I can’t imagine a scenario where I would ever say I was surprised by Beastieball. Greg Lobanov—and his development studio Wishes Unlimited—has put his talent behind so many deeply creative games that it’s almost a guarantee that his involvement will produce a banger. I guess I could say I didn’t expect him to take a crack at Pokémon, but if anyone was going to do something creative with the idea, it was definitely him.
Pokémon is definitely a hard series to emulate. Even though Nintendo doesn’t really own the concept of catching monsters and battling with them, I’ve seen games like Nexomon or TemTem catch flack for being cheap attempts at recreating Pokémon. Even at its best, some…let’s say, less ambitious creators will make the boring version every Redditor says Nintendo should make—slap it in Unreal Engine, replace the art style with gritty realism and add survival crafting mechanics to it for good measure.
But, as I’ve said in the past, “No inspiration... Read more