Monster Rancher 2 - Full Review (PlayStation 1 game)

This is no ordinary virtual pet game and, despite comparisons to Pokémon, Monster Rancher has a defined identity with its own tantalizing hook; find your monsters by inputting your own CD disks into your console. Unlike typical ‘pet raising’ games you don’t buy them from shops or trek through jungles in search of powerful creatures. Instead you must put any audio or PS1 game disk into your PlayStation console and, depending on the disk, receive one of over 400 monsters with many of these only being acquired once you’ve earned the right to raise them.

Developer: Tecmo
Genre: Simulation
Release date: 2000
Platforms: PlayStation 1
ESRB: E –Everyone

‘Monster Rancher 2’ is arguably the most successful and popular game in the Monster Rancher series despite later editions boasting better graphics and additional features. Often compared to Pokémon, ‘Monster Rancher 2’, or simply ‘Monster Rancher’ if you have the European edition, puts you in the role of a certified monster breeder where your job is to train monsters to fight in arena style battles. This strangely enticing game has the potential to take up hours upon hours of your time and dozens upon dozens of your old CD disks as you try and unlock the hidden mysteries within your CD and PS1 game collection.

Gameplay and Story

After introducing yourself and taking a short personality test you’re thrown into the role of a certified monster breeder with your assistant, Colt, by your side. The story of Monster Rancher 2 is mostly non-linear with key events only occurring when you choose to engage in them or when you meet specific requirements. The game also never has to end if you don’t want it to as you can carry on playing even after watching the ‘end’ video so this is a fantastic game for the casual gamer. The general aim of the game however is to raise different monsters, unlocking rare breeds and rising through the 6 ranks by beating other monsters in tournaments and cups. 

Gameplay is split into different segments that mostly revolve around training your monster or battling other monsters. After finding and naming your monster, be that by purchasing one of the three available at the market or by finding one on any audio or PS1 games you happen to have, you take it back to the ranch with you. This unusual twist to the game is painfully addictive and you’ll find yourself rooting around the house for any old CDs that you still have but, in this new digital age, I personally lacked enough CDs to get a real variety. Frustratingly a lot of CDs contain a ‘rare monster’ that means you haven’t met the requirements to train it yet but, by playing the game and advancing through it, those rare monsters will be unlocked with enough time and dedication and if anything it gives you an incentive to continue playing. 

 

Almost every aspect of your monster’s training regime can be controlled by you including choosing what food it will eat at the start of every month, all of which have different effects, which drills they engage in or when they should go on an ‘errantry’. All monsters have a collection of stats to be raised; Life, Power, Intelligence, Defence, Speed and Skill but monsters exceed at these in different ways, for example some monsters are intelligence based rather than power meaning rather than brute strength they adopt entirely different attacks that focus on not just damage but reducing the ‘guts’ of their opponent. ‘Guts’ is what you need to attack your opponent so by reducing them in the enemy it means they cannot physically attack you and allowing you to chip away at their health gradually until they either die or the match is up. Battles are won by having a greater percentage of health at the end of the battle, whether or not you K.O your opponent doesn’t tend to come into it as matches are fought on a time limit. 

The battles can, admittedly, be frustrating as luck tends to factor into it quite frequently and often you’ll be battling against your monster’s unwillingness to listen to you. How many opponents you face depends on what kind of tournament it is and there’s a nice round mixture of tournaments where sometimes you’ll be fighting for the most wins and sometimes where you’ll only be battling two or three other monsters who were the winners of previous fights. Whilst occasionally battles can become repetitive there’s a huge variety of opponents that are genuinely quite challenging and, when you enter a new grade or start with a new monster, verging on impossible. Due to the quite steep rise in difficulty level as you rise through the ranks the game is kept constantly challenging and rewarding so there’s no worry of out-levelling any of your opponents without some serious dedication to training. 

The amount of interaction you have with your monsters fighting and training regime is kind of variable as during battles you can choose to control it yourself or allow your monster to fight by themselves. You will always see how the fight plays out but this effects your ability to select the techniques, when to select them and whether you advance or retreat during matches. You cannot use items during battles which may seem a little odd at first but, provided you use them outside of battle, there are still plenty of items that can be used though with unusual effects. Generally however these items don’t affect the outcome of a battle as that depends entirely on how well you’ve trained your monster and how well you can play to their strengths during a match. 

Training your monster involves drills or errantry but you can also select whether to train using light drills or heavy drills. Each light drill will raise a single stat whereas heavy drills will raise two and decrease one as well as tire your monster out faster. When you select which drill your monster will perform it takes an entire week and, with only four weeks in a month, you can at most only get away with three training sessions a month and with one week to rest. During the drills themselves you can either watch the scene of your monster engaging in it, for instance swimming around a course or enduring the force of huge battering rams pounding into them, or you can just skip the cutscene and get straight to the results. Your monster is not just limited to failing or succeeding; they may also cheat or exceed and this often reflects how they are raised or their individual personalities. The way in which you can praise or scold your monster is an added dimension and a contributing factor in how loyal your monster is to you, as well as how spoilt they may be. Monsters that are frequently scolded, refused praise, pushed too hard during training sessions or doing their individual ‘dislike’ such as feeding them something they hate or forcing them to battle when they dislike it will ultimately stress your monster out. A stressed out monster means that they will die sooner, are more likely to fall ill and will frequently be tired and unable to fight properly. Monsters that are stressed out or neglected may even run away and this usually occurs when they dislike you but, on the other hand, a monster that likes you and that has more loyalty is more likely to listen to you during battle. Unlike many ‘virtual pet’ games, if this can be considered that, the fact that the way you raise and train your monster has a huge impact on the game makes it all the more absorbing as sometimes your personality and training regime will clash with a monster. What worked with your previous, precious monster now no longer works for your brand new one who needs to be brought up to speed. What this results in is you and your new monster both hating one another and either this poor partnership continues or you change your tactic and adjust to the new personality and style of this new, baby monster.

A huge part of the game and one I particularly enjoy is the feature of combining your monsters into new ones and unlocking more disk stones. Your monster won’t last forever and, depending on the type of monster, will have a lifespan that will decrease depending on how stressed or mistreated they are. There’s no actual way to view the lifespan of your monster so sometimes it can come as a bit of a shock when you wake up one morning, open the barn and find them motionless on the ground. Combining monsters is something of an art and it’s fairly confusing at first as it can be temperamental. The basic idea is that you raise two kinds of monster, the same breed or different ones, you can only have one at a time but you can ‘freeze’ them which is essentially putting them in a cryogenic freezer to be defrosted whenever you want to use them again. Once you’ve got two fine specimens you can then combine them for a flat fee, this merges their DNA to produce you one new monster that is supposed to have traits from its parents including stats, personality and any techniques the parents learnt. To help push your combining in the right direction you can use special items that you’ve picked up from expeditions, won from battles or found in other way. Items can include bits of a broken disk stone which is basically an essence of another, possibly rare, monster. Your new monster will always be back at the lowest grade for battles, level E, but this is doesn’t mean he’ll be lagging behind as the monsters you fight in battles do not raise their stats so, just as his parents did, your new monster can climb the grades and attempt to become a champion. 

Graphics and audio

As PlayStation 1 games go, Monster Rancher is reasonably attractive though not especially detailed. The sprite animations for the dialogue are particularly nice however and each character you encounter has an original look so there’s no rehashes of models. Everybody, including your monster, rae rather animated in their emotions and what’s especially nice to see is that your monster’s personality shows through the way they express themselves and move around. There’s also a noticeable growth in monsters as they age and visual indicators like this are always appreciated. Depending on the breed of monster and the sub-species that they may contain they all look different; colours, textures and features like horns or spines may be integrated into a base monster’s original appearance and this diversity is critical to making each monster feel like an individual. The environments too are pretty decent though the ranch is very unfurnished and mostly consists of just an empty expanse of rolling green hills. The weather is done particularly well in the game and you’ll notice the change in seasons is quite apparent due to the level of light and little things like the hue of the grass, how rainy or stormy it is and whether there’s snow or not. Finally, the battle arenas and town areas are fairly well drawn however, even though most of the buildings in the market do remind me of a bunch of disturbing faces, but overall I’d say the graphics for the game are of a decent level of quality. 

The music is something I particularly enjoy in the game as it’s very atmospheric and, the battle music in particular, changes depending on what kind of tournament you’re playing. It’s a very memorable soundtrack that after several sessions of playing is likely to be stuck in your head forever. There’s no verbal dialogue in the game as everything is done via text but your monsters will make noises that reflect their mood so I guess that’s something.

Overall

There’s a great potential to get hours and hours of gameplay out of Monster Rancher and still not quite understand how the complex calculation system of combing works, but it’s fun all the same. Whilst the graphics aren’t exactly the game’s strong point and gameplay can become repetitive and uneventful there’ s still this sense of achievement when you raise your monster’s rank or find a new, rare creature. The game is a nice level of challenging but is still very accessible and I particularly love how connected you can feel to your monster and how you develop favourites, I hate Pixie’s for example because I personally believe they’re a bunch of spoilt brats who never do what I say and who cheat all the time. Ahem. The game is definitely addictive and extremely time consuming, the original spin of finding your own monsters by using your own disks from home is always a draw for me and there’s a lot of replay value in the game due to how different the monsters are. This is one of those games where you can play it for the long haul or for a short stint but, I warn you, it’s a rare find and will cost you more money than your average PS1 game. If you can pick it up for less than £20 I advise you to buy it, immediately, because it won’t remain that cheap for long.

The Good: 

• Original premise of using your own CDs
• Lots of personality
• Huge selection and of monsters
• Nice difficulty curve
• Addictive gameplay
• Monster combination very fun to toy with
• Monsters are very interactive
• Lots of hidden features to unlock rare monsters
• Some nice quirky events to break things up such as birthdays and expeditions
  

The Bad:

• Can become repetetive and boring
• Training your monster takes a long time
• Graphics are a little grating
• Could use more features and places to go

The Score: 7/10

Final thoughts: "This is the golden age of Monster Rancher, it's really fun, super addictive and just has bags of originality. It's not like Pokémon, I swear."

Zeus, Master of Olympus - Full Review (PC game)

As city building games go ‘Zeus, Master of Olympus’ is an extremely enjoyable game with hours of good quality content and a fairly robust series of campaigns plus some sandbox maps. This game has great playability due to the dozens of different maps, continually challenging and enjoyable scenarios and the ability to play in sandbox mode. The liberal amounts of humour such as overly dramatic voice acting and amusing plotlines further enhances it making this game the master of city building games. It can be quite difficult to get the hang of due to all the different elements and conditions that need to be met but, once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s an extremely enjoyable experience with lots of opportunity for perfectionists to build the ultimate city.

Gameplay

The game is all set in Ancient Greece and has a strong emphasis on the worship of the Greek Gods, Heroes and mythological monsters. You’re unable to actually directly control any of those as it’s not an ‘Age of Empires’ type game but instead they’ll lend you a hand if you meet some specific requirements. The campaigns take place across different maps that vary in size and efficiency. Sometimes you’re stuck in a tiny little rocky map with barely any shoreline for fisheries and no farmland. Other time you’ll find yourself in a huge expanse of flat land with rivers, ocean, ore covered mountains and plenty of wildlife and farming areas to use to your heart’s content. There are essentially two types of city you’ll be building; a parent city and a colony. The colonies are built partway through a campaign and are used to support your parent city through trading in resources you couldn’t get before. After you’ve built it up from scratch and you go back to your parent city you’ll be able to continue trading with it, though you can’t flip back and forth between cities as you wish. If you’re not in the mood for a campaign with specific missions and a storyline then you can also play in the open play maps which come in three different modes; open play military, open play economic and open play sandbox that allow you to build up a huge city with all the buildings relevant to which mode you’re playing in. After you’ve picked what it is you’re doing you’ll be plonked into an empty map that will have particular resources, allies and rivals, depending on the map. Sometimes you’ll have a bountiful access to farmlands and rivers overflowing with fish, or sometimes you’ll get barely any means of getting food but instead a rich supply of copper ore and marble quarries, leaving you to figure out how to sustain your population. 

There are 7 campaigns which vary in difficulty and length. Some have only a handful of episodes whereas some have up to 8 episodes and which are generally tougher with more complex challenges. Challenges may include things like having a certain population in a certain type of house, collecting materials to start up a colony city or to send back to the parent city, building a temple to a God or slaying a mythological creature. The objectives of a mission will relate strongly to what the storyline is for that campaign and the reasoning behind the missions will be described in the narrated beginning of each one. You may have accidentally angered the God Poseidon for instance, who unleashes the mythological creature the Kraken. Your mission may then be to build a Hero Hall and to attract a hero to the city in order to defeat the beast. Heroes may include figures such as Achilles, Perseus, Hercules, Odysseus and so on. These heroes require specific conditions different to each individual, once you have met those conditions you can call for him to come and save your city from the monster. On the flip side, by worshiping particular Gods you will gain access to their specific beast who can aid you in protecting your city or invading other settlements. If you’re able to worship Poseidon then you’ll gain access to his Kraken. Who you’re able toworship or not worship varies from map to map and building a sanctuary for Gods is no easy feat due to the sheer quantity of rare resources that go into them such as marble and bronze statues.

There are a lot of different resources in the game but not every map will give you access to them, for instance when placing a farm you’ll likely only get one of several so either carrots, onions or wheat. You can get other food resources by trading with neighbouring, friendly allies. Other food sources include cheese, obtained from goats which you place individually in a field, urchins and fish which are found in the sea or rivers and pork which is obtained from wild boars that roam the forests. You distribute food and other supplies to your citizens via an ‘agora’ which is a building placed alongside a road where you may place 3 stalls on top of it or, if you build a large one that takes up both sides of the road, 6 stalls. There are two distinct forms of housing the game; regular and elite. Regular housing houses regular citizens who make up your workforce whereas the elite citizens are a mix of noblemen and your military. Whilst regular citizens can form a sort of vigilante rabble who throw rocks at enemies, these elite military guys are fully equipped with weapons, armour and horses if you supply them with such. Regular civilians, who live in a simple 2x2 house, require access to different things in order for them to improve their house which increases the number of people within that house and which generally improves the workforce and appearance of your city. By giving them food, fleece, olive oil, water and access to different ‘arts’ buildings you can have them renovate their house all the way up to a large three story townhouse.

For those who look for lots of military action in a city building game I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. There’s basically no strategic military action and, with the inclusion of a Hero, mythological creature or divine troops that some Gods may grant you, there’s very little chance of losing your city to the opposition. By bumping the difficulty level up you’ll find a lot more challenge in defending your city but you’ll only be invaded if you’ve really irritated a rival or if it’s pre-set in the mission you’re playing. Invading rivals basically includes building up a large army using the elite housing, not an easy task admittedly, then navigating to the map and selecting which city you want to invade before selecting which troops will be sent there. Then they’ll travel off by themselves whilst you wait to hear how it all went, if you win then you’ll receive goods or money every month from the conquered city and open up a trading route with them. If you lose you’ll just really irritate them and they’ll sometimes retaliate back whilst your troops are still recuperating. Overall, the military side of the game is lacking but it depends on what you’re looking for in a game.

Graphics and audio

For a city building game of the 90s it looks really nice. You can see a lot of detail such as people walking with their unique appearances, crops and grain growing in the fields, stall vendors walking back with a trail of workers ladened with goods following along behind and hunters killing wild boat in the forests. The buildings are highly detailed and lovingly crafted to look as close as possible to traditional Greek architecture whilst the people who inhabit those buildings such as the workers are visibly working or waiting to work. 



The audio is great with some really funny one liner’s on most buildings and people such as, by hovering over a theatre you’ll hear a dramatic actor exclaiming, “Has anybody seen my spear? How can I be a spear carrier without my spear?'' The narrator is a continual source of amusement for me but genuinely the voice acting is really well done and everything has a lovely sound with no irregularities anywhere. The music is very faint, subtle and relaxing and is quickly muffled by the increasing loudness of your bustling city and farmlands but for what it is, it’s certainly pleasant.

Overall

This game is rather like a balancing act between all sorts of elements such as the number of jobs, the population size, how much food you’ve got and how much money is in your coffers. It can be difficult to get used to but the tutorial is very substantial and detailed for new players and, if you’re already a veteran of city building games, you won’t find it difficult. It also helps that there’s a toggle-able difficulty level if you’re finding it too hard or too easy. This is my favourite city building game due to the unique position of it being set in Ancient Greece and without too much emphasis on fighting which, for me, should be reserved for games like ‘Red Alert’ and ‘Age of Empires’. This is the type of game where you can drop in, spend a couple of hours building something absolutely perfect, then drop back out again and leave it alone for a few weeks. It’s a nice, challenging but casual game that’s very easy to fall in love with and which looks and sounds great. If Zeus doesn’t have enough for you still then it also has an expansion pack called Poseidon which basically adds a new game onto it with a more ‘Atlantis’ theme running through it which doesn’t detract from the original game and really only enhances it.

Score: 9/10

To discover more of my old PC game reviews, check out this page here. 

Alternatively, if you're currently playing this game then you might want to check out the list of cheat codes for the game, found here.