When Pokemon released into the world, it created an impact that that we have felt consistently for almost three decades. If you were there, at ground zero, in the 1990s, it felt like the brand was everywhere: on my bed sheets, my lunchbox, my birthday cake, my backpack, and so on. It was, and remains, a pop culture phenomenon. It’s no surprise that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw countless new franchises sprout up that were trying to cash in on “Pokemania.”
As a kid who grew up in this era, and loved Pokemon, it was heaven on Earth seeing all these Pokemon-adjacent brands trying to carve out a niche for themselves. Some of my very favorite “rip-offs” came into existence in this era: Medabots, Mega Man Battle Network, Digimon, Robopon, Fighting Foodons. Some brands had more success than others. A few series managed to stay going for several years before fizzling out, and quite a few of them died on the vine, never quite managing to capture any sort of major fanbase. One of my very favorites of these Pokemon knock-offs was Monster Rancher; a moderately successful franchise that had roughly a decade of popularity.
If you’re unfamiliar with what exactly Monster Rancher is, I’ll give a super brief explanation. In the fictional universe of the franchise, God sealed the world’s monsters away in “disc stones.” The stones were lost to time and eventually rediscovered in the modern era by archaeologists. The disc stones are brought to an order of priests who can summon the monsters back out of their trapped state and into the world. As time passes, some humans begin breeding and training the monsters to create a battle sport. This shared focus of monster breeding, raising and battling is the central focus of the gameplay in the Monster Rancher game series.
The overall franchise started with the first game, simply titled Monster Rancher, on the original PlayStation. The highly unique feature that immediately made this game stand out from Pokemon is the method in which you collect monsters. You can place CDs into your disc drive while the game is running and it will generate a monster, based on a massive media database that was programmed into the game’s files.
This was the coolest thing ever to me. I remember digging through my parent’s CD stack, popping Creed, Elton John, James Taylor and various Christian rock band CDs into my PlayStation and seeing what kind of amazing creatures showed up. As a child, this felt like a strange, arcane secret, almost like Skannerz or something, as if the creature was hiding in your house, waiting for you to find it with the proper technology. They also tucked some fun easter eggs into the CD summoning process. For instance, some Christmas music CDs would generate a Santa-themed monster, and Tecmo’s Deception would summon
Ardebaran, a character from that game.
This was the coolest thing ever to me. I remember digging through my parent’s CD stack, popping Creed, Elton John, James Taylor and various Christian rock band CDs into my PlayStation and seeing what kind of amazing creatures showed up. As a child, this felt like a strange, arcane secret, almost like Skannerz or something, as if the creature was hiding in your house, waiting for you to find it with the proper technology. They also tucked some fun easter eggs into the CD summoning process. For instance, some Christmas music CDs would generate a Santa-themed monster, and Tecmo’s Deception would summon
Ardebaran, a character from that game.
Once you have more than a single monster, you could breed your monsters to create a new monster with shared traits and stats from the parent monsters. The monsters have various stats: Life (hitpoints), Power (physical damage), Intelligence (energy damage), Speed (evasiveness), Skill (accuracy) and Defense (reduced incoming damage). They also can vary between several types, which upon breeding, will produce dual-type offspring. Monsters also do chores and can be trained by experts to learn new attacks and abilities to utilize in combat. The battling itself plays out like a turn-based RPG.
The rest of the series played and functioned somewhat similarly with some interesting variations sprinkled throughout. Between PlayStation and PlayStation 2, we received the “mainline” series, which lasted four numbered titles, as well as Monster Rancher EVO, which was named Monster Rancher 5 in Japan. These all essentially played the same, though a story was finally introduced in Monster Rancher 4, and a new, disconnected story was told in EVO.
More cute easter eggs were snuck into a few of the games, such as a Harry Potter-adjacent snowy owl creature that would summon in Monster Rancher 4, if you used the Chamber of Secrets DVD or the disc from the tie-in PS2 game. The buxom kunoichi protagonist of the Dead or Alive series, Kasumi, appears as a cameo monster if you insert the Dead or Alive disc during the summoning process in Monster Rancher 2 and 4.
There were also two Monster Rancher games for Game Boy Advance that were huge for me and my friends during our childhood. Gameplay wise, they played just like the PlayStation titles, except you obviously couldn’t place discs into your GBA. The work around for monster summoning was that they let you type in words that would correspond to specific types of monsters. There were a couple of games for the Nintendo DS as well, though only one of them was released in North America, appropriately named Monster Rancher DS; though this was technically the second DS Monster Rancher title. This game made use of the DS’ touchscreen and microphone to summon monsters, which sounds like a neat, quite immersive experience to me.
The last few Monster Rancher titles that I’d like touch on are the unorthodox entries. When the series was still finding its footing and experimenting with different genres, they took the opportunity to be creative and diversify the brand. On the Game Boy Color, there were two interesting titles: Monster Rancher Explorer and Monster Rancher Battle Card GB. The former was a remake of another of Tecmo’s retro games, Solomon’s Key, which was originally released in arcades and on the NES and Commodore 64 several years prior. It was something of a puzzle-platformer title. Battle Card GB, on the other hand, reinterpreted the RPG gameplay of the series into a card battler.
The last few Monster Rancher titles that I’d like touch on are the unorthodox entries. When the series was still finding its footing and experimenting with different genres, they took the opportunity to be creative and diversify the brand. On the Game Boy Color, there were two interesting titles: Monster Rancher Explorer and Monster Rancher Battle Card GB. The former was a remake of another of Tecmo’s retro games, Solomon’s Key, which was originally released in arcades and on the NES and Commodore 64 several years prior. It was something of a puzzle-platformer title. Battle Card GB, on the other hand, reinterpreted the RPG gameplay of the series into a card battler.
Battle Card GB received a sequel on the PlayStation, suitably titled Monster Rancher Battle Card Episode II. This game had a loose storyline involving a character named Colt (a frequently recurring character in the games and the anime) getting transported to another dimension. The player must collect missing battle cards and compete in tournaments to free her.
On the PlayStation, there was one other bizarre spin-off called Monster Rancher: Hop-A-Bout, which is a strange Mario Party-esque game that is centered around obstacle courses and races.
On the PlayStation, there was one other bizarre spin-off called Monster Rancher: Hop-A-Bout, which is a strange Mario Party-esque game that is centered around obstacle courses and races.
The series has largely fizzled out over the last several years or so, basically to the point of becoming forgotten until recently. The first two games have been remastered as Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX and that bundle is available on Nintendo Switch and PC. They removed the CD/DVD summoning functionality, due to the decrease in prevalence of discs (also you can’t use discs with a Switch), and replaced it with an in-game database of CDs, DVDs and video games to cycle through and summon whichever monster you are looking for. The most recent Monster Rancher, named Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, is a crossover between Monster Rancher and Ultraman. Functionally, it works like Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX with
the database for summoning monsters.
the database for summoning monsters.
It's unknown what Monster Rancher’s future might look like. It seems like a good sign that we’ve received a couple of releases in the last three years. I’d love to see all the older titles brought forward to modern platforms and made available again. I think that the digital database function for the two new releases is a great workaround, but I do miss the physical media interactivity. I’d love to see a future with an amiibo or Skylanders style approach with collectible figurines and a portal scanner of some sort that taps back into that feeling of your immediate physical world having some sort of connection with the digital world of the game. I doubt we’ll ever see that, in our increasingly intangible world, but a guy can dream.
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