Mechanics wise, it's also just fun to see what discs get converted into what monster's. There is a ton of variety with monsters, allowing you to create hundreds of potential breeds! One major drawback I have is the combination system. It is extremely complex and the game won't forgive you if you make one little mistake during the breeding process. You have to do everything perfect if you want a champion to be born, instead of just another one to raise. There's also the very cryptic unlocking methods for certain monster breeds but I don't want this review to be 7 more paragraphs.

Besides all that, I think there's a much more important part of the game. Personally, I've never found a single Pokémon game to be very interesting. The series promotes the connection between you and your Pokémon, but ultimately this ideal turns out to be superficial when all you do is use them as fodder for your battles. Monster Rancher on the other hand, has you develop an actual connection between you and your monster. You have to pay close attention to your monster's strengths, weaknesses, diet, age, and especially their physical and emotional states. You are raising and training a living creature with it's own thoughts and feelings to become a powerful warrior. I don't think a game has ever left me so heartbroken and empty when my first monster died. Death is important in this game, it makes the time you have with your monster much more special. I think this game is far more powerful than any Pokémon game.

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.

Opaque but charming. You can type in a lot of random real world artists and albums to collect weird monsters to train, raise and fight other weird monsters. I summoned a strange little goblin after searching for Top Gun Anthem, so there’s that.

Honestly worth checking out just for the scene in Monster Rancher 2 where your monster studies with a bird, and the bird is flipping pages in a book twice it’s size yelling nonsense at your monster, and your monster just stares blankly and you either get “FAILURE” or “SUCCESS” in big letters on the screen as a result.

The rest of the game is fine.