Not related in any wat to the Chupa Chups platformer, Zool: Legend of the Beast Tamer is a Pokémon-like game involving taming and battling monsters. It’s much more story focused than similar games, as instead of someone that gets given a monster on their 10th birthday, you instead play a mysterious boy with a flute, living in an orphanage. Only certain people have the ability to properly tame monsters, and you end up taming one right as a couple of shady characters are looking for one for their boss (who captures them and uses them for things like fighting tournaments).

After rescuing Bob (my name for the first monster) and returning home, you can then explore the town and speak to residents. The town maps are more like menus, you select a house and speak to the people inside – with a lot of repeated NPCs. Eventually, you’ll help a farmer protect his crop from another monster, getting the attention of the bad guys, who kidnap Bob – but when you go to rescue him, the boss is interested in seeing what you’ll do and how far you’ll get escaping the house.

For dungeons, the game takes a more 3D view as you wander round rooms finding looked doors, then looking for keys (which are inside item bags). A lot of rooms in this first dungeon seem fairly useless and every few steps, you’ll be thrust into a random encounter.

Battles in Zool are very simple, your monsters will do their own thing and you can use your flute to give simple commands: attack, defend, special (this seems to generate attack power) and flee. You have a limited amount of flute “power”, but even giving four monsters instructions isn’t a huge problem. For the most part, though, you can leave them to their own choices, making battles feel a bit detached. I do like that they’ve gone for a different style that isn’t quite turn based.

After escaping, it’s time to leave the orphanage and explore the wilder world, looking into your past. Here you get to explore a vast overworld and I had no idea where to go. Even in Japan, this was quite an obscure game, so there’s no guides or anything online. There is a video walkthrough, but as you need to talk to specific people and go to certain areas, I’d just be following their actions, so I figured this was enough to get a taste of the game.

Zool does seem like it’s aiming at a younger audience than Pokémon, and for that it seems to do a decent job. The battling is perhaps a bit too simple (young kids could handle the complexities of Pokémon just fine), but I would be curious to try a translated version as Google Lens struggled with the text for this one.

?

Remake or remaster?

An English translation would be interesting to judge the game properly.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get Zool: Legend of the Beast Tamer