I’m gonna be real, I thought about going back to this for a little bit but the more I thought about it the more I didn’t… really want to. There’s a lot of charm to these games and I did enjoy getting to experience 1 and revisit 2, but the prospect of getting really in-depth with it all feels kind of exhausting. Playing 1 just felt kind of miserable because every time I’d reach a certain rank with a different monster the same monster would punch them to death without fail. Like it definitely had its charms with the sprite art and the goofier, Barney-esque model for the Zuum type monsters, but it just kind of ended up super demoralizing. You’d think they’d penalize that guy’s trainer after he keeps murdering all my monsters, but apparently the player character is the only one whose monsters can die of old age or sports injuries…

2 feels a lot less mean, but it feels super easy for you to hit a plateau where your monster doesn’t feel like it’s getting much more likely to do well in a higher rank, even if it doesn’t feel quite as likely that they’ll get murdered. It also feels like the monster generation is a lot less fun because so many times you’ll enter a title and either it doesn’t belong to Sony Music’s in-game catalogue or you get a monster you’re not actually allowed to have yet because you haven’t jumped through the hoops to unlock it. It’s a shame because there are a ton of weird and wild monster designs in this game but they feel kind of obsessed with blocking you out of making a lot of them.

Maybe if I was a kid again and this was like one of three games I owned I’d feel more compelled to dig into its weird obtuse mechanics, but unfortunately I am old and there are just So Many Games. I’m glad a new generation gets the chance to mess around with this weird little thing, but I think I’m done with it.