The one good thing i will say about this game is that the music is good. Which, it's a game about cassettes, so.

Playing this game gave me the same kind of existential dread that playing Legends Arceus did, in which the longer i played it, the less I liked it.

It started off as a charming little adventure, and I thought the open world would be kind of cool. It proved to be an issue, as I was just given objectives and thrown out into the world with not that good of an explanation of what I'm supposed to do. I set out to find "Captains" (think gym leaders), so I explored about 6/8ths of the map before actually finding a single one. When I googled others later, the first guide I found even said "You've got to challenge all 12, but the trouble is, they are oh so very hard to find without a guide. Good thing you clicked on one!" which at least vindicated my struggles.

There are various partners to join with, and this introduces a fusion mechanic once you find an "Archangel" (some of the bosses in the game, these progress your actual main quest so they are necessary), and we'll get back to those later. The fusion mechanic, while interesting at first, became lackluster very quickly after realizing a lot of the fusions end up looking... same-y. It's a nice stat boost, but later enemies make it obsolete anyways. I made it to an area that was finally my level after being overleveled for everything else (due to not finding any objectives for hours), and they just slapped my fusion out of existence.

Back to the Archangels. These are required story bosses, and while originally interesting, quickly became gimmicks that became unfun. (The last one I fought was literally just the boss putting me to sleep(guaranteed), applying a random status effect, then using an ability that does damage to you if you're asleep, and repeating. While I could simply go get an ability that lets me ignore sleep, it being a requirement for a boss fight I have to go in blind is annoying. ) Though, this complaint extends to some of the regular bosses, too. Had a random shortcut boss max poison stacks me and destroy my fusion, and a captain just spam evasion while lowering my accuracy. These may sound interesting in concept to some, but in practice just consisted of me having to spam my healing items and wait until it was my turn to finally play the game again.

All in all, a slightly interesting concept with some... less than fun practices to make the game "difficult". I think I would've rather been bored by the game than as frustrated as the later things got me. Maybe I'll finish this game eventually. Probably not!