Cassette Beasts by Bytten Studio (of Lenna's Inception fame) is a creature collector RPG, a la Digimon or Pokémon. While it takes clear inspiration from predecessors in the genre, Cassette Beasts manages to effectively separate itself as its own due to unique mechanics, an uplifting but grounded atmosphere, and its connections to Bytten's other work. It is pretty, it sounds pretty, and it plays pretty. However, for people coming from Pokémon, expect to have some growing pains as this game demands you engage with some of its weirder mechanics and be willing to swap out your beasts as the game progresses, rather than sticking with one team the whole time. Additionally, the base difficulty of Cassette Beasts is much higher than that of your standard Pokemon game. Prepare to get kicked in the teeth a little as you learn, and be comfortable with failure.
The spritework in this game is great, very mid-DS-era Pokémon, aesthetically, although with a lot of twists. The HD-2D style is a great look, as always, and fits the exploratory vibe of the game quite well. Characters are cute, although human battle sprites sometimes look a little off to me. The anime dialogue sprites for each character are well-made and easily showcase that character's personality quickly, making it so that most people will find a favorite relatively quickly, and I can't say I dislike any of the character designs in this way. If I have a single gripe about sprites, it is that the Fusion sprites always look blocky and offputting, making me not want to use them. More on that mechanic later. All of the Archangel sprites are fantastic fits for the story the game is telling, with my personal favorite being Lamento Mori. What a beast. It really made me feel the personality Bytten puts into their work. Combat animations are fine, but slow and repetitive, and by the time I got through my 2nd major boss, I was already ready to turn animation skipping on.
The storyline and dialogue are pretty standard. You're a dimensional castaway on an island of dimensional castaways, stuck in purgatory with giant cartoonish monsters which you can assume the form of using cassette tapes to help defend yourself and others. It's nothing incredible, and it doesn't have to be. A major theme is that sometimes, it's fine to not know how something works as long as it does, something that comes to a head in the major climactic moments of the game. Each of the partner characters have their own little storylines that aren't super long and give some explanation of who they are and what they like. You can romance a partner once you max out their Relationship rank, but in the end I just picked the partner I planned on bringing to the finale, as I didn't get really attached to any of them like that. The overarching storyline is directly connected to Lenna's Inception, with a group of Archangels being the main bosses this time too. You use beasts to fight them, and when it's clear they are above human grade, you and your partner will perform Fusion to get a major power boost and beat them. Very 90s anime. The main antagonist was a little flat, to me, but again, I wasn't really going into a monster collector looking for a brilliant storyline, just something that gives me the motivation to keep playing, and that's what I got.
I'm no musical expert, so I'll keep the music section short, but the soundtrack for this game is catchy, bright, and poppy in a way I really enjoyed. I still have the battle theme stuck in my head. You can play with or without vocals, and while the vocals are incredibly good, I can't focus super well when I can hear human speech, so I played with it off. Each track was fitting and powerful, and I liked it.
Here's where I get into the mechanics. Every beast in this game is monotype, and every battle is 2vX, which you'd think coming from Pokemon is a huge issue. However, type advantage is a minimal damage increase in this game, in exchange for type-based status effects. Most types will inflict some sort of status effect when hitting or being hit by another type, either good or bad depending on type advantage. These can range from things like a heal over time for hitting water types with fire moves, to the absolute devastating Resonance instant kill when hitting glass creatures with Air moves 3 times. They're an incredibly important part of the game, and something you need to learn fast. More importantly, some moves just inflict these statuses outright, regardless of typing, making moves like Boil and Pustule Bomb incredibly potent damaging moves as they apply damage-over-time status effects to anything. Rather than PP or Mana, this game uses Action Points, which you start with 0 of and regenerate 2 every turn. This means that more powerful moves can cost more, and free or 1-cost moves are important for more than just their effects by letting you more easily save up your AP, and you can supplement them with things like Gas Guzzle or AP Steal to manipulate AP gains for yourself or opponents. It's really fun to play around with and can lead to moments where you feel very smart by figuring out exact math, only to get your AP drained by an enemy, keeping your perfect strategy feeling more like a back-and-forth. The Wall mechanic is similar to Pokemon's substitute, except there are walls for every type, and those walls provide you with the positive defensive benefits of those types while you have them, even if they're not the same as yours, but break immediately if hit for weakness. My favorite was the Air Wall, which gives you more stacks of Air Wall when hit by fire moves due to air-types generating a free Air Wall when hit with fire. It's great, and it carried me through much of the game. You'll need to learn to use these, however, because most bosses have EXTREMELY damaging attacks they use when at maximum AP, and the only way to really defend against them is to use Walls. The last mechanic that I'll poke my head in at is Fusion. By using your Fusion gauge, you can fuse both yourself and your partner's beasts together to make a supercharged form that generates the AP of both halves every turn, has all status effects each had, has the combined health pool of both, and most importantly both types. Dual typing in this game gets incredibly powerful as a result, and in the back half of the game, most of my fusions were between a Sharktanker (water melee damage dealer) and Smogmagog (fire tank), making me near-unkillable due to the great defensive typing and having the offensive capability that Water offers. It was a great mechanic to play around with. My major gripe is, again, that fusions look weird and that made me not want to use them, despite them being incredibly overpowered. I get it though, they're mostly mix-and-match because they need to have a ton of combinations available. They can't all look hand-crafted, because they aren't.
The game is mechanically great, and a lot of it is the difficulty. This game teaches you its major mechanics through the Ranger Captain battles, the equivalent of a second set of Gyms or so, and they're how I learned how good things like Walls and Taunt were in this game. However, these battle are, at the standard difficulty, quite challenging, and you're going to fail a number of times doing them. The Archangel battles (your main objective) are also quite hard, but are a great place to display your mastery over the mechanics you've had access to thus far. None of them felt impossible, but they were regularly too hard for me to complete at the time I encountered them. I had to grind to beat the game because I was slower on the uptake on major mechanics, and that's fine, because that's what I signed up for. Thankfully, the game has a robust difficulty setting system, and if you just want to experience the game for its story and setting (which are again, still quite nice), you can adjust that downwards. You can also adjust upwards for a more punishing gameplay experience, and while I didn't, some of you might want to. Additionally, the game has several options for randomized seeds, speedrunning, "Nuzlockes", and Ironman modes for those seeking a real challenge. It's a well-crafted experience you can adjust to your liking, and none of it feels especially tacked on. The exploration skills beg for you to break them and get to new areas with things you're not meant to see yet, and I think watching someone do high-difficulty randomizer ironman runs could be really enjoyable, I just wouldn't do it.
All said, this game was great. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone who likes creature collector RPGs. I can't wait to see what Bytten has in store coming up, they've got an announcement this year, and I couldn't be more excited. 8/10.
