There's no character customization here, and you're pretty much a silent protagonist issuing commands to your apprentice/helper who then relays the message to your monster, or other NPCs, about what to do. You start by providing "your name" and, in some instances, a gender to change around dialogue options. The main goal of the game is nothing new or special, it's what you do in between to get there that's interesting. The best in this game means that you raise monsters on your ranch and battle them in colosseums until you reach the top and claim the trophies of the biggest and best tournaments. The goal of the player in Monster Rancher is to be the very best, like no one ever was, but not like Pokémon.
I have barely touched the last game in the series and since it's so different from the rest, so we'll be ignoring it for this Play This! review and focusing on the first four that I played and what I think makes the series so special. The last game of the franchise tried to mix things up by changing the core mechanics for the first time, but I think that may have hurt it more than helped considering the loyalty of the fanbase for the core mechanics that had been such a staple of the series. The overall gameplay from the first to the fourth was relatively consistent and I've managed to play them all for a good portion of time, except the 4th. A total of 5 Monster Rancher games were released for the Sony home consoles with a few hand-held games released in between.
It never sold as well as its major competitor, but it sold well enough for Tecmo to continue to make sequels, spin offs, and eventually a short-lived TV show. It garnered a cult following of fans that was much smaller than the Pokémon droves-similar to how Silent Hill did in comparison to Resident Evil. Monster Rancher was a special and unique little game that did some things I haven't seen done in video games since it faded into obscurity. Since then, it has stayed one of my favorite franchises, and will likely never return. Nonetheless, it was a game that interested me at the time because of Pokémon and it quickly became my preference for monster raising simulators.
I say clone, but in reality, there's very little the two games have in common other than the core concept of raising and battling monsters. One of those "clones" was a Tecmo video game for the original Playstation called Monster Rancher. Various anime and video games that tried to mimic or emulate the concepts and core mechanics of Pokémon soon followed suit. Low effort, low context posts may be deleted.Twenty years ago, Pokémon exploded out onto the scene of video games and quickly gained popularity on both the video game market and on animated TV. We want a balance where we don't block the information the community finds useful but it doesn't drown other sources and annoy other readers.
If it becomes spam or has negative community backlash we the mods have the right to remove it. It can be more if the community enjoys the content/is discussion rich. Try to keep self promotion/single source content to 30% of all current posts. managing a hockey human team and collecting famous NHL players would not fit into the monster collecting/taming sub genre) Please note this subreddit is specifically about monsters/creatures and not collecting/managing in general. Welcome to Monster Tamer World! This is a community for people who like monster catching/taming/breeding/collecting series such as Pokemon, Digimon, Telefang, Monster Rancher Etc.