First, the gameplay... I knew going into this that it was a dungeon crawler, but I wasn't aware of how tiny those dungeons were. They were literally two floors with five or six rooms each, and then a final boss floor. That was it. Every single time. The layout of the dungeons changed slightly each time, but they were all so tiny that I didn't really feel like I was exploring anything at all. And dungeon crawling is pretty much all you do. Every story mission involves crawling yet another dungeon. It gets dull really quickly.

Well, at least the Plushkins are cute, right? I would say that... Except actually GETTING Plushkins was downright impossible! In Pokemon, if you see a Pokemon that you like in the wild, you can choose to catch it. Here, the only way you can catch something is if it approaches you after a battle -- which is a very low chance. If you want a particularly rare Plushkin? Have fun trying to run into one in a dungeon, and then hoping it approaches you when you're done. The other way you can get Plushkins is by having them spawned for you in exchange for an item, but of course, which ones you get spawned for you are entirely random. Which leads me to my next complaint...

The method of making your Plushkins stronger was absolutely ridiculous. I forget the specifics -- it's been a while since I played it -- but I remember that it involved using craftable items. That sounds okay, until you remember that the the items you get from crafting are entirely random. So you could end up with loads and loads of items that you don't need, constantly farming for more materials to craft items that may or may not be the ones you actually need.

And what makes this even more frustrating is that making your Plushkins stronger is entirely pointless! When I got the items to evolve my strongest Plushkin that wasn't my starter, I was very excited! Until I saw that evolving her actually reset her level back down to level 1, and she immediately became my weakest Plushkin. WTF?! What's the point of evolving it if it's going to get WEAKER?! That makes no sense!

The bad gameplay would at least be excusable if the characters and the story were good. But they're not. They're really not. Shizuku was easily my least favorite character -- she was your stereotypical shy, moe character, so naturally, everyone in the game loved her and constantly talked about how amazing she was because she was so cute. My favorite character was Lin, a fiery, rambunctious type, and she was constantly being put down by the cast for being annoying, and was always being unfavorably compared to Shizuku. Kaede was just plain annoying. She had this incredibly obnoxious catchphrase that she would say CONSTANTLY, and since the game has voice acting, you have to hear the seiyuu say it over and over. It got to the point where I would turn down the game any time Kaede talked.

But the worst character, by far, was Moco. I knew going into this that she wasn't very smart, but I was expecting her to be like Usagi -- you know, ditzy and not book smart, but still competant when she needs to be. Unfortunately, she was less like Usagi and more like Patrick Star. Nearly every single word that came out of her mouth was in some way about food. She literally never stopped talking about food. And every time she did something dumb, I thought to myself, what could she do to get even dumber? And then she would do something even dumber, and I would just be amazed. To give you an example of how stupid Moco is: in one scene, she attempted to eat Lin's Plushkin, because it looked like a pig, and therefore, she thought it would taste like pork. I am not even joking. She literally tried to eat a live Plushkin because she thought it was pork. Another, less horrifying, example was the time that the other characters needed to explain to her what the word "buddy" meant. I honestly hate playing games where the player character has dialogue outside of your control, and Moco is exactly why.