In all likelihood, this is a game franchise you’ve never heard of. However, it’s also one that took countless hours of time from my son and I on our Playstation 1. Initially, I put it on this game list for that reason alone- it clearly defines a large period of time that I spend playing games… but ultimately, I decided not to play it on stream. I truly couldn’t see it being a fun game for someone else to watch you play, at least – not for any full stream. Hence, I decided I’d write an article about it and leave it on the list, but not play it.

Game Info:

The game itself is from the Japanese game company called Tecmo, and ultimately consists of FOURTEEN games across a number of gaming platforms. It didn’t really make it “big” in game markets, but has a rather loyal “cult following”. Those that do know about the game love it and often continue to follow the franchise much like pokemon players do.

Monster Rancher is a “life sim” where you get different monsters, breed them, raise and train them, then, ultimately, battle them in arena fights. The catch is in how you acquire the monsters originally. Each monster is generated from some sort of media. On playstation 1, it was a CD – you’d put a CD into the console, and the game would generate a monster of some type from it. Later, they started including DVDs and – when it got ported to handhelds, even reading other games to get the monsters. Recently, when the original two games (which are the ones my son and I played) were remastered for PC, they decided to have it read any music album or track in either your computer’s memory, or in the game’s files – to get the monsters. In all reality, this made getting the rare monster types WAY easier.

Review-wise, this game received decent ratings across most of the games, but only a limited success in the game markets. As I mentioned above, it was a highlight among people who really liked the simulation of training things to fight in tournaments, but that tends to be a rather small subset of gamers.

After all these years:

I own the remastered collection, and I really like it, but, still.. after all this time, I’m not as much of a fan of the grind-y, take hours of time to train a monster over the same mini game repeatedly just for one trip to the arena, only to do the whole thing over again. I’ve played it since I bought the re-master, but for some reason, it doesn’t hold the same charm as it once did.

After-thoughts:

Again, I decided not to actually play this one on stream, so there’s not a lot to say in this section… but if you’re interested in some retro monster training, I would highly recommend the remaster (Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX) for PC. You never know, it might just be the thing you need to while away a few hours!