I went into this expecting an uninspired Pokemon clone. The only Pokemon game this even vaguely plays like is Legends Arceus but even then this is far more like Ark or a random generic survival game than Pokemon. That's probably why I found the game to be very boring because it doesn't even play like the games people build it up as a rip-off of. If you remove the Pals then it's literally just the most basic survival game ever gameplay wise. When it comes to the monsters yeah it is exactly what it's hyped up to be or rather whatever the opposite of hype is. These monsters have no originality. They're made to look like Pokemon but be different enough to loosely avoid getting sued. It feels like those mobile game ads that try ripping off Pokemon for a quick dollar before getting taken down. I'm genuinely surprised such a sloppy and unoriginal game has become mainstream debate. Like this would be the kind of game I see an ad for, forget almost immediately, and then never talk about again cause it's such a nothing game, but instead people want to make it the main talking point of the gaming industry for some reason. Anyways if you want a good survival game or a good monster tamer there's dozens out there that are better than this even within just last year. Play Tears of the Kingdom if you want an adventure game that actually tries new concepts instead of being the most barebones concept. If you want a monster tamer that isn't Pokemon (which i think is the reason people even try this game) from last year I'd recommend Dragon Quest Monsters but there's also many other cool monster tamer series like Yokai Watch, Fossil FIghters, Digimon, and so many more that are actually worth investing your time into instead of this slop. I'm not usually this negative towards a game but the fact the monster tamer genre has suffered from "Pokemon rip-off" allegations for decades when nearly none were yet something comes along that actually does rip-off Pokemon but gets hyped up like this is just really annoying. The genre deserves better than the way it has been treated and the fact so many actually quality games with unique premises get skipped for this just does not sit right with me. Anyways I'm going to attempt to move on from this game now cause it really is not worth discussing in mainstream discussions for that long. Just needed to vent my thoughts before moving on.

Edit:
Increased the rating from ½ to 1 ½ cause it's not that bad. Just really annoying this is the discourse game that won't leave my timeline.