This RPG collision of Pokemon and Digimon is an amazing surprise for the end of the year, and I'm already in love with my starter creature

gamesradar.com:

I'm a bit late to the party with Anode Heart, a creature collector RPG that launched to near-perfect user reviews last month, and I'm kind of kicking myself for it. After dipping my toes in the free demo on Steam, I reckon this could be one of the most underrated Pokemon-likes of the year, in no small part because it's got a heaping helping of Digimon in its DNA. 

Developer Stochastic describes Anode Heart as a semi-open-world "homage to the classic monster tamer games of the early 2000s," adding that "JRPGs and monster tamer games have defined my childhood and they've greatly inspired me to create my own stories and games." In particular, they point to the PS1's Digimon World games, which absolutely tracks. 

You play as an amnesiac robot named Seek who sets out on a journey to tame Tama, once-virtual beings now manifesting in the physical world. Sound familiar? Anode Heart promises over 140 Tama with some 300 moves between them. You can preview the evolution tree for each Tama, and breed or "reboot" (reset) them to optimize stats, which leans into the min-maxing that so many creature-collectors savor. 

There's quite a lot for Pokemon and Digimon diehards to latch onto, really. For example, each Tama can use a whopping seven moves at once, and since your bottom three moves cost more energy to use, organizing your loadout is important. There's a familiar rock-paper-scissors type system – and mercifully there are only a few, mostly intuitive elemental types – so you'll also want a spread of attack types on each Tama and across your party of three. 

Battles are extremely fast in my experience, and enlivened through a TP system that lets you take multiple actions at once before enemies get a turn. Squeezing in some cheap