On the other hand, human relationships are a major focus in Cassette Beasts both in story and game mechanics: you are accompanied by a companion character throughout your adventures in New Wirral, with 5 out of 6 of the potential partners being human; each companion character has their own story and quest for you to explore; each have a relationship level that can be raised by gaining experience points with them, and higher relationship levels make you stronger when you fuse in battle.
-Human characters in Pokémon interest me as much as the creatures themselves, because the Pokémon world is populated by both Pokémon and humans, thus I find the humans' relationships with the creatures and each other also an important element of the Pokémon world. Unfortunately, I often feel that human characters are an aspect of the Pokémon games that are underappreciated by the Western Pokémon fandom, who tend to focus more on the creatures themselves. Therefore, seeing a Pokémon-inspired game, especially one that is developed by a Western studio like Cassette Beasts, actually make effort in fleshing out human characters and relationships are the biggest pleasant surprise for me when I started playing Cassette Beasts for the first time.
+Human characters in Pokémon interest me as much as the creatures themselves, because the Pokémon world is populated by both Pokémon and humans, thus I find the humans' relationships with the creatures and each other also an important element of the Pokémon world. Unfortunately, I often feel that human characters are an aspect of the Pokémon games that are underappreciated by the Western Pokémon fandom, who tend to focus more on the creatures themselves. Therefore, seeing a Pokémon-inspired game, especially one that is developed by a Western studio like Cassette Beasts, actually make effort in fleshing out human characters and relationships was the biggest pleasant surprise for me when I started playing Cassette Beasts for the first time.
Pokémon has a spin-off game that focus more on human characters: Pokémon Masters EX, but the fact that it is a gacha game means it is a glorified gambling game that wants you to spend real-world money to gamble to collect the human trainers. However, that is not the case at all in Cassette Beasts, since it does not have any microtransaction. In fact, Cassette Beasts‘ companion and relationship systems prove that Pokémon can do more with their human characters without predatory monetisation mechanics.