Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher (Switch)

 The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar. I do remember, probably more than twenty years ago, spending an afternoon playing one of the GBA Monster rancher games via emulation, keeping the fast forward button held down almost constantly. Even further back, I remember people complaining online that there weren't enough female characters in the anime about whom to write yuri. I am, however, a little more familiar with Ultraman, and with kaiju in general, and right from the announcement of a Monster Rancher game about raising Ultraman kaiju, I was interested. So it was among one of the first batch of physical games I bought shortly after I finally got a Switch late last year.

 

Once I started playing the game, it quickly became one that started taking up big chunks of my time. It's not a game I'm always craving, and not one to which I return every day. But when I do load it up, I'm usually there for well over an hour. The game's got a prertty repetitive design, but in a way that just kind of feels good and eats up time? It's split into weeks, and each week you choose what your kaiju is going to do: rest, train, fight in a tournament, or when they're available, fighting a wild kaiju or exploring a maze-like valley full of treasure. When you train, you pick one stat to increase, or two stats with the downside of slightly lowering another. Tournaments and wild kaiju fights are pretty obvious, and I'll get into combat more later. And all the other things make your kaiju tired, so resting is something you'll just have to do every few weeks. The treasure mazes aren't particularly interesting. You move your kaiju through a simple maze, until you find a place they can dig for treasure. They'll get a few items, occasionally one that might advance the plot a little (if you're even interested in the plot. You could easily play this game for a long long time and never even touch it). 

 

But how do you get a kaiju? The series has, since its start, been famous for the system whereby you put a music CD into your console to generate a monster, and that aforementioned GBA game had you inputting words to make them. In this case, there's something that's kind of a middle ground: the game has an inbuilt database of artists and song names, and at the summoning altar, you search for and select a song that'll probide the basis for your kaiju. The database isn't great, and it really doesn't seem like there's much metal representation, unfortunately. But it's still a decent enough compromise that keeps ties to the series' roots and isn't as boring as just typing in a word, like the GBA game.

 

The combat is interesting, a middle ground between action and turn-based that adds a little extra depth to precedings in a few ways. You can control your kaiju by making them walk towards or away from their opponent. At the bottom of the screen, there's four icons representing attacks, at different distances away from your opponent. You have one attack button, and pressing it will make your kaiju pergorm the attack represented by the icon over which they're curently standing. So distance management is important. Each attack consumes a certain amount of a resource called guts. This is constantly increasing at a speed determined by a few factors. I think (but I'm not sure) that your kaiju's speed stat affects it (it also affects your kaiju's chance of dodging attacks), but their current anger level definitely affects it: the angrier they are, the faster it increases. (Anger generally goes up when you make your kaiju train, and goes down when they win fights. If it reaches its maximum, your kaiju goes on a rampage, which could trigger a few different events).

 

Furthermore, the time limit for all fights, tournament or wild, is sixty seconds. This is actually more important than it sounds as knockouts are relatively rare, and if you're fighting an opponent that vastly outclasses you on paper, you could win a time out victory with a ombination of skill and luck. If you've managed to chip a little of a powerful foe's HP off, and they've missed every attack, you might try to run out the timer with lots of weak attacks, each eating up four or five seconds whether they hit or not. It might not be particularly noble, but it's still very satisfying to pull off.

 

I don't know enough about the Monster Rancher series to say whether the use of kaiju in this one is anything more than a thematic and visual gimmick or not. But even if it is, it's a good one. The ranch menu, that has you overlooking a sweeping vista which your kaiju looming over it is cool, and the battles between the big, lumbering beasts also look and feel cool (and their massive forms make the slow pace of their movement and the time spent waiting for guts to recharge feel appropriate, too). I've had a lot of fun with this game so far, and it's pretty clear when I look at everything I'm yet to achieve that I've barely scratched the surface, and that I'll be coming back to it for a long time to come. I definitely recommend picking a copy up.

Moero! Justice Gakuen (Dreamcast)

I know this game isn't particularly obscure, but this is a special case. This is specifically the Japanese version of the game also known as Project Justice, and a big difference between the two versions is that Moero! Justice Gakuen had a whole mode that was removed from Project Justice. That mode is Nekketsu Nikki (Hot-Blooded Diary), a character creation mode, combined with a board game with a tiny bit of dating simulation in there for flavour. A translation patch for it recently got released, and since, along with the life sim modes that were cut out of its Playstation forebears, this has been one of my most-wanted translations for as long as I've known that fan translations existed, I thought it worthy of a review.

 

With that in mind, I won't be speaking much on the actual fighting game here. Most of you have played it, and know that it's excellent already. It was a big obsession for me as a teenager, and because I couldn't find any copies in the shops in my town, I'm pretty sure it was the first game I ever ordered online (at a friend's house after school, as I had neither a PC nor my own bank account at that time). Instead, let's first talk about how character creation works. You name your character, choose their gender and their school, as well as their haircut, eyes, nose, and mouth. It's slightly disappointing that there's no customisation at all beyond that: it would have been cool to be able to make a character who's made a few minor changes to their uniform, or even to give them a different body type or hair colour than the default. But never mind, I think it's still possible to make characters into whom you can breathe a little life. (I have to admit that it was pretty clever of Capcom to use the conceit of all the characters being uniformed students to make a character creation mode possible, while justifying not having to model hundreds of different clothing items.)

 

You also choose their best school subject and three words from a selection. These choices affect your character's starting stats, and if you're boring, you can look at gamefaqs to find ancient guides written around the time of the game's release to find out the most optimal choices here. But, keeping with the spirit of the game, you should really think of the character you're making, and choose based on the personality they have in your imagination. What you notably don't get the freedom to choose are any of your character's special moves, or even their fighting stance and normal attacks. They'll be decided during the board game, which is themed around a school festival. 

 

The board game takes place over forty turns (it goes by quicker than it sounds like it would, as long as you only giver yourself one CPU opponent), and takes place on a big path of squares, laid out like a school festival. Most of the squares will slightly increase one of your stats when you land on it, some represent class credits (which I'll explain later), others give you cards, some are there to dish out special moves, and there's a rare few that reduce your stats. You spin a spinner each turn to see how far you move, though you can choose which direction you move in. Also, there are actual characters from the game wandering around, and if you land on the same space as one, you get to have a little interaction. Keep doing this with the same character, and you can befriend or even romance them (The whole series, in these console-exclusive modes, assumes that everyone is bisexual. Which is nice.). Though, chasing them arond the board would get in the way of trying to win the game or make your character stronger, so it's something to which you'd have to really dedicate a run and a junk character. An interesting thing about the special moves: though most of them are the moves of characters in the game, there's also a few moves that are only in this mode, plus the entire moveset of Street Fighter's Sakura Kasugano (who was a guest character in the first Rival Schools, but not this one). 

 

Regarding the class credits, those are the way you win the game, and if you do a good enough job, they'll be a big contributor towards your character's stats and their access to burning vigor moves. You get a randomly generated bingo card at the start of the game, with the spaces being these class credits. So, you've got to go around the board landing on them to fill your card. Getting a full row either increases all of your stats by one level, or gives your character a BV move. Furthermore, you get points for getting them, and at all times, one of them is a special space that gives an extra fifty points for landing on it (at which time another class credit space becomes the special one). After the fortieth turn, there's a CPU-controlled fighting tournament for all of the characters that were in the board game, which dishes out more points depending on where characters placed. And after that's done, the character with the most points is declared the winner, and gets to choose either another BV move (or their first if they didn't get any before this point), or a boost to all of their stats.

 

Then, you can save the character and play as them in all the actual fighting modes the game has! It's really a massive shame Capcom couldn't be bothered to translate this mode back at the time of the game's release, because I know as much as I played the English version as it was, with this mode, it would have gotten hundreds of hours of play. I know my friends at the time would have enjoyed creating characters and playing the board game, maybe even going so far as to each have our own custom trios to fight against each other in versus mode! We missed out on so much back then, didn't we? That's before you even get into the massive amounts of lore for this series that was printed in Gamest Mooks and never translated. But now we do have this mode, and it's excellent. And a (very) little bit of the extra lore got translated in the artbook Udon put out last year. Obviously, I very highly recommend playing it, and I hope that the existence of this translation is a good omen that we'll get the lifesim mode from at least one of the Playstation games translated in the near future.