Burned Out on ‘Pokémon’? ‘Monster Rancher’ Offers Similar Gameplay With a Twist

Training and battling monsters can come in many different flavors

You Are Reading :Burned Out on Pokémon Monster Rancher Offers Similar Gameplay With a Twist

Category : Pokemon

Even if you’re not a fan yourself, it’s not hard to realize that Pokémon is all-encompassing. The franchise has moved well beyond its Game Boy-based beginnings and has expanded into a multimedia juggernaut comprised of games, animated TV shows and movies, a trading card game, and about three dozen other things that would take too long to list. Although Pokémon has become such a massive success, the beating heart of the franchise still lies with its games. Though they’ve evolved (no pun intended) over the decades since their inception, the games’ core gameplay is a huge part of why the titles blow apart sales charts regularly. You catch Pokémon, you train Pokémon, you battle Pokémon, and eventually, you become the grand champion of whatever region you find yourself in. There’s also the collection aspect of course, which sees players capturing and evolving as many of the creatures as possible to complete the Pokédex, a comprehensive encyclopedia that is bestowed to the protagonist by the oft-preoccupied Pokémon Professor.

This convention has seen the games sell units by the millions, even if Game Freak and The Pokémon Company are beginning to diversify their gameplay formula with recent titles like Pokémon Legends: Arceus and upcoming releases like Pokémon: Violet and Scarlet. There’s a lot to love, and for some, the cycle of catch, battle, and collect is all they need. With that having been said, even the most addicting and successful games can get old at one point or another. Even dedicated Pokémon fans and competitive players might need to take a break, if only just for a little while. And, for that reason, it might not hurt to find an alternative that allows gamers to enjoy breeding and training of fictional creatures without being trapped within the confines of the Pokémon franchise.

If you’re looking for an alternative, it might be worth checking out one of Pokémon’s earliest competitors. No, not Digimon (although the Cyber Sleuth games are a good time), but a little series by Namco known as Monster Rancher. Debuting on the Playstation in 1997, the series attempted to compete with Pokémon’s burgeoning popularity by taking the monster-raising approach with a very different angle. A few years later, an animated TV show hit both Eastern and Western audiences, running for two seasons and a total of 73 episodes and concluding in 2000. Sadly, even with the dual-threat of the anime and the games being released on a frequent basis on multiple platforms, Pokémon simply became too big too fast to keep up with.

That may make Monster Rancher sound like an also-ran, but the series is actually still surviving to this day due in no small part to the incredibly dedicated cult fanbase. Monster Rancher’s fans tends to be incredibly committed to it, even if a new mainline title hasn’t been released in some time. Considering the first two Monster Rancher titles were recently ported to Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam (titled Monster Rancher 1 + 2 DX), it’s an excellent time to give the series a shot and see if its gameplay is compelling. But what is the core philosophy of Monster Rancher? How does it play exactly?

Monster Rancher is one part virtual pet, one part breeding experimentation, and one part boxing-style combat. Players take the reins of a new breeder, individuals dedicated to running farms and ranches where they train a multitude of monsters. One of the coolest aspects of the series came from the game’s “Stone Disc” mechanic. In the game’s lore, Stone Discs are used by complex machines to breathe monsters into the world. This manifested in the Playstation titles as the ability to place physical music CDs into the PlayStation disc drive. The console would read the data on the CD and generate a monster accordingly. Monsters in Monster Rancher have different breeds instead of elemental types. A monster can have up to two different breeds, and breeds dictate both what the monster looks like and what stats it has. A few breeds include tigers (wolf-like monsters with two horns on their heads), dragons, suezos (gigantic eyeball monsters with a set of teeth and a large tongue), dinosaurs, hares (nimble punch-happy rabbits), and even doodles (sentient hastily-drawn pictures).

Once breeders have generated their monster, the real work begins. There’s a wide array of stats for every monster, and you’ll want to increase them if you want to become a top-notch breeder. To that end, breeders can assign their monster to perform work in the region (pulling carts for strength, keeping watch over a property for defense, etc.). The monsters can also placed in training courses that allow professional trainers to pump up their stats and potentially teach them a new combat move. While you’re training your monster, you’ll be managing its stress and fatigue levels, as well as deciding on its diet each month. These are all crucial to both a monster’s performance and its lifespan. The game is broken down into a yearly calendar, with most activities such as working and resting your monster taking one week. Seasons change, and years pass with events that occur every so often to break up the cycle of training.

When that monster of yours has some solid stats and moves, it’s time to take it to the tournament circuit. You’ve got officially-sanctioned tournaments that increase your breeder rank and/or the grade of your monster, as well as side tournaments that reward things like money and rare items. To reach the top, breeders will have to clear all the sanctioned tournaments and, in some games, a championship bout as well. Each game handles tournament formats a little differently, but the combat itself tends to be about the same throughout the series. Two monsters face off in an arena, and a timer begins to tick down. Depending on how close a monster is to its opponent, it can utilize different moves. There’s also willpower to consider, which is the resource that makes attacks happen. Without willpower, a monster has to play defense until its stocks replenish. If a monster has low willpower and is defeated, it can get injured or even die, so the stakes of resource management in battle are high.

Where trainer battles in Pokémon usually end when one trainer’s team is defeated, breeders in Monster Rancher can only use the monster they enter with and will win or lose regardless of if there’s a knockout or not. If the fight timer ticks down, the monster with the highest percentage of its health wins. This encourages different play styles. Some monsters are ideal for taking a ton of damage and winning battles of attrition, while others are so blindingly fast they never get hit in the first place. Others still are so devastating on offense that they can take out opponents in a few hits, and there are of course plenty of monsters that are somewhere in the middle. A monster’s success really all comes down to how well their breeder has planned out their training regimen.

As players climb the ranks, they’ll have opportunities to obtain special items that allow them to unlock and discover new monster breeds. Some games in the series see breeders entering ancient ruins in parts of the world alongside their monster to find rare treasure. There’s always something to do, even when you’re in the virtual pet-style grind of training and caring for your monster. However, no monster lives forever, and eventually, your monster’s age will take its toll. At certain points, your assistant (typically a girl named Holly) will note your monster’s age, including when it’s getting too old to fight and when it is close to passing away. The good news is Monster Rancher has accounted for this, and it’s possible to get use out of your aging monster well before you lose it. By freezing your monsters, it’s possible to keep them in their current state, which keeps from aging them and dying. They won’t be usable when they’re frozen, but there’s a great upside to frozen monsters.

Specifically, breeders that have multiple frozen monsters can combine them to create a new monster, sometimes of a completely new breed. The combined monster will tend to have higher stats thanks to the monsters it came from, making it better on average than a monster that would generate from a disc. Then the cycle begins a new, time to get back to the ranch and train this monster up to go on a championship run.

As Monster Rancher’s technology has advanced, the CD-based system has sadly become obsolete. Since many gamers nowadays don’t tend to keep a huge array of CDs around (or even have a disc drive for that matter), the franchise has evolved. Game Boy Advance titles like Monster Rancher Advance use keywords to generate their monsters. The new port Monster Rancher 1 + 2 DX utilizes a music database, where players can look up songs by music artists and pick specific tracks to generate monsters instead. The Stone Discs may operate a little differently in the age of digital downloads and disc-free hardware, but players can still generate a massive assortment of monsters while training and breeding them to their heart’s content.

Pokémon will be an indelible franchise for years to come, but Monster Rancher is one of the best alternatives a player can find. The gameplay loop won’t hook everybody, but aspiring breeders won’t know just how addicting the series can be until they dive in for themselves. There’s no time to waste, the road to the Legend Cup is a long one.

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