Jayde, I have a complete manapedia, and I know for a fact that I can host a trade because I traded with people successfully in the past. So whenever you want to trade, just say the word...

LordLucius, I will take you up on that, but if I'm gonna bother you, I may as well get the good Sheepit. I can probably do that in less than an hour, but I am not sitting here expecting you to be on call either.

Maybe let me know times in general that are good for you, and we can go from there.

Okay, here's what I need:

1. Any manamon from the Aquaffe line
2. Any manamon from the Flammia line

That's literally it. It'll be more trades than that, but that's all I need from you, apart from your IP and the ability for you to host.

What I will do is trade you my Bearran, my Sheepit and my Aperishian, which will all transform. For two of those three trades, you can toss me the starters I'm looking for. For the third, I don't care, use a squirmunk or something. It doesn't matter.
Then all I need are three more trades to get my evolved manamon back. Kind of annoying, but nothing terribly high maintenance.

Righto, worked like a charm.

Thanks so, so much. My Lamgurk isn't the Lamgurk I want, but he will fill up the manapedia, and I can get at least a rough estimate of his stats around level 50 to help fill out the guide and all.

Yeah, I knew it would, and thanks for not replacing anything. I'd have been annoyed if I lost Power Fang or Copy. I'm not entirely sure what I'm gonna keep on this guy, I'll have to think about it.
Glad you liked the Bloody Baron though. Heh heh.

It gets Power Punch at 47 when it evolves into Tenshaino. It's actually kind of a jerk to level before that, because of White Lance's low use points.

Sculpton can actually be found on the top floors of Starwalk Mountain...not where it's icy, but in that big room near the end where you're timed the first time you go through, with the boulder-and-switch puzzle. They come around level 36-37.

Sculpton evolves into Simulon at 45 (I just tested this). It evolves from Effigem at 30 I believe.

And yeah, it's awful. As a Simulon it gets a tiny attack bump, but it's still slower than dirt. Lovely defenses don't do you much good if you take forever and a day to kill something. With a stall set, this thing would be excellent, but it just wants to hit things with Rock Avalanche/Slam/Tunnel/Stone Fist.

So I'll put this in perspective for you.

Something that's fairly quick and has low defenses and high attack:
Round 1: it hits, gets hit back
Round 2: it kills what it hits

Whereas this is what happens with Simulon:
Round 1: It gets hit; it hits back
Round 2: it gets hit, it hits back
Round 3: it gets hit, it hits back
Round 4: it gets hit, it kills what it hits
We're not throwing weaknesses into the mix here too much, but the point is that when Simulon is done killing something, it probably has lower HP than your speedy thing does, not only because it only took one hit to Simulon's four but because it was able to dispose of the foe in two hits.
Low attack and high defense is not always a bad thing, but it means you're going to be hit more often, so it's sort of deceptive.

I don't know what was different about my first playthrough of Manamon. I don't know if I was basically just ignoring the storyline in favor of being hooked on the decent battle system and mon collection, but I really did gloss over a lot of the games flaws. I'm not usually one to replay a game, but I wanted to show someone how this game works and hang out and play the game with them, so I started a new file. Here are my findings thus far, both of this playthrough and my overall experience with the game. Let me state first and foremost that I am not, at all, a fan of realism in games. The weirder, the more anime like, the less like reality, the better. However, I do appreciate a well-designed world, one that is consistent with itself and it's concept, and that's where most of these complaints are coming from.

First, the good:

A pokemon-like game that is completely legal and accessible to the blind. While pokemon isn't my favorite game in the world, and if I could see I'd throw it over in favor of any number of other RPGs, it's still not a terrible game and it's nice to be able to experience it without all the fiddling necessary to play pokemon as a blind person.
A decent turn-based battle system. I say decent because of balance issues that have come up during extensive testing.
One of the best boss fights in just about any audiogame I've played. I know people have problems with the "final" boss fight of this game, but I think the high intensity of the music and attack sounds combined with the strategic setup necessary to defeat this guy make it one of the most challenging and awesome boss fights I've ever played. It certainly got my adrenaline going. It is definitely winnable consistently with certain setups, but that's not a bad thing, since you either have to know about or learn the setups before hand.

Now, on to the flaws.

The entire concept behind manamon is honestly a complete mess. You start the game and you're treated to a light, airy logo with a big happy smile on it's face. This is great. You start the game and you're treated essentially to the Pokemon experience, starting out in your room, picking your starter, meeting your rival, and it pretty much stays solidly Pokemon until you earn your second stadium key...
Then Octoross shows up. Ok, to be fair I don't really have a problem with Octoross. Other than that he's the only character in the entire game who physically hurts people, whereas everyone else uses their manamon to do everything. Either way, this isn't really my problem with the game, even in so far as he develops as a villain.
However, this does bring me to one point. It is plainly obvious that the game was developed either by 3 distinct people as the credits say, or by one person with a severe case of changing their mind mid project. One can see, even as they play through the world as it is now, the the game was originally designed with the Pokemon experience in mind. Light, happy in most places, kind of cartoonish. If things had stayed like that, even if Octoross still did everything he did during the game, I'd really have no problem with that (though as was mentioned earlier, this should probably be discussed in the description, especially since there are torture scenes, outright mind games and the like).
Things start to fall apart for me when we see our first newspaper in Hansha village. Why do the headlines feel like they were lifted from real world newspapers instead of having anything to do with the Manamon world? The only article I can remember even mentioning Manamon is something about an organization pushing for Manamon rights, something about them not being used as food because they're too inteligent. However, there are problems with that, since there's equipment created from manamon, like the bone dagger. Don't think I've ever seen any manamon steaks or the like around anywhere, but if used for one thing, why not another?
This kind of brings me around to another point I should have covered earlier. Fighting to the death. As dark as this world gets, this really should be a thing. If the goal was to make a, quote, adult, pokemon, I think it's failed pretty miserably. Adult, in my book, doesn't mean dark, depressing and filled with the most brutal concepts and profanity one can find in the real world. However, my point now is that in the manual, we're actually told that the manamon in stadium battles fight to the death. This would actually be consistent with the messed up world created here, accept that they don't fight to the death. Try to switch in a manamon with 0 HP, and you're told he's too tired to battle. Beat a manamon in battle, and you're told they were defeated. I guess whoever developed that concept decided there were too many problems with having them fight to the death, like how is a stadium master going to train up an entirely new team before the next challenger? Of course you could just nix that whole mechanic by having revives magically resurrect dead manamon, but I digress at this point.
So lets just continue on through Avelette city and get straight to the meat of the problem I'm having right now. Sancot city.
Someone who built this game, obviously, painfully obviously, believes in evolution. You know what, I have no problem with that. We've all got free will and free rights in thsi country and in most first-world countries, believe whatever you want. But if you must insert your beliefs as a message into your game, at least, please, be consistent about it. It may seem like I've gone a little off topic here, but this is a precursor to my problems with the scenes in Sancot.
I've already discussed my problems with martiagle earlier in the thread, but I'll sum it up here. Basically, it couldn't have evolved from the martial eagle as the manapedia says, because uh, we just watched it transform from an Eagawk. There are also people studying manamon for evolutionary reasons, people talking about natural selection, etc. Again, I really don't have a problem with this in so far as freedom to share your beliefs goes, it just doesn't seem to fit into the game world. It's a painfully obvious attempt to spread a message that someone is fanatical about in the real world, using a game that wasn't designed to contain that message. So lets move on to our second message.
The evils of religion. I'm certain that either someone on the development team has had a bad experience with either Christians or a religious figure of some sort, or they've read way too many young adult books. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's your game, put whatever message in it you want. But don't expect me to buy it when there are glaring issues with it's implementation such as:
A girl who, when prevented from trying to kill herself, instead of attacking you directly, has the presence of mind to reach for her mananets to fight you off. This ruins the entire scene, emotional music and all. One could argue that things work differently in this world, that reaching for manamon is habitual in the same way we might reach for a weapon, but since not everyone is a tamer and we aren't even told when people start trying to capture and traing manamon, I don't think that works. How did she even get manamon like that, with such overprotective parents, and being consistent with his character, if she were allowed to have manamon, why doesn't her father force her to have only holy types?
My next concept is treating a manamon battle as if it means something, as if it has true, lasting power to change people. Anywhere else in the game, manamon battles, unless they're against Octoross, are treated strictly as fun competition. Never mind they're supposed to be fighting to the death, but I've already covered that. But somehow, in Sancot city, they're supposed to change things. They're supposed to make a jerk loosen up on his daughter and change his mind about his faith. They're supposed to somehow fix things. They're supposed to be the equivalent of beating someone up in the real world, in this one city.
Finally, at the end, your character just, gives up. He leaves the stadium and just says, well, I've done everything I can. When really all he's done is studder around a little, watch emotional scenes, swear at a couple people for being jerks and leave. Why not try to sneak Rina out with you? For this much intensity, why not make this a whole side plot of the game? I mean, if nothing else, you could always take her to your Grandma's house, and then there could be a whole side story about her father trying to track her down, etc. At the very least you should be given the choice of trying to do more or just leaving like you do now. The way it stands, it just feels like someone said, ok, I got my message across that religion of any kind is evil, I think they get it, lets move on with the game.

Oh, and why is there no normal road between Sancot and Hansha? Your only options to get between those two places are either pocket copter, or jump off the mountain?

That's as far as I've gotten with the current playthrough. I honestly do wish I could have a refund for this game, I could do a whole lot better with the $40 I spent here. Especially given the lack of feedback the developer has accepted as a result of truly thorough testing from people like Jayde, I can't help but feel as though the main developer or the whole team has considered the project finished in their minds and has moved on to the next, regardless of what really could use improvement. It's as Jayde keeps saying, this could be a truly great game, but instead in my opinion, they've chosen to release it unsanded, unvarnished, unpolished and unpainted, and refuse to accept any help fixing it up. If there ever is a Manamon 2, I'll be asking some very pointed questions to make sure flaws like this in the world and battle system balancing don't exist, and if they do, I won't be buying it no matter how great the sound design or immersive the atmosphere. Same goes for any other RPG or game released by this company, even if it resembles a game I've always wanted to play, like chrono Trigger. If I want to hear about politics, animal rights, the evils of religion, the stock market  or evolution, I'm perfectly capable of doing that on my own time. even if the message was consistent, I don't want those concepts crammed into a fictional world where they don't work. I think the only people that will buy messages like the ones presented above are those who've already made up their minds anyway, or those unwilling to do research who will just buy anything if it's emotional enough, which is just as manipulative as religious people who try to force others to believe the way they do, in my opinion. Again, just as with any book, movie or TV show, if it's your project, you can put whatever message you want in it. Just please, please try to make sure it'll fit in the world, or build your world around that message? You probably won't get my business if you had Manamon fighting to the death and spreading the message of evolution, but you won't get it either for an inconsistent fanaticism, at least not anymore.

hi folks,
What ice type should i take, I see that there aren't that many icetypes out there. So, should i let burgan involvve into domestress i think, or should i choose something more powerful. thanks in advance

Go for ice legendary. It has solid stats across the board, it's a tank, and it can't lose UPs. It's  Fridget touch will do more damage then the other ice types, and it gets ice tempest at level 70.  Furthermore, if you give him a life  tonic, go to the first city and check his stats then asigne points into them, it will rock. To  prove my point, the godbeast  went down  under 3 minutes with legendary at level 60, Orystar at 58, and Pandurbit at 57 with Tylivial or however you spell it coming in and reviving Orystar and Pandurbit when they die.

David,

I'm not going to defend Manamon across the board, but your post inspired me to say a few things. Obviously I'm not Aaron Baker and won't presume to speak for him, and I'll leave questions of balancing out of this discussion for the sake of everyone's sanity. I already have hundreds of hours of playtesting after all, not to mention dozens of board posts detailing findings.

So, on to the meat of the message.

1. Religious fanaticism
Aaron has tried, however haltingly, to talk about the potential harm of fanaticism. I've seen real-world situations passingly similar to this in my life, and I thought Rina having a hearing problem was actually kind of a neat touch (that's the reason given for her mother being protective, at any rate). I think that the problem here, beyond the writing itself of course, is that this is really the only example of religion that we see in the game, so it stands up much higher than it otherwise would. If there were other religious things in the game, even non-Christian stuff, and if those things represented religion on the whole in a much better light, then perhaps this situation wouldn't seem so egregious. As a side-note here, I think that the game developer's relative inexperience with religions as a concept comes into play here; Most of the holy types, with the exception of Myaneko who's just weird, have Christian symbology (I believe Loonis/Sacroloon has cross-shaped feathers on its wings or tail, lenends of Paladine/Tenshaino talk about it being an "angel", Bellaard is a freaking church bell, and Ziognioss kinda speaks for himself). Instead of a generally divine sort of vibe, I get a Christian vibe. And that's not an awful thing, but I personally have more issue with this than you do with the dark turn the story takes. Speaking of which...

2. Different tone
The game starts out like pokemon, and has quite literally dozens of homages scattered all the way through. But then it tacks on a much darker story, much weaker writing and runs into problem. See, I have no problem with a darker story, as such. I can appreciate that. But the impression I get, actually, is that right up till the Octoross stuff happens, I very much get a pokemon vibe from the game, and it feels to me as if somebody went "Oh hey, whoa, we're ripping off pokemon silver, so let's change that". Aaron has said multiple times that Final Fantasy, DragonBall and other anime creations helped inspire this game, but let's be honest and call this what it is. It's 94.5% pokemon. Now, I didn't mind the tone shift, but I can see why someone slse might. What got me, actually, was that the game was so much like pokemon that I despised, and still despise, the scaled fights and the Irroadium battle. Every playthrough where I'm about to face that boss, I cringe...not because it's hard, but because I may have to rebuild a team ahead of time just to have a chance. A solid team which works everywhere else may not work on Irroadium; thankfully, I know how to prepare now, so I just bull through and get it done. No adrenaline, no excitement, just the slog of the dungeon itself, with a boss I dislike at the end. Also, holy freaking transparent plot twists, Batman!

3. Evolution
This game actually tries to differentiate itself from pokemon by calling NPCs tamers instead of trainers, and by calling evolution transformation. I think your point about the evolution belief being shoved into the game is a weak one. I think in all honesty that to say such-and-such a manamon evolved originally from a martial eagle, while clunky, could easily have applied to Eagala and Eagawk as well (as in, the whole line somehow split off from regular old eagles somehow at some point). I don't think this would constitute shoving opinions down one's throat.

I suppose this all goes to show how two different people can take two very different things from the same stimulus though.