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Beastieball Hands-On Impressions at Summer Game Fest

Beastieball Screenshot

I got the opportunity to sit with three Day of the Devs games and their developers at Summer Game Fest for ten minutes each this past weekend! Jeff Lobanov of Wishes Unlimited introduced me to their game Beastieball, the only one of three that was an RPG, and it turned out to be one of my favorite games there! I actually hadn’t heard of it before seeing it at the show floor since I didn’t get a chance to watch the Summer Game Fest presentation in its entirety, but this one immediately drew my attention with its adorable hand-drawn graphics.

For the uninitiated, Beastieball is a turn-based RPG focused around a volleyball-like sport, or rather… Beastieball! You play as a customizable character that collects the aptly named Beasties and competes in a sports league. While competing together, the Beasties build relationships with each other. Jeff described the relationship building as similar to Fire Emblem’s support system. Basically, the more the Beasties fight together, the more the relationship grows!

For more detailed information, please see our initial coverage of the game, the Steam page, or the Kickstarter page!

Screenshot of Beastieball

Similar to the Pokémon series, the demo starts you off by picking a starter Beastie and jumping right into battle. You start off with only the starter you choose and then you immediately lose because the opponent is the other two starters you didn’t choose… which leaves one side completely vulnerable. Thankfully another monster jumps onto your side to save you, leading to you jumping right back in and winning this time!

There are both attack and defense phases to the battle system. Since we only start out with two beasties, I couldn’t fully utilize the battle system to its full potential. The defense phase didn’t really do anything for me during the demo, but Jeff explained that it’ll be utilized more once you get more Beasties.

Unfortunately, ten minutes isn’t a great deal of time, so I couldn’t exactly get a good grasp of the battle system, especially when I was struggling with the Xbox controller (I haven’t owned one in over ten years and kept pushing the buttons like they were on a Nintendo controller).

Screenshot of Beastieball

However, I did get a bit of a chance to walk around and get into regular encounters. Wandering around the overworld felt similar to a Paper Mario game, and it was really cute how you can interact with the Beasties by throwing balls that they would back and forth. I was cut off before too long, unfortunately. I wish I had more time with this game to be able to understand it better, but c’est la vie!

So far, though, I’m happy to say that Beastieball is a game I’m looking forward to checking out in the future. Pokémon-likes always get my attention, and I love the idea of the Beasties gaining different relationship statuses depending on who they are and how much time they spend in battle together. The game seems to be taking inspiration from many other games and putting them together! Here’s hoping Beastieball is a Beastie blast!

Please stay tuned to RPGFan for continued coverage of Beastieball and other cute indie games!

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Alvin Lim

Alvin Lim

Alvin was a news editor who is desperately trying to ween himself off mobile games so he has more time to play console games again. If he's not clicking on Granblue Fantasy, he's either adding more RPGs to his massive backlog, or is taking over 100 hours on a single game in it. When not gaming, he is hanging out, traveling, or cooking with his partner.

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