Originally published March 2016

Twenty years ago, Pokémon exploded onto the scene of video games and quickly gained popularity on both the video game market and on animated TV. Various anime and video games that tried to mimic or emulate the concepts and core mechanics of Pokémon soon followed suit. One of those "clones" was a Tecmo video game for the original Playstation called Monster Rancher. I say clone, but in reality, there's very little the two games have in common other than the core concept of raising and battling monsters. Nonetheless, it was a game that interested me at the time because of Pokémon and it quickly became my preference for monster-raising simulators. Since then, it has stayed one of my favorite franchises, and will likely never return.

Monster Rancher was a special and unique little game that did some things I haven't seen done in video games since it faded into obscurity. It garnered a cult following of fans that was much smaller than the Pokémon droves—similar to how Silent Hill did in comparison to Resident Evil. It never sold as well as its major competitor, but it sold well enough for Tecmo to continue to make sequels, spin-offs, and eventually a short-lived TV show. A total of 5 Monster Rancher games were released for the Sony home consoles with a few hand-held games released in between. The overall gameplay from the first to the fourth was relatively consistent and I've managed to play them all for a good portion of time, except the 4th. The last game of the franchise tried to mix things up by changing the core mechanics for the first time, but I think that may have hurt it more than helped considering the loyalty of the fanbase for the core mechanics that had been such a staple of the series. I have barely touched the last game in the series and since it's so different from the rest, we'll be ignoring it for this Play This! review and focus on the first four that I played and what I think makes the series so special.

The Premise of Monster Rancher

The goal of the player in Monster Rancher is to be the very best, like no one ever was, but not like Pokémon. The best in this game means that you raise monsters on your ranch and battle them in colosseums until you reach the top and claim the trophies of the biggest and best tournaments. The main goal of the game is nothing new or special, it's what you do in between to get there that's interesting... sort of.

You start by providing "your name" and, in some instances, a gender to change around dialogue options. There's no character customization here, and you're pretty much a silent protagonist issuing commands to your apprentice/helper who then relays the message to your monster, or other NPCs, about what to do. Much like the title suggests, you own a ranch and train monsters there to ultimately accomplish your tournament goals. Training is a majority of what you will be doing with your monster as you try to raise its stats and improve its skills so that it can battle better. About 80% of the game is made up of just training and battles.

The premise, as you might guess, is not a very involved one. It's just some simple background motivation for you to continue through the mundane gameplay mechanics of raising your monsters. Occasionally, some side-quests will come your way in the form of visits from adventurers, neighbors, or other monster trainers who will have some side-story tidbits to tell you about raising monsters, finding new ones, and unlocking access to rare breeds. Sometimes, their interactions will even lead to other gameplay opportunities.

Training + Battles

Let's go over that 80% I mentioned, first. A vast majority of the gameplay in Monster Rancher consists of you telling your monster to do some chores around the house, resting when it's tired, doing more chores, and then finally battling in the tournaments to win the money you need to keep the ranch afloat. The game's calendar goes by weeks, so every Sunday you get to tell your monster what's the next chore they need to do.

The chores you select have no impact on your farm, which I always thought was a shame that it wasn't integrated into the mechanics more. It would have been cool to work with your monster to raise crops and earn income that way, other than having to rely strictly on tournaments for money. Then again, the purpose of the chores is mostly just to improve the monster's statistics so it can perform better in tournaments. By the third game, the chores facade had been dropped altogether and all the actions were strictly for training. Each assignment for the monster focuses on a different statistic for the monster. The statistics varied from game to game, but they typically included:

• Life - The total amount of health your monster has in a battle

• Power - How much damage it could do with physical attacks

• Intelligence - How much damage it could do with mental attacks as well as defend against mental attacks; also adjusted a monster's competence as an AI

• Speed - How accurate your monster's attacks would be and how effective they were at dodging attacks

• Defense - Higher defense reduces the amount of damage taken from each strike

Each monster you find starts out with its own set of stats and skills with certain strengths and weaknesses. Some are more adjusted towards speed and a lot of life, while others are slow and have just high defense to make up for it. Choosing the right stats to focus on is, of course, important to making the best of the monsters' breed and abilities. If your monster starts out with high physical strength but only intelligence-based attacks, you'll have to determine whether to get new physical skills or improve its IQ.

Typically, I've found that it's best to just focus on only 3 stats. Life is often a universal improvement, while I'd usually choose between intelligence and power for offense, and speed and defense for, well, defense. There's nothing wrong with improving the weak areas of a monster, but since each monster has a limited life span and since the monsters you'll face all have very high, balanced stats, the jack-of-all-trades approach is not the best for beginners. Unless the monster started out with exceptionally high defense, I usually stuck to speed since improving that not only determined how infrequently my monster got hit, but how accurate its strikes were. Physical defense doesn't mean much if it can't get hit right?

When it comes to battling, and putting all those stats to use, Monster Rancher has a system that is simple on the surface, but complex at heart in terms of the strategies that form. Every monster comes equipped with a set of skills. Your monster can learn new ones along the way and forget old ones if necessary. These skills are mapped to the face buttons on the controller and can be used in battle based on the proximity to the opponent. Some skills can only be used up close, while others can only be used from afar, and some can be used anywhere in the battle circle. With the d-pad, you control your monster's movements back and forth in relation to their opponent. Since many monsters you'll face have abilities that can't be used everywhere, a common strategy is hanging out in their empty range to prevent them from attacking. This is easier said than done, as the AI is typically very aggressive and is constantly trying to attack you.

To counter aggressive players, there is something of a stamina bar that is constantly building up. Each skill uses up some stamina, and as it builds up towards the max, the accuracy of your monsters' skills goes up. Likewise, the lower the stamina, the less accurate the skills tend to be. There are even some skills that will drain the enemy's stamina. While I typically prefer to go for damage output in my playstyle, a perfectly functional strategy is using skills that prevent the opponent from collecting any stamina. Without stamina, you can't attack. Period.

Every match, whether it be a story-based battle or a tournament battle, has a time limit. If no monster has been KO'ed, a winner is decided when the timer runs down. The monster with the most life at the end of the match wins. If there is a dead tie on total health, which is rare, it then looks at how many attacks were attempted and connected to determine a victor.

There are other little variables that may impact your performance in the ring, such as how a monster that is young and inexperienced may get confused by your commands. This still has a small chance of happening with an experienced monster, and the AI enemies experience it as well from time to time. This usually equals out to a free direct hit if you attack the enemy while they're confused, but not always.

As you can probably guess, since so much of the battle is based on a monster's stats, Monster Rancher would be pretty difficult to win if that's all there was to it. You'd never have a chance against an enemy with higher agility than you, because you'd never be able to touch it. How does it compensate for this? Luck. Much like XCOM, Mordheim, and Darkest Dungeon of recent memory, the stats of your monster are certainly important, but not as important as the invisible dice roll that is taking place. A monster with absolutely no speed, but super high strength is still a massive threat because, even though it may not be very accurate with its strikes, there is still a chance that it may connect with one attack, and if it does, your monster may go down in one hit, get injured, and even die after the battle is over. Naturally, when so much is left up to chance, you're destined for some frustration. I distinctly remember saving my progress before each battle to prevent the worst outcome, and still getting immensely frustrated when my high-speed monster couldn't touch a slow-moving golem most of the match, but getting hit just once and losing all of its health as a result.

It's not the most conceptually deep combat, but you notice things over time about how it seems to work. I've noticed there is a bit of a rubber-band effect where your attacks have a higher chance of hitting in the last second of a match, as though it may overturn the whole decision. This sort of thing can work in your favor or against you just as well. It can be irritating at times when you feel like the match should have been a cakewalk, but you got shafted by poor chance and circumstance. Nonetheless, it manages to make the fights intense and exciting almost every time and it has been pretty much the same from the start to the end of the franchise for a reason.

The other 20%

The rest of Monster Rancher's gameplay is oriented towards getting new items, new improvements to your ranch, and new monsters. The process of discovering and unlocking these started out pretty opaque in the first couple of Monster Rancher games. It was almost a mystery as to how much you could actually do in the game. You had to make it rather far in the tournament circuit, get lucky with particular events, and have enough money to do everything before you discovered all there was to do. This cryptic gameplay style continued and expanded into its direct sequel with even more monsters and mysterious circumstances. The third game, however, took a lot of the mystery away and removed many of the blocks on content within the game. It's a double-sided sword when making those changes. On one hand, it makes the game more accessible and you don't have to wait as long for things to change or improve, but on the other, the sense of reward and discovery is lowered with how much more accessible everything is. For that reason, I still like the first two games slightly more, even if there were some needed simplifications made by the third installment.

In the first two Monster Rancher games, every couple of months, you would be visited by an explorer who was going out on an expedition. He or she would ask if you wanted to let your monster go along. If you agreed, the monster could then wander through the exploration maze searching for various items to improve your ranch or unlock new monster breeds. Typically, the more intelligent monsters were better suited for these journeys, as they had a high chance of finding something of interest. There was always a possibility that your monster could get lost in the expedition, however. When this happened, it would go missing for some months, costing you valuable training time. Sometimes it would return sick, and die shortly thereafter. There was a high risk involved, but the rewards were exciting and necessary to completing the game.

Monster Rancher 3 also simplified the expedition minigame, reduced the risk, and reduced the value of the rewards you could find in exchange for giving you a variety of ranches to raise your monster and more characters to interact with. It was kind of a bummer to see so much of the experience cut down, but at the same time, I still like Monster Rancher 3 a fair amount. It has the same repetitive and, some would say, "mundane" gameplay, with less exploration, but I still find it almost zen-like in its simplicity. The process of raising a monster in different environments and trying to collect the monsters in a different manner than before is rather calm and relaxing. In some ways, I like 3 for just how it's a game I can play without paying much attention to it.

What Makes it Special

So I've gone on and on about the monsters, unlocking new breeds, and collecting them, but how do you get them in the first place? Pokémon had its tagline of "Gotta catch 'em all" to drive players to hunt down the various wild pokémon of the world and catch them in the iconic little red and white spheres. Monster Rancher doesn't require any sort of catching mechanics, instead, it uses a unique feature that was something of an augmented-reality mechanic for its time.

The Monster Rancher games were disc-based console games for the Sony Playstation 1 & 2 and would allow players to use their collection of CDs and eventually DVDs to get new monsters. Yes. You would take a CD, and place it in the console, the game would read information on the disc, then once the game was back in the console, it would conjure a monster from this data. The thing was, it didn't matter how many times you put Michael Jackson's Thriller into the disc drive, it would always give you the same monster with the same stats. How it determined this and what data the game actually used to determine the breed and stats was always a mystery to me until I read the Wikipedia page about the franchise. It's quite ingenious.

You weren't just restricted to what CDs you had in your collection either. In the first two games, you could take the monsters you conjured and actually combine them like a chemist, mixing breeds and getting different combinations of stats and attributes of the two monsters. It was like a PG-rated Frankenstein breeding ritual. You could still do something vaguely similar and more macabre in Monster Rancher 3, but the visual effects of the combinations were removed for the sake of making monster breeds tied closer to the regions from which they were. This was something I always lamented a little bit, and I felt like they were cutting costs in terms of animating the different breeds, but it still worked out in some way or another.

The saddest thing about this unique disc-based mechanic is that it's unlikely to ever be utilized this way again. The process of discovering playable characters of a video game with your home movie and music collection is something that will not likely be used in video games again as we move further away from physical media. This, of course, only makes Monster Rancher more unique, but it's still a bummer that we probably won't see another game like it again. The closest thing we have to it is the Amiibos from Nintendo and the little figurines for Disney Infinity and the Skylanders thing, but those are toys specially designed for the game. It's not something as broad as taking your music and movie collection and turning it into a monster collection.

Why I like it so much

I'd be lying if I said nostalgia didn't play into my appreciation at all. I played these games a lot when I was younger as a more casual experience than the typical RPG or intense action games I enjoyed. There was something zen-like and meditative about raising my monsters’ abilities, week after week, and then being able to put my efforts and patience to the test in a tournament. Obviously, no hard work was done on my end other than pressing a button over and over, but it still felt like an accomplishment making it to the top ranks and unlocking special, rare breeds of monsters.

I also enjoyed the prospect of collecting the monsters, much like Pokémon, except it felt a lot more feasible to me since the total number of pure breeds was usually only in the 30s to 40s and I didn't have to trade with other players to get them. It was just a matter of cross-breeding them to get the different types of sub-breeds. It was also one of the first Dark Souls types of games I played that was loaded with secrets you might never discover without the proper circumstances. There were so many secrets within Monster Rancher waiting to be found that the game was constantly surprising me. Even now, when I play it years later, I'm still in the dark about a lot of the various side quests and secrets involved in discovering new monsters or items.

Despite the fact that this is a slow, passive game most of the time, it's something I still find immensely entertaining and it's a franchise that has pulled be back in year after year. Obviously, I'm recommending a game that is old, not easily found or replaced, and likely expensive if you can find it on eBay or a garage sale somewhere. However, if you were fortunate enough to pick this up at a low cost, or inherit it from a friend or family member, give it a shot as something to relax to and kill time on a rainy day as you go through your music and movie collection, looking for the best monster you can get.