YMMV / Cassette Beasts

• Anti-Climax Boss: As amazing as the concept of fighting alongside all of your partners against Aleph Null is, the battle itself is almost effortless, to the point that it would be a Curb-Stomp Battle from you and your partners if it wasn't for the high HP he has. Despite the fact that he can technically use all the abilities in the game, you'll see him using a lot of common attacks for most of the time, they deal manageable damage, and they often target a random partner, so you will rarely ever get into danger. As long as you are not too underleveled, once you defeat Aleph's first phase and enter this one, you've pretty much already won the game.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The game ends with the player and their partners, potentially including their lover, going their separate ways back to their respective home worlds and never see each other again, since the ending also reveals that leaving new Wirral is a one-way trip. Some players felt that this completely robbed any satisfaction in the various sidequests and bonding with your companions, since in the end you're forced to leave it all behind for your home world.
• Award Snub: Many players considered this game a strong contender for Game of the Year, at least in the category of indie games, with some expressing this sentiment only a couple of weeks after the game was released. Naturally, many fans became upset when it wasn't even nominated in any well-known video game awards, with the only exception being this game's nomination for the British Game category at the 20th BAFTA Games Awards in 2024.
• Breather Boss: Shining Kuneko can be this compared to other Archangels, due to being the only one in the main story with an elemental type. Said type happens to be Astral, which means you can use Plastic-type attacks to inflict AP Drain and delay the boss's Angelic Attack. You can also use Poison-type or Metal-type attacks to inflict Berserk and prevent the boss from using Ritual to effectively gain an extra 25% health. Rare stickers that score critical hits when there's a type advantage can trivialize the fight even further. That said, if you go in without a Plastic-type, Shining Kuneko can be just as much a roadblock as the rest.
• Demonic Spiders: Masquerattle, particularly when encountered in Rogue Fusions. It has impressive offensive stats and speed for a mid-stage remaster, and Poison has very few type weaknesses, so with fusion patching up its supbar defenses the result is a durable beast of a thing that hits like a 18-wheeler. Jellyton, with its scary 200 melee attack, ability to poison on contact (to AND from themselves), and ability that gives it a different set of weaknesses from most Poison types also makes for a tough customer under the same conditions.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Djinn Entonic seems to inspire the most fanart out of any monster.
  • Despite joining the player relatively late in the game and having the least amount of dialogue among the recruitable party members, Barkley has a lot of fans, due to being a cute Non-Human Sidekick and his quest being short yet sad, which quickly endears you to him; Averevoir killed his old human partner, and he needs your help to fight off the former so he can bury the latter. It helps that he is also the only party member who follows the player back to their home world in the story's ending.
  • Sunny is a minor NPC who appears in Harbourtown after completing Eugene's quest where she gets her own side quest about helping her to start a new life after being freed from Mammon's control as a Landkeeper. Despite her limited screen time, she has become very popular in the player base, wishing she had a bigger role in the game. In a Reddit AMA session, Jay Baylis, the game's artist and writer, admitted to not expecting Sunny's popularity because she was added to the game late and intended only as a fun little side story to surprise players.
• Fan Nickname: The damage boost an attack receives when it's the same type as its user is referred to by fans as STAB, which stands for "Same Type Attack Bonus" and is a term imported from the Pokémon fanbase. In the game's files, it's named "Same Type Damage Multiplier", but "STDM" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
• Friendly Fandoms: Unlike the relationship they have with a certain other game, the Pokémon fans who know about Cassette Beasts get along surprisingly well with the community, often praising it for being a refreshing take on the pocket monster collecting genre and having its own unique identity.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The passive skill "Random Starter" has a chance to randomly trigger one of your monster's active skills at the start of their first turn (whether they're the one initially deployed or if they're swapped in mid-fight), at no AP cost. By swapping stickers around, a monster can have one powerful, maximum-AP active skill like Headshot and then seven uses of Random Starter. Most encounters (even some Archangels) won't be able to last long enough to make a single action, and for those that do, the skills can activate again if the monster is swapped out and swapped back in. Just don't try this against Poppetox, as you may end up Headshotting the Effigies, which will likely result in a Total Party Kill as the immense damage is turned against you. The Machine Curse sticker added in 1.5 will also shut this strategy down by reflecting all those Headshots back at the user — don't try it on the Infernal Engines in the DLC areas, either.
    • Headshot is especially deadly for another reason, and that's due to the monster in particular that this strategy is most effective with, Khepri. While Khepri has the worst Melee Attack in the game (literally a base stat of 1), and most of its other stats aren't spectacular, it also boasts the highest offensive stat in the game with a base Ranged Attack of 300 (for reference, the next-highest base offensive stat a monster has is Kingrave's 220 base Melee Attack — 80 points lower). This naturally gives it the strongest Headshots in the game.
    • With version 1.2, an even more broken version of this strategy was created through the Evasion Nullified status; it decreases the target's evasion stat to 1%. Since critical hits are calculated partially by hit chance, this unintentionally causes any move with at least 16% accuracy to be a guaranteed crit. Inflict it and pair it with Critical Mass (90% chance to use the next move in the list, such as a 10-AP attack), and you could theoretically shred through pretty much everything with even more efficiency than Random Starter. The only downsides are that it runs the risk of failing by 10%, potentially stopping you before the opponent is defeated, the opponent potnetially stopping you through Revenge Strike, Return Fire or Machine Curse, and the fact that the animations will take a while before the Critical Mass cycle stops if you use this strategy against the ranger captains, since they can't be defeated prematurely.
  • While Shining Kuneko may be a Breather Boss if you plan correctly, they are absolutely able to destroy groups of enemies at a time, and having 140 in all stats means that they have good speed, power and coverage to deal with threats, especially with Cosmic Kunai being a playable Angelic Attack, with all the power that entails.
  • The sleep status effect is a particularly strong ailment in this game since, unlike most RPGs, it lasts a set amount of turns and the next attacks will not wake you up. The only thing the sleeping monster can do is attempt to fight back, but the moves sleeping monsters are restricted to only have a 1% chance to succeed, rendering them virtually helpless outside of strategies that boost hit rate or let them share their teammate's moves. While moves that inflict sleep only have an unreliable 50% accuracy, a lucky sleep on first turn can trivialize Ranger Captain fights or make recording a lot easier.
• Goddamned Bats: Springheels like to jump at you from out-of-sight corners in the overworld, and in battle, especially early on, they will outspeed you and hit you with Jump Scare, wasting your turns. The remasters graduating to speedy glass cannons only makes them more troublesome.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Robin Goodfellow has rather limited damage-dealing abilities, meaning that he's unlikely to wipe out the player party quickly, but he possesses passive regeneration, a large amount of hit points, and a variety of attacks that inflict status effects (most notably "Fairy Dust", which puts the target to sleep). This results in by far the longest fight of the game, whether you win or lose.
  • Captain Gladiola's monsters like to spam Dodge and Peekaboo, which will make it very hard for you to land a hit, and you'll take damage from Jagged Edge every time you miss with a melee attack. Because they're spamming defensive moves, though, they don't attack as often to be particularly dangerous to your team.
• Heartwarming Moments: If you bring Felix along to a rematch with Kuneko, he'll give her some words of encouragement when she transforms mid-fight. They've come a long way from being an artist and their Old Shame struggling with each other.
• I Am Not Shazam: The Mons are called monsters, not Cassette Beasts.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Although it's not exactly his fault, Eugene is considered a newbie trap at best and worthless at worst. Despite being available very early in the game, you can only raise his relationship level after clearing the Landkeeper Offices all over the map, as well as fighting Mammon in Landkeeper HQ after doing so for all of them. Since you need at least a level 1 relationship to fuse, this means you can potentially spend dozens of hours with a partner you can't fuse with, meaning you're better off using someone else for a good chunk of the game unless you have a guide or previous knowledge. It also doesn't help that his signature monster tape is a Plastic type and the Landkeepers tend to use the Earth-type Pawndead lineage, which have a type advantage over Plastic.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Archangels. In order to highlight them as the eldritch beings that they are, each is designed in their own art style in contrast with the pixel art style of the other characters and the world, which leads to plenty of Uncanny Valley to go around. The screen starts getting glitch effects whenever the player is near an Archangel. Special mention goes to Poppetox, who looks like a typical puppet from horror video games and movies.
  • The Falldown Mall is a haunted, abandoned mall with a lot of ghost monsters. Even with the mall's abundant lighting and the echoing "Look at the Sun" playing in the background, this place isn't any less chilling than a silent, dark ghost house.
• Player Punch: The player doesn't learn why Barkley needs their help until after defeating the boss of the quest, when it's revealed that said boss, Averevoir, had killed Barkley's former human partner, and Barkley needed to defeat them to access and bury the body. In addition to being a candidate for one of the game's saddest moments, it's also a heavy-handed reminder of how dangerous New Wirral can be, even when the Archangels aren't involved.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The fast travel function is mostly used to travel to the train stations, putting you inside the station at your destination. This is especially problematic with certain stations like Falldown Mall Station and Bard Street Station, where you'll have to walk for a long distance and dodge monsters before going back to the overworld.
• That One Boss: Any of the ranger captain rematches in the late game can be considered this; not only do they have their signature tactics refined to a science, but they are also capable of performing a fusion with their ranger apprentice, just like you and your party member. What's more, unlike you and your partner (and many of the other human opponents you've fought up to this point), it's impossible to end the fight early by knocking the captain or their ally out with overflow damage — the only way to win is to fight through all their tapes in sequence. Clee-0's rematch in particular can be a hell of a time to get through due to her constant use of Roll Again plus AP Refund, and she has these passive skills in excess. This combined with her dreaded Gambit tactic (immense buff to all stats for 3 turns before the cassette breaks) makes her an obscenely dangerous threat for the late game. It gets even worse when she fuses with her ranger partner later on, which ultimately causes all those passive skills to stack, thereby having an even greater chance for those effects to activate.

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