That was fucking awesome. Excellent monster catcher. Of course it takes some aspects from Pokemon, namely the creature collection and evolution aspect, but the battle system and its volatility and difficulty feel MUCH more inspired by Megaten, which is even more evident when you realize the story takes many of its beats from games like Persona 3 (there’s literally a character who’s just like Koromaru here). It’s also very pleasing to look at, with a style of chibi sprites roaming around a 3d-rendered overworld, and obviously that’s pretty clearly reminiscient of the graphical style of Pokemon Gens 4 and 5. The open nature of the game scales very well too, and in many ways the map and its grid, and to a degree, the premise, remind me of old handheld Zelda games, particularly the ones on the GameBoy Color and Advance. If any two games inspired narrative aspects here, I feel like it’s a marriage of Link’s Awakening and Persona 3. Does that mean it’s anywhere near as melancholic or existential at times? No, but it has the capability to talk on that. Referring to this as a “Pokemon Clone” is a disservice. It’s a love letter to that series, but it’s also its own thing. As for negatives, the postgame quests are very grindy and repetitive, but the core game is so utterly addictive that it can offset this. Also the game can run a bit oddly. It’ll stutter in some cases to load in the environments. Nothing unplayable, but your immersion can and will be gutted at moments like that. Overall an amazing time.

It's a perfectly fine way to play nonograms if you finished all the Picross games on Switch and need more. The fact that all the puzzles are based on characters and iconography from SoS is neat.

On the one hand, it's not as precise in telling you what parts of a line you've finished compared to Picross, nor does it allow you to mark spaces with temporary marks, but on the other hand this game has an extremely helpful feature that shows you how many squares you've filled in when you hover your cursor over a line, saving you a lot of counting. Technically, the game has some awkward sound mixing (and an extremely grating song that plays when the main menu is in "summer" theme), but more importantly it occasionally registers inputs twice if you mark too quickly. For instance, if you mark a space and then immediately press a direction on the pad, the cursor will move two spaces, and this gets annoying real quick.

All that besides, it's still a perfectly functional puzzle game. I wouldn't recommend it over the like 10 Picross games from Jupiter Corp. on the eShop, but it's hard to mess up nonograms.

Absolutely incredible game. The story is wild, heartwarming, funny, sad, and cool as hell. The characters are all amazing, especially the party members, and Ichiban himself is the best successor to the role of main character this series could ask for.
The music is all around spectacular, and I'm gonna be honest: the English dub is the best I've ever heard. I actually cried from the final voice performances from Kaiji Tang (Ichiban), it was so powerful.
Pretty much the only reason this isn't a 5/5 is because of some gameplay stuff with the turn based battle system, which the studio clearly wasn't entirely an expert at. A weird midgame difficulty spike, and that your positioning affects a lot of moves, when there isn't any way to influence that.
But yeah, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's a fantastic place to start the series, too.

Extremely underrated. Plays amazingly and gives you so many mechanics to juggle and fight the steep challenges it throws you. I don’t think the plot is quite on the level of Explorers, but it’s enjoyable and the world building is a love letter to the series as a whole. 9 years since the last truly new PMD story. That upsets me. Imo, this is how you do legacy content. Build your own story, but sprinkle references in as a bonus. They don’t inhibit it or take control of the plot ever. That’s why this is good.