It's a nice game with a lot of problems.

Battle animations are simplistic (think first gen Pokemon), so they could quickly get repetetive.
The world is a bit too open, with little guidance and some strangely loose fast travel mechanics (you can get to some places far sooner than you should I feel).
Some upgrades that I think are pretty important are barely hinted to, so I imagine they could get missed pretty easily (Like the infinite dash or fast travel that was mentioned earlier).
Some of the systems are also quite obtuse aswell, like crafting items and gear. Just having an actual list of craftable items that you meet the requirements for would probably have been better than the current system.

But all in all, I can forgive the jank, because it's an indie title, that very obviously comes from a place of love, with lots of nice looking creatures to collect and characters to meet.

Cute lil monster tamer in the style of wold digimon world, with an unfortunate amount of furry...

“…! …!”
-Seek

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How good is Anode Heart?
It’s the only Creature Collector game where I felt compelled to “catch ’em all!” and proceeded to do just that.
If that’s not doing something right I don’t know what is.

While all other creature catcher games are largely influenced by the single highest grossing videogame IP of all time, it’s refreshing to see a tribute to a very specific title of its competitor back when both enjoyed very little popularity, and this is mostly reflected in the creature design and specific mix of analog-to-digital aesthetic.

The creature raising and battle system is quite simple:
On your turn you have a number of action points (determined by your Tama’s speed) you use to fuel moves, reach zero and it’s the opponent turn, it sounds simple on paper but it’s very clever in its implementation.

On level up your Tama will grow stronger and grant itself “potential”, this potential can be spent to raise any attribute so you can direct the course of its growth almost 50/50 with its natural growth.
Tamas evolve and some evolutions are locked behind certain attribute required meaning you’ll can directly influence what you’re going to get.

Other than attribute growth each Tama has a set of attacks it can learn as it levels up

One way the game tries to prevent stagnation when you reach your maximum level, is the Reset mechanic:
Reverting your Tama to level 1 but gaining an amount of potential relative to its level, a permanent increase in experience received, and a higher maximum level achievable.

The map hosts a slew of different characters and events that either give or progress quests you’re going through, and with gates only openable with enough “friend cards”, basically character specific quests that often add the character as a permanent resident of your little town, you’ll be able to open up gated areas, meaning it’s not important which quests you complete, only that you engage enough with the world and its people, allowing to experience the game in a non-linear fashion.

You would think the game would go for a generic “become the best Tama tamer there is” and instead it blindsides you with a quest to stop a world ending event, complete with layers of reality, multiple actors that have their own agenda, and ancient civilizations upon ancient civilizations.
All of this while still be simple and followable by possible young players who are just in for the creature catching and battling parts of the game.

Movement is frustrating, your character not being confined to grid movement and the many MANY scattered objects and tight corridors that feel they have a square hitbox mean you‘ll get an experience akin to get your shirt stuck in a corner all the time you traverse anything.

The game looks great but suffers from the sin of mixels (2d pixel art rendered at different resolutions) especially glaring when one moment you’re in the overworld and the other you’re in a super-zoomed in battle with a static background with pixels as large as houses.

Difficulty is almost non-existent since as soon as you find a good combination of Tama and attacks you can reliably beat everything with the same combination of moves, only high level Tama may be a bump in difficulty but even then they give out so much experience that you’ll quickly reach their level after a few encounters.
The overworld being so large and explorable in a non-linear fashion means that you’ll probably breeze through a lot of areas when you have so much as just five levels over the Tamas there.

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Great game, but being a fairly unknown title with a quite high price may turn off a lot of people, I got it at a 60% discount and that was an absolutely fair price for the experience.