Cassette Beasts

w game

An exceptionally good game! It's modeling itself heavily off Pokemon but it's honestly better than anything Nintendo's made in the past 20 years. Battles are 2 on your side (your custom MC and a buddy party member) vs 1-3 enemies. You can fight groups of wandering beasts in the wild, but there's also enemy "trainers" who in true Pokemon fashion attack when you enter their field of view. You got gym leaders to conquer and story superbosses and so on. You capture beasts by recording them onto cassette tapes (see game title) which requires one of your party members to channel a capture tape onto an enemy. While they do so, the enemy is prevented from dying so they can't be killed and lose the capture or escape, which is very nice. The lower their HP the higher the chance of capture, and the other party member can hit them and apply debuffs to raise the chance even more. If the capture fails you can just try again as long as you have the capture items. It's a superior system. The battle system is rock solid. Each character gets 2 AP per round and attacks cost varying amounts. There's a web of various type advantage/weaknesses and how they are implemented is quite interesting. Hitting an enemy with an attack of a super effective type not only does more damage but it applies specific debuffs based on the type interaction, like fire attacks on plant type also apply burn, or water on earth inflicts def down. Attacks of disadvantage types do less damage and apply positive debuffs to the target. So this adds a whole other dimension to picking the right attacks. There's a whole bunch of chain interactions that can happen as a result of this that can produce some unexpected benefits, like proccing an enemy's thorns in order to get positive buffs on your character from the type backlash. You can merge your two beasts together into a super form that combines your movesets, HP, AP gain, and types, which usually is a good thing but not always. It also combines the buffs/debuffs of your team which might result in you doing tons more damage but also can result in you being crippled with debuffs unable to hit anything. I like that the choice is very strategic. There's tons of strategy in the combat system overall and some really broken stuff you can do with clever ability set ups. Each of your party members can use any of the beasts in your roster (they do this by transforming into the beast) but if they run out of HP, the beast "faints" and overflow damage gets dealt to the person's human form. You can do this to enemy beast users as well, which sometimes allows you to blast an enemy trainer, skipping the rest of their beast roster and winning the battle early. You have healing items that you can use to heal your tapes but you can only restore HP on your human forms by resting at a base. After the intro tutorial and story quest they really just turn you loose on the world and let you explore how you want. There's a big map to wander with tons of enemies scattered across it but plenty of chests, puzzles, caves, and secrets. After capturing specific enemy types your character learns permanent abilities that enhance their ability to move around the map out of combat, from hovering, wall climbing, and other stuff. It's very enjoyable exploring and clearing the map of all the treasures and activating permanent shortcuts and fast travel points. You can receiver "rumors" from people at town that point you to a lot of the points of interest on the map which helps a lot. I like how there really isn't a set order of dungeons that the game is guiding you through - you really can just sequence break yourself across the map and unlock things immediately if you want to. The battle music is really good too. They do weaving of the normal music and superior lyrical versions well. Just an great addition to the genre. It's shocking how games like this and Palworld are pushing the design forward of monster capture games while certain other companies stagnate and bilk their playerbase.