When people desire a specific product, others tend to supply the demand. This phenomenon occurs frequently in gaming, as desire for innovation can cause companies to abandon audiences who desire games they know they enjoy. Some may long for a franchise’s glory days, like the 4th and 5th generations of Pokémon Games. This pining for better Pokémon games led Bytten Studio to create a game that also revolves around capturing and fighting monsters, known as Cassette Beasts. This title expands on the gameplay formula of the Pokémon series to create an experience better than most modern Pokémon games.
Like how Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling approached and improved upon the gameplay of Paper Mario, Cassette Beasts heightens the basic mechanics of Pokémon’s turn-based combat. For example, catching new monsters feels like 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 drastically shift the success rate. This change makes the gameplay 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 leveling up monsters as one’s current party members are the ones who level up, which allows players to change which monsters they want to use in a situation without fretting about levels. They can explore the world freely as the game drowns the player in questlines, which works much better than Pokémon Scarlet/Violet’s pseudo open-world design. 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 game’s many double battles. Any two monsters can fuse into a stronger form that shares move sets, 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 shatter difficulty since fusions still take a decent amount of damage from stronger enemies.
Cassette Beasts also excels with its typing system by making it immensely interconnected. Pokémon has its fair share of weaknesses that make sense, but when one tries to rationalize the less comprehensible types like Dragon and Dark, the logical reasoning starts to fall apart. By comparison, Cassette Beasts opts to give everything a logical weakness. Plastic-types are weak to fire since plastic cannot withstand heat, and metal-types take more damage from electricity because metals are conductive. Figuring out a monster’s weakness only requires some thought.
Even weaknesses that appear irrational are still understandable, as the game ensures players can comprehend them. Not only does the game provide a handy chart that explains every weakness, but quick and brief tutorial pop-ups 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 range from simple stat increases to status effects to even the monster’s type changing to something else entirely. Unlike in Pokémon, ice-type monsters are 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 Pokémon has relied upon since its inception in the 90’s.
The graphics could use a little polish, though. In-Battle sprites still look fine, but the overworld sprites of characters and monsters look cheap. It seems like it tries to emulate the graphical style of the 3rd and 4th generation of Pokémon 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 suck you right out of the experience. The abilities one gains for traversal can also suffer from this 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 Pokémon franchise. Players constantly deal with a stamina meter that prevents them from running non-stop, as it features a long cooldown. However, they can stop for a few seconds and begin running again, which 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.
Overall, I give Cassette Beasts a 9/10!
