, and a blatant parody of Dr. Frankenstein.
- Elemental Powers: Most of the monsters, which the exception of Legendary-type monsters, fall under this category.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Griffin is, in fact, a griffin. Literally.
- Frankenstein's Monster: Frank S. Tein, if you can't tell from the name.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: An unintentional and downplayed case, but the Cosmic Lindworm's description states that he has the power to end the Cosmic Era. Sure enough, once he was released, his ability to transfer his turn to another monster has brought back a number of Legendary monsters to the Cosmic meta, particularly those with powerful denial abilities hampered by their comparatively low speed.
- In the 4th chapter of the Era Sagas, while calculating information about Gregorz of Lyria, Neurofunk states that his health is 50,351. This remains true to the game's information, as Gregorz does have that exact Life stat when brought to Rank 5.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- A few of the weaker Legendary monsters in the game include living mountains, masterful swordsmen, endlessly powerful sorcerers, and even the game's equivalent of Sun Wukong and God. A few of the monsters much stronger than these include a nerdy hamster, a cartoon fuzzball, robot Santa, and a regular lizard with some armor and a flail. Not to mention a few monsters are described in their bios as if they were individuals, yet you can obtain multiples, implying them to be entire species.
- Uriel, better known as God (or at least 'the light of God'), is a support monster beaten out by, just to list a few examples, a hologram of an anime girl, an adolescent Light mage, a fish woman, and the Tooth Fairy.
- Guest Fighter: One collab event brings in Mine Turtle from ASDF Movie, of all things. The event was even advertised in asdfmovie14.
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: VoltaiK. Initially a superhero, albeit with a large ego and Glory Seeker tendencies, VoltaiK ended up falling from grace and ended up being corrupted into Dark VoltaiK during the Metropolitan Era, a delusional supervillain thinking he's still a hero, but even after being corrupted, he managed to learn from his mistakes and returned to being a hero as VoltaiK Redeemed during the Galactic Era. This is especially noticeable in that despite being corrupted by Lutum (which is stated to enforce Black-and-White Insanity), VoltaiK still managed to redeem himself.
- Infinity -1 Sword: Musu is easily breedable in the early 10's and is a great replacement for just about any uncommon monster. Especially when it reaches level 20.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Uriel. You need a lot of gems, plus you need to reach the (previous) max level, 60, to get it, but in return, you get a powerful legendary monster with an extremely rare (and for a while, exclusive) revival skill.
- Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: Plenty of mechanical monsters are in this game. The most notable examples being Metalsaur and Sparkwedge.
- Little Green Man: Many of the "Skeel" monsters are green-colored aliens, such as the Skeel Trooper, Exo-Skeel, and Master Skeel.
- Living Dream: Mythic Amber combines this with an in-universe 1-Up. The backstories for every Mythic monster involve them being brought to life by the powers of Mythic Amber, whether they be created from imagination or brought back from the dead.
- Moveset Clone: Or, more accurately, Everything Clone. The game's unofficial mascot, Pandalf, has 5 versions of himself, in the form of Pandaval, Pandaxplorer, Pandafest, Super Pandalf, and Zomdalf, that are identical in everything but appearance. Heck, even their animations were identical (excluding Zomdalf) until Pandalf got his redesign.
- My Brain Is Big: Master Skeel is a floating big-brained alien.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Numerous examples, including:
- Eggeater, an egg-eating Easter snake with magic powers.
- Santerion, a robot Santa Claus.
- Varuna, a literal zombie pirate who is also a crab.
- Cavenfish is a pirate shark, and Storm Beard is a pirate lion with lightning powers.
- Hornet, a cyborg lightning bee.
- Crabbydroid, a crab-jellyfish combo with a robotic exoskeleton.
- Belbreath, a butterfly-lion-bird hybrid.
- Tryon, an incredibly similar dragon-chicken-centipede hybrid.
- Stake, a robotic snail/snake with spider eyes.
- Patrion and Tijen are both feline light warriors based on YouTubers.
- Toshiro, a space robot samurai.
- Grumpex and Zameleon both are and run a team of humanoid space chameleons.
- El Dino Volador, an anthropomorphic gangster Triceratops that dreams of being a luchador.
- Galante, Violet, and Galante Jr., all of which are humanoid bird-like romance gods.
- Olympus Mons: The Legendary monsters. Especially notable are Uriel, "The light of God", and Timerion, who is immune to status ailments.
- Playing with Fire: Fire-type monsters
- Pure Energy: A few monsters with the magic element such as Flawless and Genie fit this trope.
- Shock and Awe: Thunder-type monsters: Thunder Eagle, Rhynx, Rabbidex to name a few.
- Special Person, Normal Name: Two monsters in particular stand out, those being Trevor, a living Death Mountain and Aiden, a man made of both fire and water.
- Took a Level in Badass: While this has happened to many monsters across the game's development, a villainous case taken up to eleven happens to Nebotus. What was considered by the Monster Legends community to be one of, if not the shittiest Legendary in the game even compared to fellow early Legendaries, has become one of the most powerful Mythics in the game, as well as the Greater-Scope Villain of the Corrupted Era, corrupting Fayemelina and sending her off to corrupt more monsters to create an army while he enlists others as well such as Wickah, Wangzhou and Wormhole.
- Villain Has a Point: In the Era Sagas, Wickah is undoubtedly an evil force, especially once Corruption transforms her into Anwrikah and makes her begin serving the Lord, but she is still justified in what causes her mounting frustration - monsters keep coming to her asking for help when she already has to carry the entirety of the swamp's duties on her own and never gets offered any help in return.
- Whale Egg: All the monsters hatch from eggs.
- Whateversaurus: Firesaur, Greensaur, Metalsaur, etc.
