14.5 hours played
Written 12 days ago
Haven't sunk too much time into this game yet, but initial impressions are good. REAL good. Definitely good enough to leave a positive review, albeit with a few critiques.
Note that I'm going to be comparing this game to Pokemon a lot, because yeah, this is pretty much a full early-gen pokemon game for $11, which is honestly a great deal considering those things cost $30 back in the day.
Pros:
- Already way better spritework and sound than 2D pokemon games
- The in-game dex comes with a type effectiveness chart AND shows the BST of all the Spirits you've encountered, so you can easily see how they stack up against each other without having to go on a wiki.
- You know the devs know what they're doing when they make an adult game that can be played entirely with one hand
- Your spirits can equip butt plugs as battle items, and for some reason they can even have 3 AT ONCE! (by the way, this game's version of the EXP Share comes in the form of a butt plug and grants the equipped spirit full exp without splitting it)
- This game DOES have it's own version of shinies, but with a much higher encounter rate (shiny encounters are closer to 1 in 10 to 1 in 20, rather than the 1 in 4000 or so pokemon has)
- Yes, your spirits do evolve, although the BST increase isn't as big as in Pokemon - we're talking like, a 5-10% increase per evolutionary stage - it's mostly cosmetic.
- good variety of moves including status moves. Some of the moves are downright HILLARIOUS btw
- Spirits an change their movesets on the fly via the main memu, like in modern pokemon.
- Gameplay is smooth, UI is functional, game overall is well-optimized.
- EDIT: I just found out you can BUY additional EXP Shares in the second town you encounter! Butt Plugs of Wisdom for everyone! Double EDIT: oh wait, I guess there's only one in stock, so that's only 2 early game EXP shares (the other one you get from one of the very first fetch quests) - still pretty good though.
Cons:
- only nine element types, and so far I haven't seen any dual-type spirits
- dex only has 67 spirits. I mean really? You couldn't add just 2 more and make it the funny number? Something to look forward to when the game finishes Early Access I guess.
- encounters are restricted to tall grass like in old-school pokemon - maybe I've been spoiled by the overworold encounters in modern pokemon and games like palworld.