[Mini-Review] Monster Rancher EVO
Well, I guess calling it Monster Rancher Devo would have brought on a few legal issues.
Published: April 30, 2006
The Good
Tecmo's Monster Rancher series has always revolved around a simple concept: toss a CD (or later a DVD) into your PlayStation and let the game whip up a monster based on the disc, then pit them against other monsters in an arena and win fame and glory. Simple, no? But as the games have gone on, they've slowly started building around this concept with more RPG elements and a deeper set of diet and training exercises to train your pet monster.
EVO essentially builds off of these additions and pushes them to the fore, making game that is about 10% monster creation and the rest is a set of circus performances (you play a young lad who has an uncanny ability to guide monsters, spurred on by a mysterious girl that can breed and combine monsters that just shows up and demands to be part of the show), or exploration outside of whatever town you're in.
The towns themselves have guilds that can dole out simple missions, and item shops that can be used to buy gadgets that help train your monsters in certain ways for their circus shows, as well as items that can be used during the adventuring parts of the game, but the bulk of first couple years of game time will be mostly spent training and getting the monsters used to their owner. Very used to their owner.
The circus setting is mainly there to keep things relatively fresh and provide a vehicle for the storyline and side quests for the people in the towns you arrive in. The new, wider approach to monster rearing and advancement is admirable, since it sheds most of the established bits of gameplay that were introduced in previous games, but it also means an overabundance of something else: tedium.
The Bad
Oh, where to start? I suppose the best place would be in the general tempo of things. Monster Rancher has never been a breezy game, happily resigning itself to set schedules that you make to properly raise your monsters, but here week-by-week check-ins need to be made with your stable, and you must manually step things through, allowing enough time for monsters to recover from an adventure or circus performance.
The circus stuff is all mini-games that are initially fun, but not nearly varied enough to stay interesting. Replaying the same bits over and over again, and then being forced to watch the animals play out the "trick" based on your performance in a non-skippable, simplistic cutscene slowly grinds on you. Likewise, adventuring is the only way to earn better items, but it will require multiple trips through the same dungeons, fighting the same enemies, and this is where the game really starts to drag.
Battles aren't so much fought as wrestled with. Enemies are plentiful, but stay in the same spaces, though you'll never really know if you can scoot by them or get ambushed as you run past. Once you do get into the battles, you'll often find that your monsters don't respond to your commands the first time, randomly charging or backing up on their own for a few seconds. You can bump up against an enemy, but that character is then locked and can't move unless you hammer on the Square button to bump them off.
Enemy attacks seem to occur at random times, and your own monsters' attacks often miss at first. If you can move all three (or even two) of your monsters together, they can chain their attacks, which is often the best way to go. If you're not bumped up against other monsters, the attacks are long-ranged and if you are locked in, they close-up attacks, though it's not always obvious which a monster is better at.
This leads to a ton of frustration as you try and re-try to get monsters to listen to your commands, and often they'll miss their attacks. The fights are a passive, aggravating affair that doesn't immediately recall any of the improvements you've been making with tricks -- and what's worse you're penalized for adding new tricks to bump up different stats. This is bad enough, but changing out monsters means you have to start from scratch, building up a monster's affinity to the trainer, which means more ignored commands in battle, and more frustration.
It's a painstaking process, and one that doesn't offer enough of a reward to keep even freaks like me that eat up the process of leveling in RPGs or methodically working to make a character more powerful. What's worse, I like the Monster Rancher games, but this is a serious step back from the progress that the last two PS2 games have been making towards thickening up the stuff beyond just breeding and fights.
The Verdict
There's just no excuse for what was done to the series here. Sure, I can see what the developers were trying to do, and I can even see why, but nearly all the fun has been sucked out of the experience, replaced with tedium, endless repetition and absolutely horrid fighting. Stay away, stay far, far away.
Tecmo's Monster Rancher series has always revolved around a simple concept: toss a CD (or later a DVD) into your PlayStation and let the game whip up a monster based on the disc, then pit them against other monsters in an arena and win fame and glory. Simple, no? But as the games have gone on, they've slowly started building around this concept with more RPG elements and a deeper set of diet and training exercises to train your pet monster.
EVO essentially builds off of these additions and pushes them to the fore, making game that is about 10% monster creation and the rest is a set of circus performances (you play a young lad who has an uncanny ability to guide monsters, spurred on by a mysterious girl that can breed and combine monsters that just shows up and demands to be part of the show), or exploration outside of whatever town you're in.
The towns themselves have guilds that can dole out simple missions, and item shops that can be used to buy gadgets that help train your monsters in certain ways for their circus shows, as well as items that can be used during the adventuring parts of the game, but the bulk of first couple years of game time will be mostly spent training and getting the monsters used to their owner. Very used to their owner.
The circus setting is mainly there to keep things relatively fresh and provide a vehicle for the storyline and side quests for the people in the towns you arrive in. The new, wider approach to monster rearing and advancement is admirable, since it sheds most of the established bits of gameplay that were introduced in previous games, but it also means an overabundance of something else: tedium.
The Bad
Oh, where to start? I suppose the best place would be in the general tempo of things. Monster Rancher has never been a breezy game, happily resigning itself to set schedules that you make to properly raise your monsters, but here week-by-week check-ins need to be made with your stable, and you must manually step things through, allowing enough time for monsters to recover from an adventure or circus performance.
The circus stuff is all mini-games that are initially fun, but not nearly varied enough to stay interesting. Replaying the same bits over and over again, and then being forced to watch the animals play out the "trick" based on your performance in a non-skippable, simplistic cutscene slowly grinds on you. Likewise, adventuring is the only way to earn better items, but it will require multiple trips through the same dungeons, fighting the same enemies, and this is where the game really starts to drag.
Battles aren't so much fought as wrestled with. Enemies are plentiful, but stay in the same spaces, though you'll never really know if you can scoot by them or get ambushed as you run past. Once you do get into the battles, you'll often find that your monsters don't respond to your commands the first time, randomly charging or backing up on their own for a few seconds. You can bump up against an enemy, but that character is then locked and can't move unless you hammer on the Square button to bump them off.
Enemy attacks seem to occur at random times, and your own monsters' attacks often miss at first. If you can move all three (or even two) of your monsters together, they can chain their attacks, which is often the best way to go. If you're not bumped up against other monsters, the attacks are long-ranged and if you are locked in, they close-up attacks, though it's not always obvious which a monster is better at.
This leads to a ton of frustration as you try and re-try to get monsters to listen to your commands, and often they'll miss their attacks. The fights are a passive, aggravating affair that doesn't immediately recall any of the improvements you've been making with tricks -- and what's worse you're penalized for adding new tricks to bump up different stats. This is bad enough, but changing out monsters means you have to start from scratch, building up a monster's affinity to the trainer, which means more ignored commands in battle, and more frustration.
It's a painstaking process, and one that doesn't offer enough of a reward to keep even freaks like me that eat up the process of leveling in RPGs or methodically working to make a character more powerful. What's worse, I like the Monster Rancher games, but this is a serious step back from the progress that the last two PS2 games have been making towards thickening up the stuff beyond just breeding and fights.
The Verdict
There's just no excuse for what was done to the series here. Sure, I can see what the developers were trying to do, and I can even see why, but nearly all the fun has been sucked out of the experience, replaced with tedium, endless repetition and absolutely horrid fighting. Stay away, stay far, far away.
