The New Denpa Men – General Guide

by Doc – Owner, Founder, How Come There’s Millions of Denpa Men But Only Three Denpa Women

A very large amount of the information in this guide comes from either my own playthrough or the community in the unofficial English-speaking Denpa Men Discord server, which I recommend joining.

Spoilers will be avoided as to plot and endgame content, but the mechanics introduced in the first portion of the game will be explained in some detail. Endgame content is located at the end of this post.

How This Game Works

The Denpa Men series is a fairly typical authentic JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) experience, with the catch being that your party members are 100% unique and specific to the real-world places you inhabit every day. Imagine a classic Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game, mix in some Pokemon elements like type effectiveness, and include a location-based party mechanic where you catch party members by going places in the real world, and you have The Denpa Men.

Adventures – General

Like its predecessor, The Denpa Men Free, The New Denpa Men revolves around self-contained “adventures” accessible through the Harbor. Going on an adventure uses 1 Stamina, which regenerates every hour.

Adventures are the meat of the game. When you go on an adventure, you have to either beat its win condition (nearly always just beating a final boss) or lose everything you gained during the adventure save for the experience points. Adventures always play out the same way after your first time beating them – the long cutscenes are stripped out, and the text is altered to reflect that you’ve been there before. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same steps that you took before – talk to X NPC, enter the cave, flip the switches or beat the enemies you beat previously, and then you win and take your spoils back to the island with you.

The purpose of adventures is that that’s where the “grinding” happens. The New Denpa Men is an authentic JRPG and follows in the classic “grind a lot or be destroyed” style of RPGs that was common back in the day. As a result, you’ll end up repeating adventures often, and may even become a bit of a speedrunner with how many times you’ve done them. Fortunately, green chests can be re-opened each time you do an adventure, and you’ll get different loot each time. Most of the time you’ll get a minor amount of gold, but sometimes you’ll find new clothing items, decorative items or medicine.

Of course, your party is fully healed and restored upon returning to the island.

Adventures – Event

At all times, there is a special event adventure that rotates every 24 hours and costs 2 Stamina to use. These adventures are straightforward: pop in, beat up a bunch of enemies or go fishing, and keep going until the enemies run out.

List of events

• Get Boost – Enemies are low level and more likely to drop “boost” items that can be applied to a single adventure. Stacks well with the Get Gold! and Get Exp! events by giving Experience and Gold boosts.
• Get Feast – Enemies are low level and more likely to drop multiple food items that can be used to raise happiness.
• Get Exp! – Enemies are low to high level, very high defense and evasion, and drop sometimes hundreds of thousands of experience. Remember that experience gains end when hitting the level cap, so limit break before using this event. Bring items that increase crit chance/lower enemy evasion if at all possible, as most of the “teeth” enemies in this area can only be killed with critical hits.
• Get Coin! – Highlight to reveal Spoiler:
  • Enemies are low level and give out a paltry amount of casino chips. This event is a waste of stamina.
• Let’s Fishing! – Timed fishing event. Bait not provided. Useful for increasing fishing points when at a low fishing level, but not as effective as joining Denpa Men community servers and adding a guy with a great island as a friend.
• Get Gold! – Do not miss this event. Gold is really hard to get in this game, and if you happen to have critical hit-raising equipment you’re in a good spot to make enough gold for a limit break. There’s really no other good way to make money in this game besides this event.

Catching

Catching is simple: take your Nintendo Switch to locations with lots of Wi-Fi signals in real life, use the “offline catch” option to catch Denpa Men generated by those signals. If you have a cell phone with mobile hotspot, I recommend connecting your Switch to that hotspot so you can upload your Denpa Men as you catch them. That way you aren’t limited to catching 8.

Battle

I translated a Japanese Denpa Men wiki page, which you can find at this Google Drive link. It’s not formatted, but it goes more into detail on some mechanics that are more endgame material. It also includes tier lists for clothing and such under the opinion of the original wiki author.

Auto-Fight

The AI options in this game are generally pretty good, and you can rely on them. Pressing Y activates the AI and gives it permission to use AP (the AI tends to use antenna attacks like Great Wall/Defocus even when it’s not necessary), whereas pressing X activates the AI and does not permit it to use AP. The game knows how many Denpa Men it will take to kill an opponent and will balance it evenly so no Denpa Men attacks are wasted. We don’t have that advantage, so there is something to be said for relying on the AI.

Of course, you may find it more successful to individually issue orders to Denpa Men as to which enemies to hit with AP attacks and which ones to use default attacks. I typically issue orders as to AP usage, and then press X so the rest of the team just attacks the enemy outright.

Typing

Basically, the typing works as follows:

• Fire beats Ice
• Ice beats Wind
• Wind beats Earth
• Earth beats Electric
• Electric beats Water
• Water beats Fire
• Light and Dark beat each other

Types resist attacks of their own type, so if you’re going into a Fire adventure and need to resist Fire attacks, bring a Red Denpa Men. Be advised that a Denpa Men with a certain color will not automatically have attacks of that type. You’ll need to find and equip a bracelet that changes their attack type.

Colorings of the Denpa Men define their “type”.

• Red is Fire
• Light blue is Ice
• Green is Wind
• Orange is Earth
• Yellow is Electric
• Blue is Water
• Purple is Dark
• White is Light
• Black has no typing

There are other colors in the game, but those are paywalled and have more specific purposes than just attack typing. If you’re not spending money on microtransactions, those are all the typings you’ll need for the main game.

Antenna/AP

There’s a lot of antenna types in this game. Think of AP as the equivalent of “Magic” attacks in traditional JRPGs. They’re unique to that Denpa Men, and can’t change but can grow stronger as the Denpa Men levels up. For example, Small Heal antenna become Small Heal +1, +2, +3 and so on. The result of this is that they will heal more HP. All antenna skills follow a similar growth pattern.

Denpa Men are very limited in their AP usage, and will use 1 AP at a time. Be careful when using the AI option as it will sometimes waste your AP in inconsequential battles. I’ve found that the game likes to set “Wall” on my Revive hero when I’m fighting random junk opponents that can be easily defeated in 2 turns. If you run out, AP can be regenerated with AP+ items.

Unlike previous Denpa Men games, Denpa Men rarely come with “Attack All” antenna. That is a feature that can only be easily obtained by “Birthing”, which will be explained later. If you see an elemental-type antenna in the Antenna Tower catching minigame, it’s likely going to target an individual enemy, not an entire party.

Limit Breaking

Starting at Level 20 after beating the fourth adventure, you unlock the ability to limit break. This is a level cap that must be hurdled every 10 levels at great monetary expense. To limit break, the Denpa Men must be:

• At the level where limit breaking is appropriate (20, 30, 40, etc.)
• At maximum happiness (viewable from the Denpa Men Box screen – raising happiness will be explained in a moment)

Limit breaking is also expensive, but results in a massive stat boost to the Denpa Men that is roughly equivalent to gaining 5-10 levels on its own. It’s well worth it to limit break as soon as you can, but it gets very expensive after level 50.

Raising Happiness

Much of the difficulty of limit breaking comes from raising your Denpa Men’s happiness level. This is going to be expensive no matter how you go about it. There’s a few good ways to do this:

• Talk to your Denpa Men from the Denpa Men box screen (Contact menu, repeatable once per day for +4 Happiness)
• Feed your Denpa Men fruit and fish (Happiness dependent on the specific fruit or fish)
• Complete adventures (+4 Happiness per adventure)

Earning Money

Money is the limiting factor for most of what you’ll do in The New Denpa Men. You don’t get a lot of it for beating enemies, and most of the gear and equipment you are handed during the journey is the best you’ll get until you get handed something better, so you shouldn’t sell it.

Money’s pretty hard to come by a result. You’ll find that you get most of it by re-running later game adventures, but if you’re in the early game your best bet is planting and reselling flowers on your island, which requires time passage. Keep note of which flowers can be resold for a profit, and which ones can’t. Alternatively, once a week (usually Saturdays in western time zones) an event adventure runs that is designed to make it easy for you to get money. If you can manage to kill at least a few of the enemies in those adventures, you’ll get some acceptable coin out of it.

Endgame spoilers are located below this line. Proceed at your own risk.

Idols Guide