The game itself is a beginner's RPG, guilty of guiding the player through most of the game. Sometimes this complicates things, whereas you may already have an idea of how to use a potion but the game decides to guide you through with an explanation, anyway. Incidentally, some items given to you will never be used --instead you get to watch a cutscene of Juka using them himself. For it's lack of challenge, Juka becomes a walk in the park. You're never really in danger of getting lost or dieing due to everything being hand-fed to you.

Juka himself is a promising young alchemist, and when he runs an errand into town one day, finds the town is missing many of its residents. All of this has something to do with a menacing Monophonic.. uh, Menace. Nonetheless, your giant frog friend, Bufo, is more than willing to guide you into the world of Obla to solve this mystery and rid the world of any evils. Oh, and also Juka isn't just an ordinary child because he has powers that let him use said Sound Staff, and so forth --it's a really basic RPG. While it may not be interesting at it's core, the characters and aesthetics of the actual world are what make the plot fun to follow.

In the same vein, the game's combat is very simple. Based around a magical Sound Staff, Juka captures sound shapes which enemies fire at him, then fires back. If you can catch all coordinating shapes without getting hit or grabbing the wrong ones, you're good to go. The player doesn't necessarily kill anything, but makes enemies disappear with a "POP!". Meanwhile, Juka only has the power to put trickier enemies to sleep or blind them with a potion. There is an hint of pattern-based puzzle elements in the combat, but it the mechanics stop to take a breath right when you're ready to go on a jog.

Most of the adventure is composed of shaking trees and various plants to get ingredients to make potions. This is both good and bad. The good part is that you never, ever, run out of ingredients --in fact you can hold up to 50 of each. The bad part is that lots of your time is spend mixing ingredients for potions and shaking plants. Mix, rinse, repeat. Alas, this is the life of an alchemist. Throughout the game more characters will give you recipes on potions you will learn to make, thusly more potions are available to mix and use. This leads to potions that will animate parts of the landscape or put enemies to sleep. Potions really do come in handy, you know.

One of the biggest problems is not actually the time spent making potions, but that the entire aspect of experimentation is removed from the game. I spent time actually writing down what kinds of cool things I should be able to make but couldn't. I even started a new file to discover that without recipes given to you, potions you will learn later in the game are not available without a recipe. The game tries to hide this by holding back ingredients until certain points of the game, but it's still a nuisance.

Juka and the Monophonic Menace is a solid entry in Orbital's book, but there's a chance that if you aren't 12 or younger, you may just be bored with it no matter what. This is once more due to Bufo's constant walkthrough, limited potions, etc. While the combat system is based around the principle of sound, along with the entire game's story line being aural centric, there isn't much variation between the enemy attack sounds to any interaction with in-game items. Fortunately, the game's music is a pleasantly different story. There are great concepts and ideas in Juka, but they simply aren't fleshed out for any number of reasons . Don't be fooled by it's boxart or weird name, though; Juka isn't a bad game by any means. Buy it for your kids, rent it for yourself.