Game:

Monster Rancher (1997)

Duration: 2:49

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Name the first classic game series that centers around collecting, training, and battling monsters against other trainers around the continent that comes into your head. No, we’re not talking about Pokémon — instead we’re looking at Monster Rancher, a series which started in 1997 on the PlayStation and turns 25 next year. So what better way to celebrate that quarter-century than to catch the first two games re-released for Switch? Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is certainly one of the more unusual games on Switch eShop. Monster Rancher, like many series coming out of Japan in the '90s, has a somewhat spotty localization history. In fact, this is the first time that the original game has ever reached Europe, with the sequel marking the series' debut in that territory (dropping the titular '2' so as not to confuse Europeans). Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is a pretty faithful port of the first two games, adding in a few quality of life improvements that weren’t a part of the original Western release — such as more save slots and monsters to raise — while keeping the gameplay, sound, and graphics straight out of the PS1 era. While fans of Pokémon might recognize the general structure of these games, there is a distinctly different focus to Monster Rancher. Here, the game centers around training a single virtual monster to compete in battles before breeding them with other virtual monsters to create new and strange creatures, repeating the cycle until players reach the upper echelons of the monster training world.

One thing that set the original Monster Rancher apart from other, similar games, was the fact that players could put a CD into the PlayStation and it would generate a random monster in the game, allowing them to effectively use their favorite songs and albums to create perfect killing machines. The idea is that, in the game, an ancient god sealed powerful monsters away inside stone discs. Modern humans have discovered the means of opening the discs and releasing the monster inside, raising them to battle for fun and profit. It didn’t need to be a music CD but that was the most common use of the feature. Of course, there are a few problems with this when porting this game to modern hardware. First, CDs are a quaint idea in 2021. Second, even if you do have some lying around, you're not going to get far jamming one in your Switch's cart slot. Therefore, this port allows players to search for their favorite songs and artists in a database, generating a list of possible matches that can be used as though the original disc were present. The list is somewhat limited, however; the more mainstream the artist is, the more likely it will be to show up in the search.

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