Cassette Beasts

This is a gotta-catch-'em-all style game with two modes:

1. Platformer Mode: where you talk to people and wander around exploring. You must overcome simple puzzles to find gear and points of interest.
2. Combat Mode: where you transform into a beast (from among those you've captured) and then fight other beasts or people. You can capture more beasts by recording them during a fight.

THE GOOD:

• You can play with a friend.
• I like the 14 different monster types (these include the 4 elements plus 10 other options like poison and astral!) and how complex all the interactions can be.
• The overarching premise, that you're in a land of imagination and all the people here came from alternate dimensions, is off-the-beaten-path and interesting.
• The idea that capturing beasts can grant you special abilities is cool, though I wish it were more obvious which creatures could give you a special ability.

THE BAD:

• The game is rather boring.
• Most of the quests are simple fetch quests.
• Most of the game is spent in repetitive, pointless fights that you can't skip. The wandering monsters are hard to avoid (even when using a special spray that is supposed to prevent monsters from chasing you) and either I or my co-op partner would constantly run into monsters by accident. The respawn rate is also absurdly high, so you can even end up in the exact same fight over and over.
• While the 14 monster types are cool, it's too bad you can mostly ignore the entire concept. You can just use the same monster every fight and there is little need to switch monster type even when facing a monster that's strong against yours.
• If you want to play co-op with a friend, you have to play for 15 minutes solo before they can join you. The whole process is rather obscure and I actually had to look up a tutorial video explaining how it worked.
• The beast fusion concept doesn't make fights more interesting, on the contrary, fusion makes it worse for your co-op friend because then they have nothing to do!
• When applying abilities to your beasts, it's not explained why some abilities can only go on specific beasts. There is no rhyme or reason to it that I could discern. It makes setting up deliberate builds difficult.
• It was too difficult to capture certain beasts, leading to boring repetition and eventual frustrating failure.
• The main story's plot structure involves somebody always lurking nearby unnoticed, and then popping in to do annoying shit at key moments. This really gets my goat.

THE UGLY:

• Some of the music has lyrics. Who on Earth thinks this is a good idea for a video game? Fortunately, you can turn lyrics off in the game settings, but I noticed that one song in the game still has lyrics (the second fight against the leader of the Rangers)!
• This game was constantly putting my co-op partner to sleep.