Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX

Genre: Compilation / RPG

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

.

Review:

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX, released in 2021 on PC, mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch, is a Compilation of the first two games in the Monster Rancher series, released on the original PlayStation in 1997 and 1999. In this game, players buy or create their own monster and manage a work and training regimen to build up its stats to compete in tournaments.

Given the game’s theme and central premise, those unfamiliar with this franchise may expect something along the lines of a Monster-Collecting RPG like Pokemon or Digimon, but Monster Rancher bears little resemblance to these games beyond the superficial. You’ll be focusing on raising up just one monster, not a team, and you’ll be doing so primarily through scheduling rather than battling for experience like a typical RPG.

In its initial release, Monster Rancher and Monster Rancher 2 had one major selling point – the game let you scan any music CD into your PlayStation and use the data from the CD to generate a monster. This clever feature is clearly impossible on Nintendo Switch, so this version of the game has a searchable database of music CDs instead. Unfortunately, I found this workaround to be severely lacking.

In the original Monster Rancher, I whipped up a monster using Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, resulting in a giant rolling coin with a snake on one side and a soccer ball on the other. Um.. okay, sure. But when I tried to replicate this process in Monster Rancher 2, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to use this album, and got booted out of the menu. Going back in, I tried again. Perhaps The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Not in the database. John Lennon’s Imagine? Not in the database. Yanni’s Live at the Acropolis (don’t judge me)? Not in the database. Queen’s A Kind of Magic? Not allowed, booted back to the prior menu again. I finally found success with Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which gave me a squat water monster with buff man-arms. But overall, what a miserable failure this feature is. Having never played the original games, I can only imagine kids excited to see if their favorite CD could best their friend’s favorite CD, only to find them both rejected.

Aside from this necessary change, little else appears to have been altered since the original PlayStation release. This game still uses the original games’ presentation, which is to say it users a combination of decent but unimpressive pixel art and some archaic low-poly 3D backed by a forgettable synthesized RPG-style soundtrack. I suppose fans of the original may find this nostalgic, but anyone who never played the original games isn’t likely to be impressed.

When it comes to the gameplay, I tried to keep an open mind here, having never played the original games, but even so I found this experience to be extremely lacking in numerous ways. There’s not much here in the way of a tutorial for either game, so new players will likely want to brush up using the digital instruction manual that comes with the game.

Players will spend much of the game selecting activities out of the menu for their monster to perform, ranging from a training regimen to taking on jobs to earn money. Much of the time, you’ll assign your monster to one of these tasks only to find they’ve failed, wasting your time and money, as well as their own energy. As tedious as it may be to basically play a glorified scheduling assistant to a fictional monster, it’s even worse when much of the time all of your efforts go to waste. Similarly, when you finally get into a battle, your commands to your monster are treated as mere suggestions.

As a result, this game makes players feel detached from their successes and failures in the game, struggling to succeed not due to their own lack of skill, but because a random number generator behind the scenes rolled snake eyes five times in a row. Do people find this fun? I see some other reviewers have given this game good reviews, so surely some people do, but to me it just seems like a tedious, frustrating waste of time.

I cannot imagine what anyone could see in Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX beyond the nostalgia value. This Compilation of PlayStation-era RPGs does nothing to update the games’ archaic presentation, is missing the games’ core central feature, has replaced that feature with a workaround that works extremely poorly, and the core gameplay seems so reliant on randomness that I strain to think how anyone could have found this fun to begin with. While Monster Rancher remains a unique formula, it is a formula that has spoiled with time, if it was ever even palatable to begin with.

tl;dr – Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is a Compilation of two PlayStation-era classic RPGs, though it lacks their core central feature – the ability to scan your CD collection to create monsters. In its place is a database that works incredibly poorly. Otherwise, both of the included games have barely been updated at all, still touting an archaic presentation. Even worse, the core gameplay is so highly dependant on random chance that it becomes an exercise in frustration. Unless you fell in love with these games in their initial release and have a lot of nostalgia for them, stay far away from this Compilation.

Grade: D

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}