Pokemon vs Digimon: it’s an argument that has fueled fans of the monster fighting subgenre since the late ’90s. Pokemon seems the obvious favorite in the numbers game, with both its game sales and anime viewership, but there are still plenty of Digimon diehards claiming superiority for itsharder-hitting story elements.
But there was aanothercontender that hit the scene around the same time, complete with its own anime. It perfected art form of raising cute and friendly battle monsters — even if it did take four installments to get it just right. That game was Monster Rancher, and despite its now dated and muddy PlayStation 2 graphics, for me it still reigns supreme as the king of monster-raising sims.
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I’ll tell you why, but let’s start with a brief summary of the first three games in the series. The first two are, honestly pretty similar, and the most readily available sinceKoei Tecmoreleaseda remastered bundlea couple of years ago for Switch, PC, and iOS, marking the first and only time I wished I had an iPhone. In those first two games, you’d take over the training regimen of one monster at a time, raising it over the course of several years.
At the start of every in-game week, you can choose to train it in one of six skills — three offensive and three defensive — and your monster’s species (there are more than 300, by the way) will make it better at building some skills than others. For example, a massive stone Golem is great at bumping up its Power and Defense, but the big fella ain’t so great at Speed and Accuracy. If it’s running out of stamina, you can give your monster a week off, and whenever one’s available, you can enter it into a tournament for a chance to win fabulous cash prizes and increase its rank in the local monster battling league.
Just getting the monsters in the first place is a trip, as you could put any PlayStation disc, CD, or DVD in the tray and the game would generate a different monster based on its coding. Once your monsters reached the end of their battling days, you could fuse them together with a chance to make something entirely new. See, every monster has a main type and a subtype. For example, a purebred Mocchi is a beady-eyed, blobby pink creature resembling its edible namesake, and a purebred Hare is a bipedal bunny with a penchant for boxing. Mix them together, and you may end up with a chungus like this:
That’s only one of 325 possible combinations, and combining two cross-bred monsters opens a lot more possibilities for what you might get, since there’ll be up to four of the 25 main species' genes in the mix. I’m not promoting min/maxing (or in this case, eugenics), but with proper planning and a little save-scumming at fusion time, you can plan some demigodly combinations for several generations out.
Just compare that to Pokemon, where the extent of training is to go get into a fight with some rando on the street or wild animals in the wilderness. While that is one way to train, you didn’t see Rocky (Balboa, not the Hare-Golem hybrid) getting ready for his match with Apollo by punching old ladies at the bus stop.
What I love most about Monster Rancher 4 specifically is the ranch itself. You start out with a small plot of land, expanding as you progress through the ranks, and you can buy your battlin' buddies training equipment to give their stats an extra boost. For example, installing a heavy bag and assigning a monster to it will give them an even bigger Power increase than the usual calisthenic exercises. They can train any skill without equipment, and they may have to, since your space is limited at first.
As you get to be a bigger name, you’re able to also build a bigger barn, eventually raising up to five monsters at once, all of whom will build relationships with you and each other as they get more swole together. It makes me feel like I’ve got an honest-to-god stable of fighters, and I’m steering their growth in a way that benefits their individual skills.
Pokemon games can put you up against some pretty high stakes—the fate of the world has been in the hands of a 10-year-old far too many times—but there’s no real sense of urgency. Scarlet and Violet are set in a boarding school, and the entirety of the game is supposed to take place during an independent study session of indeterminate length. In other words, it takes as long as it takes.
But in Monster Rancher 4, you’ve got time limits, and there are consequences for not meeting deadlines. Specifically, those monsters you’re raising so lovingly? They don’t last too long. At best, they’re making it a little under five years of game time—less if you run them ragged or let them get injured in battle. And since a week passes with every training session, five years can go by pretty quick, and your ringer’s not always going to be there to bail you out of a tight jam.
I admit, the loss of the CD-reading mechanicis a blowto what makes Monster Rancher a unique experience, but even without it, a return by Monster Rancher 4 could remind us monster-rasing enthusiasts that it’s alright to expect more immersion and investment from a monster-raising sim, and I still hope Koei Tecmo eventually re-releases it.
After all, if it can give us new installments like last yea’s Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, it can bring back my slimy little pudge buddies as well.
NEXT:I Can’t Believe Neopets Is Still Around (But It’s Seen Better Days)
