in a lot of ways, youkai 4 feels like a love letter to the fans. universes from three mainline games and two feature films are brought together to make for an astounding amount of dialogue. it's hard not to see this game as the apex of the youkai experience.

unfortunately, it's still a little too rough around the edges. the frame rate is abysmal, the monster collecting is purely up to RNG on both unreliable spawns and material drop rates, difficulty is acutely rubber-banded, there are very few animated cinematics or voiced cut-scenes, and combat is largely a meme. i also never felt compelled to grind or grow my team - especially since are so often given higher tiered monsters just by finishing quests.

i kept holding out thinking that maybe at the post-game the collecting and battling would come into its own but it really doesn't. the extra play modes (youkai blasters and sumo tournaments etc.) aren't engaging enough to warrant grinding and ultimately everything is just plagued by the poor difficulty scaling and framerate.

i do however think the general design of the combat system is a direction pokemon-battlers aught to take in the future. the trainer can choose to actively support or engage in battle themselves. the whole thing kind of feels like a WoW raid - trying to keep your allies mana topped off and also managing your cooldown abilities. in a pinch you can freeze combat to administer a heal or switch trainers (also tied to cooldowns to prevent cheesing). and also similar to WoW, there are a lot of red circles and obvious telegraphs - but that's about all there is in terms of combat execution.

anyway, if you pretend the game is largely a VN and a walking simulator it's fine enough.