Cassette Beasts

Whenever I criticize Pokemon (and that happens a lot) there is always someone ready to tell me that I've grown out of it, or of turn-based RPGs entirely, that it isn't for me. Cassette Beasts is here to prove these people wrong. But I don't wanna spend this review talking about the obvious comparison because the game is a lot more than just a pokemon clone and its flashy number of 14400 different fusion sprites. It's beautiful, cozy, has a good story, lovable characters, it didn't even need to have romance but it has that too. The menus are fast and responsive, moves have unique animations, the amount of team customization is insane, the balance is such that you can always use your favorites, but there is also room for optimization, the game allows you to break it only to show you enemies that totally counter your busted builds, I only had to grind on post-game, and even then they make it very fast and easy, and at that point I was also completing the bestiary (the game's pokedex), something I've never done in Pokemon, because I simply didn't want the game to end. If you like pokemon, play this. If you hate pokemon, play this. If you've never played pokemon, start with this one. There's a sequel coming out soon and I will be there day 1.

The game is excellent. It's similar enough to Pokemon to be familiar, but it's different enough to feel fresh. It runs well on the Steam Deck.

Cassette Beasts has a great concept, charming visuals, good music, and an interesting combat system, but the progression is frustrating and often feels like it wastes your time. The game gives you several questlines at once, but you can travel across the map only to discover that you need another traversal ability, a higher level, or a different quest completed first. The Ranger Captains are scattered everywhere, and losing can mean a long trip back because checkpoints and fast travel are not always convenient. Wild encounters also interrupt exploration constantly, while normal battles and repeated animations become repetitive. Even some quests feel like busywork, such as collecting 300 Wood early in the game just to build a sign. The game can be fun, but too much of that fun is buried under grinding, backtracking, unclear progression, and unnecessary frustration.

Amazing game i remember playing it when it came out but heres why i downvote it. the devs and the community are SUPER lgbtq and you most likly will be banned in the reddit or discord if you say something againts their beliefs Other then the drama 8/10 CCG (Creature capture game)

Lo piratee y era tan bueno que senti la necesidad de pargarle a los desarrolladores con mi moneda de tercer mundo. amo este juego

ゲーム起動後にCTRを押しながらcheatsを入力 これでYボタンを押してる間倍速モードになります。 これがないと始まらないレベルなのでメモ。 ゲーム全編に漂う、緩やかだがどこか不気味な世界観が非常によくできている。ビジュアルと音楽、テキストのトーンが統一されており、独特の空気感に浸りながら探索する楽しさがある。オープンワールド形式で自由度も高く、メインストーリーを追うだけでなく好きな順番で寄り道できるのも良い。 BGMが物語の主題になっているだけあって音楽面は特に素晴らしく、融合時にボーカル曲に変化する演出は印象的で、本作ならではの体験になっている。サウンド面の完成度は非常に高く、雰囲気づくりへの貢献度も大きい。 一方で、戦闘システムはやや複雑すぎる印象。属性関係や追加効果があまりに多彩で覚えきれず、しかも無属性スキルの汎用性が高いため、最終的には属性をあまり意識せず同じ技を使いがちになる。モンスターの役割分化も近接特化か遠距離特化程度で、もう少しビルド面での個性が欲しかった。 また全体的に間を重視した演出が多く、それ自体は雰囲気づくりに貢献しているものの、テンポの悪さにも直結している。倍速モードは隠し要素ではなく正式に実装してほしいところ。融合素材集めなどもやや作業感が強く、快適性の面では改善の余地がある。 とはいえ、独特な世界観、音楽演出、探索の自由度といった強みは非常に魅力的で、インディー作品としては完成度の高い一本。粗はあるが、雰囲気ゲーや音楽主導のRPGが好きなら十分おすすめできる。

Started out nice but after a few hours certain mechanics really started to annoy me which ultimately led me to dropping the game. I like the fact that you "scan" monsters instead of catching them, but in reality it still feels more like throwing a pokeball rather than how Digimon Story games on the PS4 handle scanning the data of an encountered Digimon. What I don't like is you generally play with two characters, and when you want to "catch" or how they say "record" in this game, you use up the action of one character and it starts to record the data of the monster during that turn. You immediately start recording as the first in the turn, it gives you a certain % that it might record succesfully, but then attacks, status effects etc. will affect that rate during that turn. So in general it's start recording, your other monster does an attack on it, lowers the rate, then the monster you're trying to capture does his attack and in between every move the animation for recording shows up (and it's slow as hell). By the end of the turns, then it'll do a final % check and then will have recorded the monster regardless whether you've killed him or not during that turn. What I don't like is the god awful slow animation for the scanning part which repeats itself sometimes 3-4 times during a turn. It just takes a lot of time for no reason. Just start recording and then do the final record check at the end of the turn, why do I need to see the % fluctuate between turns when you can't do any additional attack during that time so you're just watching some % go up or down while not being able to affect it. It just makes it tedious and because of the slow animation that follows after EVERY attack done or received by the potential monster, it just takes a lot of time just to get the recording done, and this is all without actually having to still battle it afterwards, kill it so you can actually end the battle and get your record at the end. Another thing what bugs me is that AOE attacks show the attack animation one after another, instead of simultanously. So doing an AOE, whilst normally it should show the same animation on the affected enemies at the same time, instead it does it first with enemy A, finishes the animation and then does the same for enemy B. It doesn't feel like an AOE attack in the sense that both enemies are affected by it at the same time, but more like a multi-turn attack that you're dealing. Again, combined with the slowness and the second after each animation to start the next one, you spend so much time waiting on animations to finish and continue during any battle. Grinding for Exp or recording more monsters take a lot of time when you factor in these tiny delays for every single action within every turn. Finally, the navigating part.. you can only slow-walk which feels clunky, but you can also dash that costs stamina (which you can upgrade for longer range dash bursts but also take more stamina). Once you dash to the fullest, you have to wait 2-3 seconds for that temporary stamina to regain for you to do another one.. all of this while you CANNOT run in the game. So you're stuck walking at a snails pace, doing a dash burst to move faster across a map, only for it to exhaust your stamina and then slow-walking for 2-3 seconds so you can dash again.. why can't you just run in this game? It just feels very badly designed and since you're walking around a lot, these minor inconveniences at first feel very tedious the longer you go on. The recording mechanic falls flat which is one of the key mechanics that separate this from a standard monster collecting game. I wish they would have stuck with how Digimon implemented it, you immediately scan a certain percentage per identical mon at the start of an encounter, and when you encounter more you just add up those percentages until you get 100% and you can "create" that mon outside of battle whenever you like. Digimon even has it when you scan over 100% and go up to 200% you can create them with improved stats. This makes the collecting much more worthwhile and it doesn't require much effort other than literally just encountering them. I bought the DLC 2 hours before I quit because I was expecting to quickly finish this game but I noticed the more time went by the little frustrations just started to wear me out and I don't want to waste my time having to grind out a game, even if I purchased extra content from a DLC. There are many games to play so I just decided to call it quits. It's not a bad game but the aforementioned bad implementation of the gameplay mechanics become too tedious for me to warrant it suffering through it to complet the game, it's not like Pokemon where the IP kinda keeps you interested because you know there are more interesting pokemons the more you progress, but with this game I cleared about 70% of the monsters (and grinded their evolutions) and I have no desire to find out what else monsters there are simply because the IP is not familiar to me nor does it carry the weight that Pokemon/Digimon would. 6/10

Cassette Beasts is an excellent indie monster collector, probably head and shoulders above anything else in the genre aside from Monster Sanctuary. It smooths out many of the rough edges of similar games by not tying monster progression to levels/strength and eliminating variable stat gains. It gives you a lot of variety to mix and match abilities by elemental type, though in doing so, it removes most of the mechanical uniqueness between monsters that would normally drive you to switch between them. Either way, it has just enough story, platforming, and puzzles to keep things interesting and has a great aesthetic all around with a unique mechanic in fusing monsters together during a fight. Highly recommend.