Home of the Yokai Reviews

best pokemon clone out there

This game currently appeals to my autism

not controller friendly, hope developer improve it so i can play on handheld

Very fun. Scratches itch of overworld catching that rewards exploration. Battle system a bit mixed, sometimes doesn't find it's footing between being too easy or too hard but doesn't deter from the fantastic designs, music and vibe.

If you like creature-collector or auto battler game, this is the one for you. (There're shiny too)

A fun, whimsical take on the creature collection/auto battler genre. The art style is fun and well done and even though it can feel grindy (what creature collection game isnt?) it keeps it refreshing by keeping it more simple. All in all I love this game so far, and I think its worth playing. (I would say I would wait for it to go on sale, not 100% worth full price)

Really nice game, not very complicated mechanic and very chill game to pass the time

As a fan of Pokemon and monster training type game, I really like the concept as well as the art style of the game. At the beginning, there are so many things to try and explore, scrolling around the map to catch rare Yaoling, it's really fun. But when it come to endgame content, there is not so many things to do except farming quest, breeding Yaoling, arena,... If there is one thing I don't like in this game, it's breeding system, actually the most fun part of any monster training game is scrolling around the map and if lucky enough, you can encounter a rare monster and catch it your own. But because of breeding system, there's no reason to do so, just catch a trash stats Yaoling with Elite and rare color one, then breeding infinity until getting one with max stats and rare color. I do like a monster with max stats though, but just staying at home, repeating the same things from time to time is kind of boring and exhausting though. Anyway, no matter how much efforts you spend to design the map, since we won't scrolling around much, it's such a waste to be honest. Except for that, I still recommend this game for any adventuring and monster training lover. Overall 8.5/10

If you have no idea what this game is, think pokemon legends arceus but rather than the turn based battles once you leave the overworld, it's a real time battler. My rating for the game in it's current state as of 8/15/2025 when it's at full release is a 7/10, with an asterisk that it could very easily get boosted to a 10/10 with some relatively minor fixes. It's mostly a good game, I enjoyed it and it is WELL worth the 20$ I paid for it. But it has some rough spots mostly to do with communicating features to players, lacking quality of life features and a lackluster ending. For the points it lost, 2 of those are for the QOL/communication failures, 1 is for the ending. Positives: -> Absolutely stellar creature designs I'm picky when it comes to designs I like, and this game knocks it out of the park for me. The designs have a fairly wide range, some more original than others, but all visually interesting without getting cluttered. I usually end up with a squad of favorites in a game, and in this game I ran out of space, even with the later upgrades, and had to get really picky. So many of the designs just look excellent, and there are 400 on offer that still manage to have a cohesive art style/design language. 10/10 the artists knocked it out of the park, into another park, and out of that park again. -> character/world design is visually rather pleasing and fairly easy to navigate I will say that I regularly ended up a bit overleveled for challenges, but that was only because I would often see interesting paths that I desperately wanted to go running down and ended up grinding to get yaolings well above my level early. Despite having a very expansive map and minimal direction (and an entirely accessible open world), the layout is well thought out and most areas lead you to where you should be going next. There are quest markers, but tbh just follow the trails and you don't need them. -> Lots of Juicy Numbers and abilities. The game has a lot of fun and juicy numbers, I do wish they were better explained, but there's a ton of mechanism to be playing with. Fun abilities and mechanisms around summons, stats to polish up, plenty of min-maxing and cheese strats to be found. All juicy fun you want in a game like this. If you enjoyed pokemon IVs, this game is for you. -> there's just a full second game in this game where it's a more traditional turn based game with a story and like, it's just there. I loved it. Negatives: -> The english translation quality isn't horrific, but it's severely lacking polish For the most part the translation is passable, but there's a number of typos, some glaringly obvious, poorly formed sentences, and it clearly has not undergone any form of rigorous review. A decent translation would go a long way to improving confusion in the game for me. Maybe a pass over by a qualified writer as well. To cite some specific examples, in the Help/tutorial you have basically all the red flags of poor translation in one place. - Elite's heading is mispelled as "Elit" - The categories to select from are "Tutorial" (singular preserved), "Game Terms" and "Special Terms". It's not entirely clear to me what designates something in one category or another, but I think that a better translation might be "Tutorials", "Game Mechanisms" and "Lore" based on what's contained within. - Under the "Abilities" screen, the text flips to calling abilities "skills" and is very unspecific and doesn't give examples of what it means. This is hard to track. This is persistent throughout the game, and may be very hard for players not familiar with the genre to decipher. Certainly not the worst I've seen, but in need of major improvement. It's one of the biggest areas where some fairly minor improvements would do a lot for player experience. -> Game information/explanations are thin This may or may not be related to the translation issues above, but I found the help screens and in game explanations thin/lacking. For example, under "evolution" there's no note about how evolution may change a yaoling, and no explanation for demons vs regular evolution. Nor does it mention that you can check in the scroll to see when something will evolve. Further examples: - Locations for most demons are "Unknown" despite most of them having set spawns for re-fighting in the demon scroll. - Fishing is never listed as a location from what I can tell, nor is there any way to tell what yaolings can be collected from fishing - Location listings are only ever one spot where something could be found, yaolings that can be found in more than one place aren't listed in the second spot. - Merchants aren't marked anywhere on the map, meaning you have to just remember where they are and what they sell. - Quest givers aren't marked on the map, only active quests - There are lots of fun numbers, figuring out what exactly they mean and how much they matter is largely up to you. I still don't really know how much each number impacts a lot of things, Or how skill stats work at all. Would love to find out some day. - Did you know that to access the jailed yaolings you have to use charms on them through the bars? I didn't, and spent the entire game fruitlessly searching for keys before caving, looking it up and being very sad. -> Connections for information are seriously lacking, Information in the game is often loose and lacks vital connections that would be a massive buff to figuring things out. Things that would be extremely helpful: - "Evolves to" on Yaoling's pages, telling you what they can evolve into - "Evolve level" being listed on a Yaoling itself, rather than needing to go into the scroll - Being able to click the location on a Yaoling's scroll listing and be shown the area of the map in question, particularly given how expansive the map is and how hard it can be to locate specific areas. I still cannot find what the game means by "Ink Realm" - Better sorting for the yaoling scroll, including being able to sort by location and a filter for demons! Also filter for encountered vs collected vs unencountered. Please let me see what I'm missing - I am begging you to let me type in a name to search rather than scrolling -> Fishing is pointless and should be removed Now to be clear, this is not a matter of difficulty, I caught every fish in game and actually enjoy stardew valley fishing, but fishing in this game feels extremely tacked on and pointless, particularly given that from what I can tell, the location you fish at is irrelevant, only the bait matters. Further, once you unlock the hunter's cabin (or just are running around the abyss), there's no need to bother with fishing at all. It doesn't add much to the game, just yoink it or at least make it worthwhile. -> The story is mostly fine, but seems to lack a conclusion??? Also could use just a little bit more expansion. {KINDA SPOILERS} I generally enjoyed the story, it was very much fine for what it needed to be, but I feel like maybe we could've spent a bit more time explaining where our Rival came from. From context I wasn't able to pick out if we were supposed to have already met them or not. Per the ending. Uh, I feel like it's flat out missing something. I went all the way through, never really figured out what was going on with me, as there seemed to be like 2 different plotlines for where I came from. Might've been a translation issue again, but to the scale that I actually couldn't follow it. I did a final boss fight. And then. There's kind of just nothing??? I feel like a final cut scene or epilogue of some sort is sorely lacking and hopefully planned for the future. As it stands it really does feel like I'm missing the last 20 pages of a book. :( Overall, I think the game is good. All of it's issues from above are extremely fixable with a bit of effort, and I really hope it sees that effort/time put into it.

I enjoyed most of this game, but sadly towards the end the game pulls the rug out from under you and becomes 10x more difficult. The monsters start to get abilities that without rebuilding your entire team to silence them/stop them from casting you will not survive. This means a dozen or more hours of breeding new monsters to be ready, because the team you want to use will not be good enough. Expect to be breeding for far longer then you want. They will be monsters you don't even like because endgame requires basically meta builds which take all the fun out of having 400 monsters to mess with. This soured the game for me. It sucks so bad as I was enjoying it, but I did finish it after breeding new monsters for a few days. The team I used worked perfectly fine with minimal intervention on my part until you kill the last major demon. The areas after that the team I relied on for 90 hours got wrecked in every trainer battle/demon battle thereafter. If you use the meta monsters the game is pretty easy, but again, what's the point of all the other monsters if you are basically forced to use specific ones.