Monsterseed Game Sample - Playstation
0Hohoho... Monsterseed. Well, Monsterseed (or Monster Seed in Japan) is a "Tactical Pet Raising Simulation" that is often called an RPG (which it only loosely is), developed by NK System in Japan in 1998 and published overseas by Sunsoft later in 1999. It combines the navigational prospect of a traditional roleplaying game with various areas to explore and interact with and combines this with turn-based battles and mild monster breeding to create a game that, while somewhat original for combining such elements into one game, is very old-fashioned and brings almost nothing new to the table in its entirety. This would be all well and good if Monsterseed was a great game, but... well, it's not that great.
In the game, you play as Daniel (by default), a "Ruler" who can summon monsters and is traveling to the South-eastern region to a remote town called Len Bal. He sold his beasts and has no money whatsoever, but hears about a rumor that there are lots of "Monster Seeds" in Jedes Mine. If he can get some seeds and find some work, he can live well, so he heads for Len Bal but gets more than he bargained for as he is attacked by the "Black Rope Gang" and has to do odd jobs for the mayor of Len Bal. The bulk of the game consists of learning about the gang and what troubles Len Bal, and to ultimately save the land from evil. MS is the victim of some curious design choices, a rather bland presentation (where the few things that really stand out are some of the special effects and lighting used in various areas, though the audio is decent), and one of the worst English localizations I have ever seen in a game from the land of the rising sun... EVER... and I'm not just saying it to sound condescending. Considering I've played hundreds of games within this genre or related genres over the years, trust me on this one... whoever translated this game has no idea how the average English-speaker speaks.
For example, a girl will be all like "I'm glad your feeling better. How did your journey go?" and homie is just like "Yes." or "Is that right." or "Uhh...!" or "Hmm? How about...?". The point I'm getting at is that the reactions and way people respond to simple inquiries is highly unnatural, human or otherwise. There are literally games from the 80s (NES, Gen/MD, DOS, you name it) that have far better dialogue. Even Zero Wing and games of its ilk can have the honor of having a bad "English" trans. that at least comes off as funny. MS' dialogue just leaves a bad taste in your mouth and lacks virtually any personality or soul. Hell, half the time, the protagonist responds with either "..." or ".....", so you know this game has characters that are somehow less than one-dimensional. Without even playing the original Japanese release, I am confident that the translation is more than just literal here, as some statements are mistranslated in general and the game manages to be vague even with the limited amount of locations and NPCs.
You won't care much about the characters or the story (which doesn't even make much sense) and would hope you can fall back on the gameplay. In the game, you can visit a few key areas as well as gain a variety of general-use items and dozens of seeds which you can use to breed nearly 100 monsters with. In addition to this, you can also use a variety of "Solutions" which help influence the stats and traits a monster will have upon creation. Before any monster can be made, you have to choose the temperature to hatch the seeds, with different seeds supposedly having different "safe zones" (where failing to adhere to it can lead to a useless defect monster or a slightly stronger monster than average). As the game has a book where you can review your seeds and every possible combination you have or haven't made, breeding is simple and the game's strongest aspect, though the most important factor, stats, are random by a wide margin.
The combat portion has been botched however. As characters constantly talk (saying really stupid things) and break the flow of combat, monsters have different personalities and "Call" ratings (the faster it is, the quicker they can be summoned to battle), you do not have direct control over monsters, and the A.I. is not very smart so one can become frustrated with this game quite quickly if they haven't spent hours restarting the game for monsters with high stats. However, while this is annoying enough, it's not what will get on your nerves. The really annoying aspect is that monsters have a life span and will eventually die. While this was good in Monster Rancher, the lifespan of monsters in MS is far too short and they seem to die when you are deep in a dungeon, so you'd better have plenty of backups.
Overall, MS is a game with some good ideas but relatively poor execution. It's not the worst game I've played, but it's difficult to recommend to anyone other than diehard fans of tactical games and breeding sims. This vid shows some things in the game.