>>55741841Thanks for listing out the hacks, anon. I'll share my thoughts on the two I played so far.
I played Bugs... or at least, I tried to. The dev was right: it does contain bugs, including a game-breaking bug that makes a required mobility move (Pounce) vanish from your moveset. Hopefully it gets fixed.
The other hack I played was the Mer-Line one. I wasn't a fan, unfortunately. It was kind of boring to play through, it felt too long, and the plot was total nonsense to me. I disagree with the dev's claim that "No knowledge of Cassette Beasts is assumed", because it drops lots of names and concepts and stuff without ample explanation for a newcomer. Another issue is that it timeskips past all the character development, so the ending has zero emotional weight even though it's clearly trying to make you feel something. As for gameplay, it's just standard PMD fare with dungeons and bosses. The second boss felt like a difficulty spike, and dying there crashed my game for some reason. I also saw a lot of typos, some mistakes in text formatting, missing stats for the new moves, and some places where default text like "recover the stolen item" or "Secret Waterfall" was left unchanged (though that's a minor and very common mistake, from what I can tell).
The hack deserves praise for the custom assets, though. There are new moves, modified items, and new tilesets for the dungeons. The hero and partner are characters from Cassette Beasts, and there are 2 options for the hero, so there are 3 sets of new character sprites total. And all the bosses have an intro splash screen giving a name and subtitle for each one, which is cool.
Overall, I didn’t like this hack too much. It wasn't exactly terrible, just kind of mediocre, and with a very confusing plot. I bet a Cassette Beasts fan will get a kick out of it, though.
