Made by a developer who doesn't know when to Stop Making More Game. The Story/Tutorial will probably take you ~10 hours or so. After that is an infinite yawning abyss of more upgrades, more endgame systems, more creature and player customization, more side content, it just goes on and on and on. Somehow it never feels overwhelming given that you're only given little pieces of the puzzle at a time and the game respects your intelligence enough to put the pieces together on your own and come up with a strategy

If you like mixing and matching skill sets to build doinked-out combos...
If you like endless modes such as Pokemon's Battle Tower or Cassette Beasts' Gauntlet...
If you like to play a game in short bursts...
...Siralim Ultimate might just be for you.

SU is my first foray into this series, and it's such a good game to sit back and relax with. The story is extremely barebones and often jokey, so it quickly fades into the background as you are eased through the gameplay loop, feature by feature.
You organize and equip a party of six creatures at your castle. Then you enter a "realm", a procedurally-generated floor of a dungeon. You accomplish a randomized task there, like collecting doodads or fighting a boss, then you can teleport back to your castle. There's no "catching" monsters here; instead, defeating them grants "mana" which is used to summon your very own critter to your castle. For the vast majority of enemies, you beat one and you're at 100% mana. Each creature has its own stat spread, a "class" that determines its type advantages and what "spell gems" or activated abilities it can equip, a "race" that puts it in a category like Yeti or Skeleton, and a passive "trait". You soon unlock the ability to fuse two monsters together; you end up with the race of the first creature, the class of the second, the average of the two stat spreads, and both traits. Early on, I fused an Ebony Ent (whose trait gives the whole party an HP regen buff) with an Ancient Spirit (with a trait that gives a random buff to an ally anytime they are healed).

Starting to see the point of Siralim yet? Battles are 6v6 and turn-based, but there is a "Timeline" that shows you what order everyone's turn is in, a la Final Fantasy X. Certain abilities can force creatures up and down the Timeline. And if that sounds appealing to you, there are creatures like the Snaptraps who specialize in Timeline manipulation. Basically, if there's any particular strategy or even a very specific debuff that catches your attention, there's creatures and specializations that play off it directly. Oh yeah, specializations--your player character doesn't directly engage in combat, but they still have their own set of passive perks determined by their specialization. Pyromancers interact heavily with the Burning debuff, the Animator and Grovetender have their own "ace" monsters and all their perks power them up, and the list goes on...for quite awhile, actually.

This right here is the point of Siralim. With all these options at your disposal, the ability to mix and match traits and strategies so freely, the point is to theorycraft like crazy and come up with a team of six that busts out whatever insane plan you can think of. There's a spell out there that heals your party based on how much damage the Poison debuff is currently ticking for on a targeted creature. That's how specific and hyper-focused some of your options can get. You can even set up "macros" to automate your creatures' turns using various if-then statements. You can always keep full manual control and that's fine, but this right here is the point of Siralim, to build a strategy and watch it go off on unsuspecting Hounds and Satyrs. Oh, maybe not the Satyrs--their passive traits tend to limit the enemy, especially to stop "multiple actions in one turn" strategies.

And that's basically all Siralim Ultimate is. You'll delve into a new realm and be presented with new creatures with new traits, and you'll find new recipes for spell gems to unlock new activated abilities. Even after the story ends, you can simply keep returning to the realms, generating new dungeons, while the enemy scales upward into infinity. You can crank up the "Realm Instability" to make things even harder (like disabling your Defend and Provoke commands, or giving all enemies an automatic type advantage against a certain class regardless of their own) and gain even more rewards in exchange. It's designed to go on and on and on for as long as you can stay interested. Even when you've got your team fully formed, you still gotta watch out for hard counters in stuff like the Satyrs, or even from random "Nemesis" creatures that gain additional advantages like reflecting damage or starting at the top of the Timeline (all but guaranteeing they'll all go first). That's the whole loop right there. You delve into the realm, see what new options you can find to augment your strategy, and test that strategy again and again and again.

There are other reviews saying that Siralim Ultimate is grindy, but...the grind is the game. Sure, it can be hard to switch strategies because of the investment of time and resources that goes into unlocking new specializations and kitting out a new team. That's probably my biggest complaint with the game, is that it offers you so many different options and then you get stuck in a rut once you pick one--so if that team of Hunters you built turns out to be less fun than you were hoping for, oh well, use them anyway until you build your resources back up! You're never really stuck because you can always go back to a previous floor, and you can move spell gems and equipment around freely (and at like floor 40, you can instantly elevate a monster's level to match the highest level among your whole squad). And with even a modicum of strategy, most teams are gonna be viable at zero Realm Instability. You're never really in a spot where you have to start over, but if you want to try a different team out of the 1,200 creatures throughout the game or a different one of the 40 specializations, then you're just gonna have to keep on dungeon delving. And speaking of the creatures, that's my second-biggest complaint: the creature designs are mostly forgettable. They could be stick-figure people wearing sandwich billboards that say "AMPHISBAENA" for all Siralim cares. You can freely inspect any creature in battle to see their stats and traits and even get reminder text on their current buffs/debuffs, so this is never really a problem gameplay-wise. But it's hard to get attached to these critters in the way that most monster-catchers are going for.

Siralim Ultimate is kind of like the Divekick of monster-collector RPGs. It's an attempt to boil the genre down to its very core, at the expense of just about everything else. It's not about the story? Then bam, SU has none. It's about team building and synergy? Then bam, pick like any facet of the game mechanics and you can specialize in it. This isn't for the people who play Pokemon casually, just catching and using whatever vibes with them. This is for the people who look up base stat totals and work real hard to lab their perfect team. Neither of those is the right or wrong way to play Pokemon, but to play Siralim Ultimate, there's nothing else to the game except the latter. The closest thing you'll find to a minigame is the slot machine. If you like to crunch numbers and minmax, Siralim Ultimate is for you.

.