Cassette Beasts playthrough with mods. I main krab. This first episode has minimal editing to remove meandering around. Later ones will be more concise.

I forgot to turn the difficulty settings back to normal. Level scaling mostly matters when your level is higher than the base level of encounter zones and NPCs. Behavior setting decides whether enemies go for the kill or use random moves. Main objective here is to grab a couple overworld abilities. Improving the tapes I'm carrying with me is also nice.

Bootlegs in Cassette Beasts are different in color and type. Their sticker compatibility is also somewhat different. There's a guaranteed bootleg tape of a random species and type on the west side of town, but you need the field ability from Bulletino to reach it. I hope I get something useful. On my old save I have tons of bootlegs from meandering around. Some from the overworld. Many from rogue fusions. Some repeats. I didn't record that first playthrough, but I had a ridiculous amount of overworld bootlegs very early on which made my first experience with Cassette Beasts feel very lucky.

My tapes aren't strong enough to win consistently. Do I want to pick up and start using something new? I'll need to grind a while to catch up and I'm not strong enough to win against strong enemies so that I can "leech" my new tapes to quickly catch up. Maybe it'd be a good time to grind up my tapes so I can deal enough damage for direct damage fights to be faster than status stall and for my tapes to be tanky enough to not get one-shot from full health. Which tapes do I want to keep using forever? Cassette Beasts makes it very easy to reuse stickers, so it's only a question of whether I have the tape I want as the foundation. There are certain bootleg tapes of species and type that I want to get but for now all I can do is meander around and hope I stumble into something good enough.

Fighting rogue fusions is a good way to get resources, experience, and rarer encounters. They're also great for bootleg hunting even though most of mine so far have been from the overworld...

Cat-5 would be a decent tape for Meredith to use but having her spam Stony Look to stunlock enemies and let me deal type-advantage damage plus status effects is worth a lot more than 10% more stats.

I shouldn't win all the hard battles by stun-locking enemies with petrification. I'll keep doing it anyway. I should get the other naturally-compatible Stony Look user and go for double petrification, or at least so that I have a backup in case Mardiusa gets taken down. This strategy might not be that helpful since a certain class of enemies that I've been ignoring are immune to being petrified and put to sleep.

Good luck with getting things that are unlikely, but it's bad luck that it ended up being something I have no use for. Good luck with getting a dice high roll, bad luck because it was so high that I'll have to find that bird again to get the last field ability.

A little level grinding with the difficulty turned up so I can get more experience. Picking up some treasures along the way.

Finally, making some quest progress. I'm also stumbling into more bootlegs.

I fit in a sneaky bootleg hunt along the way. Most of the ones I've been finding lately haven't been included in these compilations since I probably won't use them.

What happens when an archangel gets to full AP? A big nuke attack. Fighting them is a race to deal enough damage. If you're having trouble and don't want to use powerful attacking stickers to blast your way through each battle, you could use multitarget and walls to buy time. You'd still be vulnerable to status effects depending on what you're fighting against.

I lost the recording of fighting the archangel in Waterloop Station but it gave me an important hint. After that, I had a little fun editing in some sound bites.

I did a little grinding with the Gauntlet Train earlier to afford building up a couple decent tapes for a better run so I can farm even more of these weird triangles. What's the point of the plant-bootleg Palangolin? Natural compatibility with two important stickers: New Leaf and Fair Fight. The Gauntlet Train will dump debuff effects onto you before the battle begins, which is where New Leaf helps by cleaning those off. Fair Fight prevents any new status effects from being applied which includes enemies spamming buffs, walls, and other tomfoolery that I don't want to deal with. A similar setup can be achieved by having one of your characters bring New Leaf while the other brings Fair Fight. The sticker for Fair Fight can potentially be equipped onto any species tape if you spend one of the bonus slots on "compatible with any tape." There's another advantage with plant Palangolin: Life Absorb. Top off my health by knocking out an opponent at the same time. Artillerex's natural compatibility with Bite, which heals the user for 25% of damage dealt, is also nice for mitigating all the pre-emptive strikes and self-destructs. This setup is missing Phase Shift. I'd have to use New Leaf to wipe that off if the train starts enemies with that effect. A non-bootleg Ripterra would be great at that since it'd also get Bite.