Cassette Beasts

A beautifully crafted Pokemon-esque pixel art fighting game with its own charme with more puzzles than I remember from Pokemon (My Pokemon days are like 15 years behind me), so it feels more like a mix of Pokemon (the fighting) and 2D Zelda (The puzzles). All in all the game is good with some flaws. I would recommend not going for all achievements, because the post game content is mostly busy work. The Good: The music is great! If you like it: A lot of social commentary. The story is pretty nice and managed to make me engaged with it. I like the art style and all of the effort that was clearly spent on creating a ton of models for all of the fusion models as well! The nitpicks: At a few points in the map you will have the game having to load more parts of the map, one of these points is within the main city and therefore you will see that pretty much every other time you are doing something in the main city. Its not a long loading time, its more of a nuisance. One of the quest markers for one of the quests is even wrongly placed <.<. Sadly you can easily rest twice at a fireplace without wanting to do so, because you dont get moved out of the fireplace menu after resting. Game was quite clearly made with gamepads being the primary way of interacting with the game, keyboard and mouse only being an afterthought. During the fights against Vic and Frankie, Vic uses the same opening voice line he uses as when he is fighting you 1v1, saying "1 on 1!". The Bad: Since the game has quite a few puzzles, often times your partner is in the way, blocking your movement, blocking items you move, etc.. Really quite obnoxious. The Balancing is quite off in some aspects. Especially the combo of 7x Random Starter + Headshot twice on your starter beasts and then swapping back and forth between them, turning every fight into a breeze even if the level scaling difficulty is set to "impenetrable Grind". A lot of the postgame notice board quests feel like slop (repeated fights with the same enemies (with the same text), stuff like delivering a package to someone (wtf), killing 3-5 fusion monsters in the wild, killing 7-10 of a specific monster somewhere, ...). Some effect animations get a bit tedious, since they arent skipable and they pause the gameplay. It would be better, if they made some of the stuff show in a simplified way at some point or give the player the option of not pausing the gameplay for these animations. Currently this is quite annoying towards the lategame, some of the most annoying examples being when you lose HP during the recording process or effects you deal or get dealt after death. Im on a quest of at least trying every game in my library, of which I got plenty from all kinds of bundles. If you are interested in my journey, check out my other reviews :)