Monster Battling

Pokemon ZA came out, but I've been playing the Aethermancer Early Access instead... it's only got slightly more content than the demo right now, but that's ok.

One thing that bugged me about the design of both Cassette Beasts (mons game by a different studio) and Monster Sanctuary (Morai Games' previous monster battler) is that passive abilities and activated moves are the same... "resource"? You know how in Pokemon, your Pokemon gets one "ability" (passive power) and four "moves" (thing you click on to do that turn". In Casette Beasts, you get eight slots, which can be filled with any combination of "passive power" and "activated ability" stickers. This gives you a lot of flexibility... maybe too much flexibility, because it's really easy to get lost in the weeds of what options are available. Monster Sanctuary, having all its passive and active powers arranged on a skill tree, is arguably worse - far too easy to make bad builds. I like a game that rewards system mastery, but if players have difficulty intuiting strong combinations on their own (especially because I think most casual players whose sole prior experience is Pokemon are tempted to only take active moves and no passives), your skill floor may be too high up.

Aethermancer has seperate pools for passives and actives - and each monster can have a total of four each, not counting their species' signature passives (which I like, I think a monster having a gimmick unique to it helps give it a use case). Obviously, as a roguelite, there's a lot of randomization involved, but there's ways to re-roll and the selection is weighted towards what your monster and party currently specializes in.

I just caught a Nixe last run and am trying to level up its "worthiness" to the current maximum level, so my current run consists of it, Tatzelwurm, and Catzerker. Poison + Regeneration is a pretty potent archetype combo thanks to Toxic Cycle, and heals from Regeneration trigger Nixe's signature ability. Tatzelwurm and Catzerker are also both Critical archetype monsters, so that's fun.

If I haven't found them by the time Nixe is fully Worthiness-maxed, I'll go hunting for the shifted (variant) forms of Nixe, Minokawa, and Dark Elder. They're the only shifted forms I haven't caught yet. (Though shifted!Mandragora evaded me for a damn long time...)

EDIT: Hold on.

I just saw Vampiric Seed + Auto Heal make Toxic Tides go off eight times from a single action.

Ok yea Nixe's good. Especially with a more damage-oriented Poison partner like Tatzelwurm exploiting that poison. Jesus Christmas.