This is a Pokemon-like I’ve had my eye on since it released in 2023. I was on the fence about buying the full version after playing the demo, but I managed to snap it up for dirt cheap during the summer sale.

I found this game to be very similar to Disc Creatures: Lovely world, presentation, and creature design, but distressingly dull gameplay. The late game is barely any more complex than the battles featured in the demo. The whole thing feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game, which is a shame because it does have a lot of potential.

The key difference from Pokemon, and the thing that caught my eye initially, is that instead of commanding monsters, you transform into them. You also fight with a partner (one of several you can recruit throughout the game), who you can combine with to create unique super-strong monster fusions. Unfortunately, the game does not explore this interesting transhumanist concept anywhere near as much as I would like, and characters barely discuss it at all beyond a token “This is pretty weird, huh?” in their introductions. This is by far the biggest wasted opportunity of the writing in my opinion. It seemed like such an obvious avenue to discuss themes of reinvention, identity, and human nature, all of which are deeply relevant to the game’s main plot, but… nothing. Profoundly disappointing.

The plot itself is an isekai: You are sucked into a portal and find yourself stranded on the island of New Wirral, a magical dimension filled with monsters. You’re told that this has been happening to people for over 100 years, so fortunately there’s an existing community ready to onboard you. You’re also told that leaving the island is impossible, but while your new partner tries to show you the ropes, you stumble upon an eldritch abomination called an “archangel” who promises to show you a way back if you defeat the other archangels scattered throughout the island.

(This unfortunately means that the game is open-world, which, as Scarlet & Violet showed, does not work with a mons game (or any RPG, really). Boss fights do appear to scale with you, at least, but there are lots of areas I skipped over and later steamrolled because by then everything was 10 levels under me.)

I found the worldbuilding nice, though sparse. There is a strong anti-capitalist theme, as the residents of New Wirral live in a commune that runs on a barter economy. (In practice, though, this works like any other video game market system, just with multiple currencies that are each used to purchase different things.) It presents a very optimistic view of humanity where people in crisis choose to work together for the common good, which I always appreciate. There is also an attempt to make this a multiverse by saying some people are from alternate versions of Earth, but like the monster transformation, very little is done with this aside from a few one-off jokes.

You eventually discover that monsters and archangels are tulpas created by humans’ thoughts and ideals. This is treated like a reveal, but it’s stated pretty clearly in the bios as soon as you defeat a single archangel. One aspect of this that I thought was neat was that every monster-dex entry has a trivia section explaining the real historical or mythological context behind its inspiration, which was fun. However, like the rest of the worldbuilding, I feel the game doesn’t go nearly far enough with this idea. The concepts the designers chose to base the archangels around don’t have much of a thematic throughline, and the lines between them are rather arbitrary — religion and storytelling are separate archangels, for instance, even though I’d say those concepts have a ton of overlap. Moreover, despite almost all archangels representing concepts that have been around since the dawn of humanity, the game insists they were somehow only born recently, which makes no sense. The game claims the archangel based on the fear of death is one of the younger ones, which, seriously? Seriously?

Compounding this is a bizarre choice to base the archangels’ designs only on British mythology specifically. There are archangels based on William Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland, multiple based on the Arthurian mythos, and three more based in Christian lore, but not a single one from another culture or religion. This has the uncomfortable implication that British culture encapsulates all human culture, which is, you know, bad.

This also leads to that most tedious of tropes, “We solved an abstract issue by punching it in the face.” There is an archangel of consumerism whose bio literally states it “feed[s] on the lost potential humans emit when they spend their lives consumed by trivial media and content,” and boy howdy was that some cognitive dissonance. That sure did make me question why I’m wasting my life playing this mediocre game! I’m not sure why artists love making media about how media is the opiate of the masses. Sincerely, what are you trying to do here?

It all just feels so shallow. There are interesting ideas on display here, but it only ever scratches any of them skin-deep. I’m ultimately just left with the feeling that Hogfather did this better 30 years ago.

As for the game… It does have a lot of convenience improvements over Pokemon. Power is tied only to your human characters’ level, so you don’t need to waste time level grinding an old monster if you want to try it out. Leveling up monsters instead unlocks new moves for them, but the game also uses a materia-like system where moves are freely swappable between monsters (though each monster is restricted to a list of compatible moves), which means you can get a new monster battle-ready as long as you have the moves from somewhere else. I also appreciate the changes they made to capture mechanics — monsters can’t be defeated while you’re recording them (so no need to worry about accidentally KO’ing the monster you’re trying to capture), and you can improve the chances by attacking the monster on the same turn, adding an element of skill to it.

But the battles themselves are, if anything, even simpler than Pokemon. Dual-types don’t exist, though in this case I’m willing to excuse that due to the fusion mechanic (which does produce dual types) and because it would probably get messy with the unique way the game handles type matchups. See, the biggest diversion from Pokemon is that, rather than type matchups altering damage, they produce various buffs or debuffs, and some matchups can produce different effects even against the same type. For example, while hitting a plant-type monster with poison just, well, poisons it, hitting it with a wind attack will uproot it, reducing its energy gain. These can even change monsters into different types: For example, hitting an ice monster with fire will melt it into a water type, while hitting a water monster with ice will freeze it. Personally, what I found most interesting were the buffs granted by type advantages, which could get pretty creative — instead of metal-types simply being immune to poison as in Pokemon, they instead get their weapons coated by the poison, allowing them to deal additional poison damage with their attacks. This is a very inventive and creative spin on the elemental matchup mechanic. (It also avoids those endless debates about what moon logic the developers were using when they came up with certain matchups, because they’re all explained and justified explicitly the first time you see them happen in combat, which I really appreciated from a lore standpoint.)

It’s also meaningless because 90% of battles are snoozefests that can be won entirely through fielding the right types and spamming your strongest moves, just like Pokemon. (The remaining 10% can be won with the groundbreaking additional strategy of putting up walls (essentially Substitute from Pokemon) right before an enemy uses their obviously telegraphed supermove.) None of it even matters against archangels, because they’re all typeless.

The archangel fights are huge disappointments in general. Despite being hyped up as reality-warping eldritch set pieces who all use unique rules and abilities, in actuality they have incredibly simple attack patterns that are trivial to learn and counter. As per usual, removing the player’s ability to interact with a gameplay mechanic doesn’t make battles harder, it just makes them simpler. Especially given their lore as incarnations of abstract concepts, I was expecting archangels to be puzzle bosses that required you to overcome the human flaws they represent, but nope, you can beat all of them by just punching them real hard. Their battles come down more to how many healing items you have than anything else.

This all really sucks because, just like the story, I can see how it could be good. All of these systems have a lot of potential for tactical depth, but they’re never realized because the game is just too easy to make you engage with them. I’m not going to waste brainpower setting up some complex gambit with stacked status effects when I can win by just using the same attack on loop.

This honestly makes me feel really disillusioned with the state of the medium. Pokemon has been around for 30 years now and computer RPGs in general at least a decade longer than that, yet so few of their imitators have done more than dip their toe into greater complexity. Why does this keep happening? It feels like… like if every platformer for the past 30 years was just Jumpman with slight iterative variations. RPGs do not need hundreds of repetitive battles that can all be won with the same strategy. That was a crutch for a simpler time. We can do better now. If you’re going to make a story extolling the virtues of human creativity and imagination, you should strive for more than rehashing the same game we’ve been playing for decades.