Jade Cocoon is one of the most inventive and creative role-play games offered on any console!
(-) it could seem like a Poke'mon clone
Jade Cocoon is a role play game where you play as a man named Levant and raise small magical beats that are sealed up inside cocoons. You gather all the keys and head through the forests to complete objectives.
Many of us know that there will never be a Poke'mon game released on the Playstation because Nintendo has those rights locked for eternity. But this is not only the closest similar video game you can get, it also improved upon Poke'mon's strengths so much that you can hardly care if you ever see that wimpy yellow rat on your Playstation console!
Raising your monsters involves going off into the wild and battling other monsters. There are at least 150 different ones to find and catch, using your cocoons instead of your Poke'ball, to catch them. Where the game really shows its integrity involves with the merging process. When you merge two monsters, the result is visually the two monsters put together, which that creates an almost endless amount of creations that the likes of Poke'mon could never dream of! What exactly do I mean by this? If you have a dragon and you merge it with a turtle, you either have a heavy set dragon with a mildly long neck and turtle shell or a turtle with wings and a dinosaur exterior. This excellent feature can really bring out creativity.
This has to be one of the best looking Playstation games. The forests are bright and colorful and have an artistic touch to them. The beasts are also given pretty magical detail and the attacks animate well, though sometimes the cut-scenes take a little too long. The people are animated wonderfully, showing proud and broad male characters like Levant and some beautiful and innocent female characters, like Ra the beast healer. The music is also impressive, offering so free-spirited simple tunes and flutes to listen to as well as forest effects.
Even after you complete the game, there is still an infinite amount of different forests you can walk through which show randomized beasts from the 150 collection and a boss battle ever so often, but the levels of these beasts will keep going up which could possibly mean there is no limit. But it's nice to have this feature because should you become really immersed into the game, replay value is at no loss here as long as you don't mind doing nearly the same thing over and over again with your beasts.
Jade Cocoon serves as more than just a distraction of the Poke'mon giant, but also a deeply integrated beast raising role play adventure of its own, with plenty of dept and excellent graphics and soundtrack for its generation. This will very easily keep players addicted for years after years because I myself ran through two different copies of this game! A very unique and fun adventure and shouldn't be missed!