4.5/5 ★ – Cryophage's review of Cassette Beasts.

"This is literally just Indie Pokemon and I am all for it" When people desire a specific product from one company, another company entirely tends to step up to the plate and supply the demand. This phenomenon occurs frequently in the current gaming market, as the desire for innovation can cause companies to abandon audiences who desire games they know they enjoy. Some may even long for a franchise’s glory days, such as the 2000s when Pokemon seemed on top of their game with the 4th and 5th generations. This pining for objectively good Pokemon games led Bytten Studio to create a game that revolves around capturing and fighting monsters, known as Cassette Beasts. This indie title takes the basics of the gameplay formula of the Pokemon series and expands on it beautifully to create an experience better than most modern Pokemon games. Similar to how Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling approached and improved upon the gameplay of Paper Mario, Cassette Beasts heightens the basic mechanics of Pokemon’s turn-based combat. For example, catching new monsters feels like more of an ordeal to overcome rather than something that relies mostly on luck; actions taken during a turn where a character tries to capture a new monster can cause the catch rate to drastically shift. This simple change makes the gameplay much more dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, fun. This dynamically-focused approach to gameplay permeates throughout the entire game. One does not need to waste time with grinding sessions as one’s current party members are the ones who level up, which allows players to easily change which monsters they want to use in a situation without worrying about essentially babysitting a weaker monster until it reaches a high enough level; the player can explore the world as they please as the game effectively drowns them in questlines to pursue, which works much better than Pokemon Scarlet/Violet’s open world with unfortunately linear storylines; the additional game mechanics like damage-absorbing walls and status effects like multitarget allow for intricate strategies. The game even provides a limit break that plays on the core mechanics of the double battles that the game relies upon. Any two monsters can fuse into a stronger form that shares movesets, buffs, and debuffs from both monsters. This system acts as a brilliant expansion of the double battle mechanics- as one needs to consider their prior actions before fusing to get the most from it- but does not completely shatter the game’s difficulty since fusions still take a relatively decent amount of damage from stronger enemies. Cassette Beasts even goes above and beyond with its typing system by making it immensely interconnected. Pokemon has its fair share of weaknesses that make sense, but when one starts considering the logic behind its more obtuse types- like Dark, Dragon, Fairy, and Psychic- the logical reasoning starts to fall apart. Cassette Beasts abandons these wackier types and gives everything a logical weakness. For example, plastic-type monsters are weak to fire since plastic does not hold up very well to heat, and metal-type monsters take more damage from electric-type move because metals conduct electricity. All one must do to figure out a monster’s weakness is to give it a little bit of thought. Even weaknesses that feel more irrational are still easily understandable, as the game ensures players can comprehend which types are effective against other types. Not only does the game provide a chart that will look familiar to fans of the Pokemon franchise, but every time a new weakness becomes discovered, a quick and brief tutorial pop-up will explain why the weakness exists and how exactly it affects gameplay. However, these tutorials can feel mildly irritating as the same tutorial can pop up multiple times for how one type behaves. Similarly, using moves that are not very effective against certain types can provide stat increases to the defending monster. These can range from simple stat increases to status effects to even the monster’s type changing to something else entirely. Unlike in Pokemon, ice-type monsters are actually good to bring against a fire-type monster as they can melt and become a water-type which can put out the fire-type. It ingeniously expands on the tried-and-true super-effective moves system that Pokemon has relied upon since its inception in the 90s. The graphics could use a little polish, though. In-Battle sprites still look fine, but the overworld sprites of characters and monsters look somewhat cheap. It seems like it tries to emulate the graphical style of the 3rd and 4th generation of Pokemon games, but ends up with tacky graphics. Thankfully, the game manages to turn this minor weakness into a massive strength at times, but I will not spoil that for those who have not seen anything regarding the game yet. The game also features a physics engine that can feel legendarily awful at times. It never draws away from one’s enjoyment of the game, but seeing a crate suddenly clip into the ground or fly away at ludicrous speeds will usually suck one right out of the experience. The abilities one gains for traversal can also suffer from the awful physics as it can be hard to get out of bodies of water or get the magnetic poles to lift the player. Bafflingly, the developers also decided to make some gameplay mechanics more cumbersome than they are in the Pokemon franchise. The player must constantly deal with a stamina meter that prevents them from running non-stop, as it features a long and tedious cooldown. However, one can stop sprinting for a few seconds- a much shorter amount of time compared to the cooldown- and begin running again, which utterly defeats the already non-existent purpose of the cooldown. Additionally, moving tapes to and from storage feels unnecessarily frustrating as there is no option to directly swap tapes between storage and the player’s inventory. All in all, I give Cassette Beasts a 9/10!