A monster collector with art design by Studio Ghibli talent is a crazy sell, although I can see why it doesn’t get talked about too much looking back on it now. I still really like the battle wheel system where you’re essentially building a JRPG party out of monsters, each one bringing one ability to the table to round out some kind of class within the elements: fire is damage, water is healing, earth is buffing, wind is debuffing (but this isn’t a hard rule and there’s a lot of different abilities in each element). I do wish someone else would have given the idea a shot, there’s a lot to play around with there.

The only thing getting in the way of it is the merging system, it felt more limiting than I wanted it to be. Experimenting with abilities feels inefficient when taking evolution points into account, and it’s best to just stick with merging the same monsters together with maybe a slightly weirder monster of a second element for the sake of stats or one of the side slots.

Once the novelty wears off and you’ve levelled up all your guys and seen all the cool creature designs, Jade Cocoon boils down to a lot of just. Waiting. Waiting for the battle animations to finish playing, waiting to cut through the laborious repeating dialogue and wade through the menus to do what I want, waiting to go from the same dungeon to the next and so on until you get to the end, with the final stretch being painfully laborious.

The game feels a little front-loaded once you get through the story setups for each dungeon type and you’re just saddled with grinding for ages, and yet you need to get a decent way through the game to get enough monster slots to field an interesting party, so the whole thing can feel a little mediocre throughout. I loved it when I was a kid, but I can’t really recommend it to any adult that respects their time now. Yeah, really really.