Cassette Beasts remixes Pokémon but falls short of revolutionizing it

polygon.com:

I fell off Pokémon after 2016’s Pokémon Sun. It was fun! But somewhere along the line, even the most die-hard monster collector experiences ’mon fatigue, unable to remember what happens when you put a fairy-type up against a bug-type without Googling, or what in Arceus’ name is the difference between the ground-types and the rock-types. The dozens of hours required to climb from that moment of picking a starter Pokémon to beating the Elite Four can make one wonder: Do I have this in me anymore? In short, one begins to age.

Cassette Beasts is an indie Pokémon-like with lapsed Pokémaniacs in mind. Instead of capturing monsters with two-toned balls, here you record them on cassette tapes through a process the game winkingly tells you not to think too hard about. Visually, the game looks like an Octopath-ed Pokémon Black/White, with colorful and wonderfully animated sprites battling across three-dimensional backgrounds. The monster designs are creative and varied, like Traffikrab, a hermit crab with a traffic cone for a shell, and Bulletino, who is a very serious little bullet dude. The beasts come in one of 14 types, each with strengths and weaknesses. At first glance, it’s Pokémon all the way down.

Well… except that the game opens with a quote from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a sequence in which you fall through a wormhole of sorts into a world of cassette tapes and monsters, where a powerful Ranger tasks you with finding and fighting 12 Ranger Captains (think Gym Leaders, but usually without a building to their name), alongside a separate quest given to you by your starting companion Kayleigh to defeat eight Archangels — mysterious enemies that cause the screen to warp like a rewinding VHS tape, each rendered in