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.
No comments:
Post a Comment