#Monster crown switch review trial#

In fact, that may be an understatement: it mostly just drops you into the game and assumes you’ll figure it out yourself.

#Monster crown switch review trial#

You also need to be willing to accept a fair amount of trial and error, since Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to telling you how it works. Again, I see how that will appeal to some people’s sense of nostalgia, but if you’re playing these games for the first time now, you have to be willing to make a lot of allowances. Notwithstanding the promise of more save slots and the ability to fast-forward through some of the more arduous training sequences, there really hasn’t been much done here to make it seem like the past 20+ years have elapsed. These games first came out on PS1, and it shows. Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX probably isn’t helped by how dated it looks, sounds, and plays. What’s more, while I can certainly appreciate that some people feel nostalgia for this different approach, it’s hard not to feel like the more streamlined way became more popular for a reason. The problem, of course, is that Pokémon has conquered the genre so thoroughly over the past twenty-plus years, it feels alien to play this kind of game any other way. There’s a lot more going on here than simply constantly levelling up your favourite monsters so they can win in battle. You even need to contend with your monsters gradually aging, and eventually either retiring or dying. You need to build up your relationships with each monster, to make sure they trust you, and you have to pay close attention to their morale. You need to decide how intensive you want their training regimen to be, whether you want to coddle them or be a strict disciplinarian. It places a much heavier emphasis on breeding and training your monsters than you find in Pokémon. To be fair, Monster Rancher is somewhat different from those other games. It doesn’t help Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX’s case, either, that it kind of sucks.

To say that Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX faces a bit of an uphill battle would be an understatement. have been re-released in North America nearly 25 years later, and it’s not only still being overshadowed by Pokémon and Digimon, it also has to contend with a host of other monster-breeding imitators that includes (but is by no means limited to) the likes of Nexomon, Monster Sanctuary, and Monster Crown. Now, the first two games in the series, Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX. After all, when they first came out, it was at the height of the initial Pokémon/Tamagotchi/Digimon craze, which meant it was hugely overshadowed.

It’s interesting that Koei Tecmo decided that now was the time to re-release the first two Monster Rancher games.