Topic for talking about the Shimamon minigame as well as sharing your achievements. Note that this topic is for talking about the gameplay. We ask you make your story related posts (regarding the final boss’s identity and such) in the Common Route topic or use spoiler tags. Also don’t make reference to other stories or information beyond the Common route without tags.
The Shimamon minigame is enabled on July 29th by going to the Umi event(candy store) and asking for the same thing that Umi bought. You need to confirm your participation later in the evening as well. There are two major parts to the game play: catching Shimamon with bait, and battling with your Shimamon. Each part has several intricacies to discover.
Important note: This game relies heavily on RNG; however, it’s been confirmed that the numbers are determined beforehand by unknown factors, so save scumming is less effective than you’d think. You can try this out by going back to previous choice after a battle. If you play that battle again, playing your cards in the same order, the result will always be the same including exact damage numbers and all.
Bait
By default you will start with three kinds of bait and three places to set them. The game has a total of 20 different kinds of bait and 10 locations to set it. Baits and locations persist across playthroughs after you unlock them once. The number of traps you can set per day is determined by your rank: you start at 2 and can go up to 5 at most. There are 100 different Shimamon that you can catch. You can find documentation on how all the baits are obtained and where to use them to catch a specific Shimamon here.
Battle
Battling is accessed through the blue icon in the lower right corner of the island map screen. You can battle up to two times per day. Battle is conducted between Hairi and an AI opponent. and they both are allowed up to three Shimamon. Each Shimamon has a star grading from 1-5 and one of three attributes: Water, Wind, or Earth. They have advantages against each other in this rock-paper-scissors fashion.
Players can customize their deck of Shimamon and choose which Shimamon is sent out to fight; the rest of the battle happens automatically.
Your goal with the battles is climbing to the top of the ranking ladder and be the very best like no one ever was. The ladder is made up of Hairi and 35 other fighters. On July 30 you can only battle against Umi as a tutorial. If you lose or don’t battle Umi, you get put in Rank 36. If you win against her, you get bumped to rank 10 (she will also be stronger the next time you fight her).
When you beat an opponent, you will switch ranks with them. This hold true until you take the rank 8 from Umi. From that point and on, you only gain 1 rank with each victory no matter who you defeat. When you beat all fighters from rank 7 to rank 2, only then can you fight rank 1.
If you’re battling with Shimamon like Ryouichi or Inari, the relationships between those Shimamon and your opponent can trigger certain events during the battle. This can make certain opponents much harder than normal as your awesome 4★ Tenzen suddenly takes 999 damage or loses all of his attack power, for example. If you find any interesting interactions, you should totally list them here.
