Monster Rancher is alive and kicking!

• There’s a remaster of the first 2 games (Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX) on Steam, Switch, iOS and release a couple years back.
• MR2 has a huge competitive scene, with lots of community run tournaments. it’s even going to be at Combo Breaker, a fairly large annual event/competition for fighting games!
• There’s a Spinoff/Crossover game “Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher” released just over a year ago, where instead of traditional monsters, you raise giant Kaiju from the Ultraman franchise. (Switch only)
• There’s a Japanese only mobile gacha game LINE:Monster Farm that’s hugely popular atm

Monster Rancher
I’ll toss in another vote for Monster Rancher ;) A Pet Raising and Breeding simulator that got it’s roots from an earlier 1996 game “Gallop Racer” which was a Horse racing and breeding sim. Monster Rancher replaces Horses with Fantasy monsters, and swaps out Races for Real Time battles.

While the Raising aspect is highly menu driven as you make constant adjustments to your strategies for raising stats, learning new attacks, or doing “side-quests” in the game to unlock even more monsters, the Battle is in real time where you control your monster moving between near and far ranges to use attacks that are unique to those ranges. The attacks themselves also have 2 primary types (Power or Intellect) and 5 sub-types (Heavy, Crit, Wither, Hit, and Special). Using attacks has an associated resource cost (Guts) and your monster’s guts regeneration differs based on it’s breed (or mixed breed).

Loads of variety of strong looking, silly, or fun monsters to pick and choose from.

• in 2021 the original first two games games were re-released as remasters on Switch, Steam, and iOS as Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX. with upscaled graphics, some overhaul in the UI, and a lot of QoL features added in, but for the most part still looks and feels like the PSX game, just a lot smoother and zero load times.
• in 2022 a new game exclusive to Switch released asa crossover with Ultraman where you raise Kaiju from that franchise but with Monster Rancher rules.

There’s been SOME activity in MR in the last couple years…
MR1&2DX is a remaster of the first 2 games with some QoL improvements, on Switch, Steam, iOS, released in 2021
Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a crossover, though only on Switch, released in 2022
LINE:Monster Farm is a JP only mobile gacha game released in 2023, but some folks hope it will come to the west… it has some amazing artwork.

There’s also hope for MR3&4 “DX” release but those weren’t very financially successful originally, so it’s probably unlikely they’ll be rereleased, but everyone’s huffin’ that hopium.

Monster Rancher has made a return!, in a sense.
“MR1&2DX” a “Remaster” is on Steam, Switch, and iOS. This came out in 2021. (It’s mostly the same game, just with a searchable CD Database/Song List instead of physical media, upscaling, both JP and English monsters in the same game, Enemy monsters raisable, extra freezer slots, fast forward, instant loads etc. a bunch of QoL stuff).

Also there’s Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher (This one is on Switch only) that came out in 2022… a Crossover franchise of raising Ultraman Kaiju that plays like a mix of both MR1 and MR2

And LINE: Monster Farm, came out in 2023. A JP only gacha game, though there’s some hopium that it will be released in the west eventually.

There’s a huge Monster Rancher community and Discord that even holds public tournaments with varying formats and stat-cap limits. It’s a lot of fun!

for the remaster, the CD reading system is replaced with a built in searchable Song List. This is how you can play it on Mobile, Switch, Steam etc. The Song List doesn’t exactly equate to original CDs (the function is mechanically different) but there are a handful of entries that equate to their originals (this accounts for about 0.01% of entries within the 664,909 that create their original monsters.

The good news is, Everyone now has access to the entire game and can raise any monster they want to (once they’re unlocked, of course), and the Song List is 100% solved and published. You can Random Button if you like the surprise, but if you want something specific, you can just view the published Song List, Pick your Monster Main/Sub, then pick the Title/Artist suggestion for the variant you want. :)

I can agree for sure. I do like the game and at it’s core, it’s still a fun game as it’s an interesting mish-mash of MR1 and MR2 mechanics. But I can say that after multiple 100% playthroughs, it’s always a reminder that this could have been a legit true mainline sequel rather than a spin-off.

There’s a TON of nods to Monster Rancher. The obvious ones are the Kaiju rare subs that are Monster Rancher breeds, but there’s also a lot of dialogue or the occasional random mail that has some references for fans of the series. There’s even a Pure-breed Plant sitting in grandma Teresa’s shop that I only noticed for the first time after someone pointed it out haha.

I did put some effort into learning a bit more about Ultraman than I knew before, which made it slightly more enjoyable, and also fun for naming them, because I’m a sucker for Punny names.

Like this one… Kaiju is a Melba.
I named him… Idris Melba. (First he fought Kaiju, now he IS a Kaiju! lol)

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is also on Steam, Switch, and iOS!
It is a remastered per say. Not so much a new graphics engine or anything, but with bug fixes, item changes that function better, and GUI & other QoL improvements :)

The great thing about the Song List on DX is that now everyone has access to every monster in the game, rather than being limited by a personal collection of CDs. (You still have to make your own unlock progress in-game of course).

The entire Song List for MR1&2DX has been solved too! LegendCup has an app to pick a Main breed and Sub breed and see every unique variant of every possible pure and mixed breed now as well. (Or you can use the “Random” button if you live for the thrill)

Hey now… Monster Rancher is Legit and predates Monsters, Inc. by 4 years :)

If you’re referring to the Fandom wiki, that’s an interesting topic of much debate, and I have nothing to do with it. It’s got 1 or 2 main editors, but the real contention is the wiki attempts to link everything between every game plus the anime as a single cohesive piece of information, which ends up causing a lot of made up fan fiction just to connect the dots. The source material has been argued to be legitimate, but when pressed for the source, the wiki authors admitted that the data was from a Japanese cooking blog… which is never named, and no longer exists and cannot be found on any internet archive to cross reference

Additionally, the fandom wiki contains many completely made up monster lores and flavor texts from the Japanese translations that don’t correlate. I did make an attempt to explain to the editors, using 1 particular monster as an example comparing the English text to the Japanese text. I provided the real translation and the likely meaning behind the name and lore description based on the direct translation of the name itself and the flavor text. This singular entry was changed, but none of the other hundreds (maybe thousands) of entries have been touched. Much of the guide information on the Fandom wiki is also out of date, or based on pre-data mining posts from the 90s/00s and not updated to the current findings that engineers and code hackers have discovered and published. If there’s one thing the Fandom wiki has going for it, is that it has an impressive number of images across the many genres and platforms Monster Rancher has appeared on. I just wouldn’t recommend trusting it for actual game information.

LegendCup isn’t trying to connect everything to everything just for the sake of it, and doesn’t acknowledge the Anime as a source of cannon for the games. Sort of like if you were to purchase a game guide about something, Each game’s FAQs and guides are researched and dissected in isolation mechanically, and doesn’t attempt to be a guide to the lore and history of monster rancher outside of providing references of actual in-game flavor texts of monsters within their respective games, along with data mined mechanics and information within each game.

haha, yeah.

I started the Fan Site back in 1999, and even got Tecmo’s blessing in writing, and I’ve also got IMDB/game credits in two of the games in the franchise from before the KoeiTecmo merger . It’s been a hobby/obsession for over 2 decades that all started… mostly because My wife had beat the 1st game before me in '97, just waiting for me to get home from work to show me.

The Monster Rancher community is much smaller and overshadowed by other communities by comparison. MR’s genre is pretty niche and hard to spread the word because of it, so I try :)

The remaster of MR1&2DX (Steam/Switch/iOS) does have a random button in addition to a searchable internal database of Albums, Song titles, and games.

For whatever reason, the Random button in Ultra Kaiju is absent from the North American version, so you just either have to enter in some random letters/words in the Keywords field, or use NFC. The Japanese and Southeast Asia versions of Ultra Kaiju have a CDDB and Random button, though the “CDDB” is a bit misleading because it actually uses the keywords lookup to generate the Kaiju from the CDDB entries. In this regard, at least, the North American version is superior since the Keywords aren’t locked to a pre-defined list.

Why did JP and SEA get a Song List and NA got Keywords for UKMR? Maybe copyright or licensing, though it’s honestly anyone’s guess.

But it still would have been nice for them to keep the Random button :)

Most people don’t actually use the NFC, It’s just not as highly accessible in North America as it is in other places (Also, very specifically, Amiibos will not work, and this is an in-game notification as well. No idea if this was a licensing thing or what). It’s an interesting gimmick to replace how Swapping out CDs worked for the original Playstation game, but most people use the Keyword generation in the North American version.

Thankfully, we solved how keywords worked. After scripting out auto-solving more than 2 million keywords, and filtering out duplicates, we have published options for every baseline, and every variant (stuff that has different stat gains, starting stats, starting techs, or faster guts regeneration from the baselines).

• Keyword Solver for manual entry of any keywords you want, to see what it will produce
• Curated list of Keywords: Pick a Kaiju main, then Kaiju sub. Below the choice will be a scrollable table of all the Script-found Kaiju and fan-submitted Kaiju

NTAG scanning and Bus Passes are solved too.
The bus passes are fun/interesting because the remaining balance of Yen on them is what determines what it makes. Many of the numbers are references to Ultraman or Monster Rancher lore. If you’re curious about that, check out: https://legendcup.com/faq-ukmrnfc.php

I realize this is a bit late, but… I did end up making a tutorial video, showcasing how to use the app and extra features, and “Disc Swap” mechanic with Emulation of Monster Rancher 2, with no optical drive.

https://youtu.be/bhI02o8UAsw

Links to MR2 tutorial (mostly the same with a couple extra things) and links to the app
https://kbin.social/m/MonsterRancher/t/496208

Small, but huge correction. I forgot to include (omit) replacements in my napkin math above. There are 60 indices and two index fields that are summed to the offset result. so index 0 & 5 produce the same result as index 5 & 0 etc.

• Offsets can be a combination of 60 indices. Each breed with offsets is a choice of 2 indices from a set of 60 with replacement (1 & 5, and 5 & 1 are the same result), so (60-1+2)!/((60-1)!x2!) = 61x60/2 = 1,830
• 1,830 x 333 (breeds that offsets can be applied to) = 609,390 spawns total
• There are 60 ??? spawns in NTSC and 19 special spawns that aren’t ???
• There are 70 ??? spawns on PAL and 19 special spawns that aren’t ???
• There are 6 different monsters in the market and those spawn with base stats
• 609,390 + 60 + 19 + 6 = 609,475 total monster spawns on NTSC
• 609,390 + 70 + 19 + 6 = 609,485 total monster spawns on PAL

In MR2DX, the Indices work almost the same, except each index value has a range that it is randomly rolled, so if 2 same indices are together they can still be different. I’m not even sure how to math the possible value range for those but since the original game are static indices, it’s much easier.

The newest game “Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher” on the Nintendo Switch (A cross over between Ultraman and the Monster Rancher franchise) has a feature for reading NFC (basically anything except amiibos – probably a licensing thing).

I’m not sure how one would read NFCs using a Switch emulator, but that’s kind of a next evolution of it I suppose.
There’s also a Keyword system (type in any word in 2 input fields) to generate the monsters as well. The Keyword system has been fully cracked, and some mechanics of NFC has been cracked (for NTAG215 anyway).

Well, the 1999 NTSC version of MR2 has 391 playable breeds (factoring in all mixed, pures and rares).

• There’s a very small handful of additional non-rare breeds that are hard coded, I can’t recall off the top of my head but roughly 10.
• There’s 58 Rare breeds (Special skins) that have no offset adjustments
• There’s 333 monsters that can have born-with stat offsets and there’s 60 offset ranges x 2 offset parameters to determine final born-with offset stats.

I think this means there’s roughly 1,198,868 total variations of the 333 breeds that can have offsets plus the ~68 rares/special spawns that don’t have offsets.
This may not be exact, but it’s a close ballpark.

There’s several other apps on LegendCup that are amazing for playing the original or the new DX version if you are into Monster Rancher, but those aren’t really emulation specific, and didn’t want to risk being off-topic discussing them.
However, the Make-A-Monster app is for the 1999 NTSC and PAL versions for original console or through Emulation, so I thought i’d risk posting about it :)

Glad even 1 person knows what Monster Rancher is tbh!