Objectively this is too many stars but this game was just so delightfully strange. Nothing at the time was doing anything similar.

The gimmick here is that you have to create your own monsters to do minigames to save an amazing island. As you get better scores and unlock more minigames you get more accessories to add to your monsters. The accessories range from body textures to hair to sneakers.

The best part of the gimmick is that you are straight-up drawing the body parts of your monster. It offers an unheard-of amount of customization for creature design as you painstakingly doodle horrible lumpy nightmare creatures and paste tiger stripes and googly eyes onto them. Different accessories and body shapes can change your stats, so you can build monsters that are better at running, flying, etc. Theres a lot of experimentation in building monsters, and all of them will look delightfully jank. No amount of artistic experience can prepare you for drawing with a gamecube controller.

My favorite monster I made was just a head with red sneakers, anime hair, and a beak. Terrible stats (it was literally just a floating head) but I loved my horrible anime rooster friend.

There is a bit of an uneven difficulty curve as you progress, but in a game that encourages grinding for monster accessories I think it actually feeds back into the core conceit: building cooler, weirder, stronger monsters.

It's definitely not a /good/ game, but it is a really interesting one.