>>55166001I love Mons as a genre, but unfortunately (for me at least) I think the vast majority of games that count as monster collectors just fall flat on their faces.
The two main aspects I'm drawn to are the actual monster designs and how combat plays out, and IMO it's incredibly rare to find a game that manages to pull both off. Either they don't put the right amount of time and effort into their monster designs and the monsters end up looking boring or just bad and uninteresting, or combat ends up being unfun, a slog, or just not enough to hold my attention.
Even Pokemon's biggest competitor, Digimon, very rarely pulls things off in a way that I like. Cyber Sleuth is probably the best Digimon game, but combat feels lacking and the overall world design ends up being really boring.
I'm playing through DQ Monsters: The Dark Prince right now, and it's hitting things okay for me. I'm enjoying it well enough but something about it just feels kind of lacking right now and I'm not entirely sure what it is. I can't put my finger on why it's not *really* pulling me in.
I fucking loved Cassette Beasts though. Cassette Beasts is easily my favorite 'Pokemon clone', and a game I put more time into than anything else last year. Combat is a blast once you get far enough in to really start playing with the details of the combat system and most of the monster designs are rock fucking solid. I'm looking forward to the multiplayer update, whenever that ends up happening.
