Design Values Comparison

Design Values Comparison: Cassette Beasts and Pokemon

A lot of aspects of Cassette Beasts are contextualized by its comparison to Pokemon. Even if one doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion that Cassette Beasts is intended as a reimagining of the story and gameplay of Pokemon, Pokemon is such a gargantuan franchise currently that comparison to it is unavoidable for Cassette Beasts. I personally have been playing Pokemon for the majority of my life, and I was introduced to Cassette Beasts by a friend who I met through playing Pokemon. While it would make sense to assume my comparison would be biased towards Pokemon, what makes Cassette Beasts interesting to me are the ways it’s different from Pokemon, which I have found more than enough of to keep me engaged and looking forward to playing more Cassette Beasts.

The widespread tendency to compare the two is primarily on account of the two sharing their core gameplay mechanic and premise of turn-based strategy combat between a large plethora of different monsters. While Cassette Beasts has battle mechanics which are very different from Pokemon in their individual details, the gameplay loops are similar from a broad, general perspective. While the mechanic of using the forms of creatures that naturally occur in the game’s world to fight other monsters in the wild is mostly identical from a gameplay perspective, it is completely different from a narrative perspective, because unlike in Pokemon where the human characters capture the monsters themselves, human characters in Cassette Beasts use magic cassette tape players to “record” the monsters they encounter in the wild, and they themselves transform into the monsters they’ve recorded in a way that’s more similar to the Ben 10 Omnitrix. This change does ensure that the onlookers who question the morality of Pokemon’s premise have no reason to turn their attention to Cassette Beasts, but from what I’ve played of the story (which admittedly isn’t all that much) they sort of gloss over the in-universe explanation for the existence of the magic cassette players in a way I don’t really like. There is even an NPC you can talk to right at the beginning of the game who just says “don’t think too hard about how the cassette player works” so I hope this is just part of the mystery present in the game’s early story and an explanation is revealed as I play through more of it.

One of the differences Cassette Beasts has from Pokemon that sticks out particularly to me is that the kit-building of each monster form the player has access to is actually way more freeform in Cassette Beasts than it is in Pokemon. Every Pokemon has access to exactly four slots for Moves, actions they can take on a turn in battle, and one slot for one of the three passive Abilities that Pokemon’s species has, as well as the ability to hold one Item in battle. Even since its earliest games, Pokemon’s variety of playable characters and selection of Moves and Abilities that overlap between multiple characters makes it feel incredibly freeform and creative in how one decides to build their roster. In Cassette Beasts, my monsters started with only four move slots but expanded to seven or eight of them before they were even fully evolved, and these move slots are open to both turn-consuming actions and passives, both of which one monster can stack multiple of on one build. This means that while the most challenging decisions the player has to make in Pokemon are primarily concentrated in the battles themselves, Cassette Beasts instead has the most challenging decisions be how to optimize your roster’s synergy in the party editing screen.