Thanks for the impressions. I'm hoping the combination of Mario-ness and some strategy will be up my alley. I know my wife likes this style of puzzler, so that's my main impetus for picking it up. (Plus, Amazon was kind enough to offer their original 25% discount once the price changed so it'll be like $22.50.)
Yeah, the game on phones has a number of F2P design choices that I ultimately found frustrating: the stamina meter, feeding monsters to other monsters to evolve them, having to spend currency to expand your monster inventory or to try to get rare monsters. A version without that seems very appealing to me.