Cassette Beasts is about eighty-percent Pokemon and twenty-percent Legend of Zelda or TUNIC. You may be aware that the Xbox is not exactly overflowing with Pokemon and Legend of Zelda games, so we’re happy to admit that this combination got us more than a little excited. We were standing right at the front of the queue to review it, with our Pokedex in hand and Ash Ketchum hat on.
But what we didn’t expect was how much Cassette Beasts sets out to fix Pokemon. As much as we love the Nexomon series, Xbox’s most notable attempt at the Pokemon games, they mostly set out to emulate the Game Freak games. But Cassette Beasts isn’t satisfied with being an homage. It’s got the scissors and Tippex out.
Cassette Beasts starts with that Hyrule classic: a young, mute protagonist castaway on an island. The deviation here is that everyone has arrived on the island in the same way: you are just the latest to have arrived on New Wirral. You are old hat. Everyone else has been here for decades, maybe centuries.
That doesn’t bode well for a rescue attempt. The people of new Wirral have settled into their role of island castaways, and encourage you to do the same. That’s not the worst prospect, as New Wirral certainly is idyllic. But it plays by different rules than our reality, and it’s far from safe. Monsters roam the countryside, and they can be recorded onto audio cassettes. Those audio cassettes can be used as Pokeballs to summon your own creatures. Master the art, and you’re a full-blown New Wirral Ranger.
It wouldn’t be much of a story if you were meant to settle down and start a cassette-based family. You want to leave the island, and bring the others with you. That aim leads you to an outpost, where your mind is frazzled by what turns out to be a frigging archangel. Something clearly is up.
This is the meta-story that sits above lots of other personal stories. Cassette Beasts loves to hand you more objectives than you can possibly know what to do with, and let you choose from them at any given moment. Perhaps you might take the ‘Gym Leader’ approach, as Ranger Captains are tucked away in the corners of the map, each with their own elemental speciality, and you need to defeat them to fill out a scratch card. Then there are companion quests that first unlock a partner for your travels, and then encourage you to foster the relationship through a quest and some campfire chats
Our favourite are ‘Gossips’: villagers who merrily go about their business with exclamation marks above their heads. They will have scraps of information that barely qualify as ‘quests’, and you can explore the region they talk about and see if you can stumble on the treasure, monster or whatever it is they’re whispering about. It’s a neat prompt to hoover up the remaining secrets in Cassette Beasts’ world.
And what a fecking ridiculous world it is. There’s a reason we referenced TUNIC, as it’s the closest cousin to Cassette Beasts’ ridiculous world density. Virtually every step you make will take you past a new monster to fight, a battle with the equivalent of a Team Rocket member, a Metroidvania-like obstacle that you will need an upgrade to pass, and a treasure chest tucked in a nook. It’s like wandering around in a Cave of Wonders: there’s always something glittery to distract you from the quest you’re on.
Just don’t expect to fall in love with it immediately. Cassette Beasts is the epitome of hard to learn, hard to master. That’s a combination of two things: a world that is so packed that it becomes a little hard to translate it into workable objectives, and a combat system that’s initially pretty damn unfriendly.
The combat is your usual ATB Pokemon battling, but with a unique twist. The elemental pairings don’t only increase or decrease damage: they have game effects too. Use lightning attacks on a water beast, and you will turn it into a conducting tesla coil, with bolts passing to you and the other beasts next to it. Use fire on a water beast, and a spinning column of steam will act as a wall protecting that beast. It’s so beneficial that you might even use it on your own creatures. And that’s before we get into the expanded elemental roster, and use fire on plastic, water on poison, lightning on metal and more.
It’s a matrix that’s more sprawling and complicated than Pokemons, thanks to the additional mechanical effects, and we’ve had years to absorb and learn the one in Game Freak’s game. But Cassette Beasts makes the additional mistake of trying to teach you in the moment: use any elemental effect on another elemental beast, and a text pop-up will fill the screen and try to inform you of what’s happening. But it’s TMI. You can’t possibly absorb all that information. So it becomes a confusing maelstrom, and you have to hope that you’ll pick it up later on.
But when you do, it’s fantastic. You will be messing with the enemies’ elements while changing your own. Your beasts can be customised with ‘stickers’ which give them different abilities, which is essential as you try to create chimeric creatures with a multitude of elements. The Archangels and Ranger Captains have specific tactics and weaknesses that you will need to understand and exploit. Every waking combat moment is a puzzle, and it just feels superior to the relatively one-note, loadout focused Pokemon.
Capturing these creatures, too, is a revelation, and Game Freak should take notice. You’re not tossing a ball in their faces and hoping the gods of RNG are smiling in your favour. Instead, you take one of your beasts out of action to perform the ‘recording’, and a % chance of capture is visible. It’s then up to your next creature to do as much damage, or destabilise the creature as much as possible, to nudge that total higher. The enemy can whittle the % down too: if it gets a killing blow in, then your chance is vastly reduced. Cassette Beasts feels like it’s exposing the inner workings of the capture-chance, rather than hiding it from you.
If there’s a flaw it’s in the noise and usability. This is a busy game, and it’s hard to take more than a couple of steps without something careening into you or whisking you off to a battle. There are the usual consumables that stop battles from happening, but it really only masks the issue that Cassette Beasts is high maintenance. There’s no automated battling, even the lowliest creatures need some degree of attention (even at high levels) and you can’t just stroll about looking for secrets.
The usability quirks are understandable as there is so much to do. But Cassette Beasts puts unnecessary obstacles in the way of things like fast travel (you can’t travel to camps, but you can travel to arbitrary points in the map), healing and swapping monsters in and out of your team. These things are not only difficult to comprehend in the first moments of the game, but it can be a ballache to trigger them in the latter parts – even with most of the railway network unlocked.Â
But for all the minor frustrations, something will pop up like a Diglett and make you marvel at it all over again. We would ‘record’ a creature, only to find that it had an ability that benefitted us, Metroidvania-like, in the wider game. That’s cool, right? Cassette Beasts is stacked with these moments, and we hold it to our hearts and treasure it like a mixtape from an old flame.
Cassette Beasts might not be as immediate as a certain pocket-monster game on another platform, but its depths are more cavernous. If you’ve been aching for a beast-battler that treats you as an adult, well, what’s stopping you? Go collect ‘em all.
