I tried...but I hate this game. I was a super Pokemon fan back in the day, and this hit all those notes. And seeing Humble publish what is, lets be completely fair, two Pokemons standing on top of each other in a trench coat trying to get into the local strip club, I jumped at it in a hearbeat. But a few things really soured my experience, and eventually made me rage quit.

Holy cow! I wouldnt be against it if it was free to play. Cards on the table: I got this in a bundle, so it kinda/sorta was free for me. But for a lot of people its not. If I had bought this at launch, Id feel even saltier about this. There are many items out there, and many I missed starting playing a year after release. And let the "its just cosmetic" argument die, especially here; this is basically an MMO where showing off that youre character is cool IS gameplay. Being able to see other players running around has no other functional purpose than this, making this argument even dumber in this game's context.

Unacceptable. Anybody else in the family wants to play? ♥♥♥♥ YOU! Like...this is indefinite. Youre stuck with your starting character FOREVER! The devs have the gall to say it'd be too expensive to allow more than one save. That is just...no. Just...no. OMG, just...no! That is such an unbelievably stupid argument, I...cant even begin to fathom. Its...its a save game! They take up like...kilobytes! I feel like I should include a counter argument here, but Ive started typing several and just stopped every time because every one of them feels like Im explaining things to a child and I feel like Im coming off as a patronizing jerk to people with a brain.

This one is touched on in a lot of other negative reviews, but yeah...I can confirm this game was designed to waste your time and patience (animations, loading screens, unnecessary long healing, etc).

Adding to the wasted time point, there are other things added to the game for reasons I can only imagine were added to be annoying and have no other function. There are a lot of little bugbite things of this nature that make me ask "why include this for any other reason than to annoy people?" Good example of this would be some Temtem poison you when you kill them. Sure, I can think of some legit cases where players are battling each other and that tactic may play into the overall strategy. But that is such a ridiculous niche tactic; I seriously doubt anybody is including these Temtem in their decks planning on using this strategy. No, its not there for tactics. Its there to make players just weak enough after a wild encounter to backtrack and heal their Temtems or risk dying. WASTED. TIME. AGAIN.

My rage quit moment? Quetzal Dojo. Dojo master has a Temtem that wont let you target it if its below 40% health. Game doesnt even tell you WHY! It lets you try to target it, but then your attack just hits the other Temtem like you fat fingered it. Thought this was a bug until I looked it up. Not a bug, its by design. THATS. NOT. GOOD. GAME. DESIGN. Googling walkthroughs/tips and tricks should NEVER be REQUIRED just because the game refuses to explain itself. Lost 4 times because I was stuck with an enemy with 1 HP being effectively invulnerable. Nope...Im done game. Take your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanics and waste somebody else's time.

There are many other reasons to not like this game, but this review is already long enough. The final thing Ill say is this game was not built for people who value their time. If youre a young kid who only has school to worry about, go for it. Great time-sink type of game. For the rest of us? Yeah...hard pass.