Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Nintendo is famous for their Pokemon series, involving little creatures that are spit out of special balls to fight against other creatures summoned the same way.  Other series have had their own series with their own twist, like the Digimon series, but they never have caught on the same way Pokemon has.  Tecmo’s Monster Rancher is another one of those series.

The Monster Rancher series started out on the original PlayStation in 1997.  Since then it has found life on the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and the PlayStation 2.  It also spawned a short-lived anime series in the US.  While the game is more popular in Japan, the Monster Rancher series does have a cult following here.

Monster Rancher differentiates itself in the fact that you can create monsters using a DVD, CD, or game disc to create a monster.  Once you have a monster, you train the monster to increase its stats.  Monsters need food and eventually grow old.  Then you take them into battle to fight against other monsters that have been trained by other trainers in the game.  Sounds like a familiar formula, doesn’t it?  Can it stand up to the prodigy of Pokemon, or does it fall flat?

Most of the graphics in Monster Rancher Evo are bright.  Your main headquarters is a circus tent, complete with the crazy characters that you’d expect to find at the circus.  The background patterns are consistent with a big top.  However, there is little detail to the textures.  While you can see wrinkles in the tent and some shading in the wood, there isn’t a great deal of color change within the textures.

Inside your training room there are three Orocho Eggs where you can hone your skills on the circus show mini-games.  These eggs look terrible, with many different visible points on them.  While you don’t expect a huge powerhouse from the PS2, it doesn’t look much better than an original PlayStation game.

Moving outside in the game makes the game look even worse.  Fields look like random shades of green with few details in the road.  Trees and pillars look rough and the backgrounds look very rough, with blocky graphics and blurry textures, It’s almost as if you could count the number of polygons used to create them.  The aliasing in the game doesn’t help either.

The graphics do feature nice animations for the characters.  The movements of the monsters during the circus tricks are smooth.  Your character’s movements flow as you move from one location to another.  While there is a bit of a stutter when starting movement from a standstill, anyone who has played an RPG should be familiar with this.

Generic is the first word that comes to mind when talking about the music for Monster Rancher Evo.  Most of the music is based off of circus music, so if you can’t stand that type of music, Monster Rancher Evo will drive you absolutely mad.  It doesn’t help that during the performances your character is supposedly playing an accordion.  It gets old and repetitive very quickly.  There are some times when there is different music being played, but it is very generic.

The sound effects fare a bit better, but they aren’t anything special.  You’ll hear the familiar whacks and hits from battle and tones from making menu selections.  Most of the game is pretty silent though.  You don’t even have any voice acting.  While bad voice acting can bring down a game, it’s really disappointing to not have any voices to associate with the characters.

The game has a few modes of play, and each controls slightly differently.  While walking around through town you move around using the D-pad or left analog stick, move the camera with the right analog stick, perform actions with X, and go to the Main Menu with the Square.  Performing the mini-games during the circus acts or practicing, you use the face buttons and the left analog stick depending on which mini-game you are playing.  While going through an adventure, you move with the left analog stick, change the camera with the right analog stick, switch which monster you control with the L1 button, take direct control of the monster with Triangle, look at the map with Circle, go to the Main Menu with Square, and examine items or attack monsters to go into battle mode with X.  In battle you move the monsters to gain position and move the cursor to select skills with the D-pad or left analog stick, select the monster you control with the L1 and R1 buttons, cancel out of the menu with Triangle, use a skill with X, shove away from a linked monster by hitting Square repeatedly, and try to escape from the fight with the Select button.

The modes play entirely differently from one another.  During the circus act mini-games, the analog control of the cursor is loose, and hitting the face buttons didn’t seem to be as precise as it should have been, especially when games like this require precise timing.  Also, because you have different modes of gameplay that are very similar to each other it is easy to get confused as to which button does what.  While some of the buttons are what you’d expect and similar throughout the different modes, it’s difficult to figure out which button does what.  While Tecmo should be commended for trying to integrate so many modes on the controller, the confusion that it occasionally causes makes you wish that the game was a bit more streamlined.

There are several elements to the gameplay in Evo.  What you do is determined in a schedule that you look at every turn.  Every turn represents a week in the game.  In this schedule you have slots where you assign Training, Showtime, and Adventure tasks.

The Training times are used for training your monsters.  You can also indicate to the others in your circus group how to train the monsters.  You do this by getting the monsters to do tricks.  This builds up the confidence of the trainers and helps motivate them to train the monsters more.  During this time you can also go into town and buy different items for the monsters to perform tricks with, as well as buy different food to feed the monsters.  You can also pick up assignments that will result in adventures while in town, as well as fight against other monsters in the arena.

You can create monsters during your training time.  Creating monsters in the previous games involved finding a shrine.  In Evo, all you have to do is go to the character Mayuta.  You are then prompted for a new disc.  This is a lot like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, because you never know what you are going to get once you pop in a CD or DVD.  You can use just about any disc, including Xbox 360 games.  All of these monsters start out at a low level.  You can also combine monsters to create a different monster. 
 
The Showtime is set up as the time when you increase the stats of your monster.  This is done by doing tricks for a show.  Different equipment for the monsters will change the tricks done during the circus performance.  The more advanced the tricks, the more your monster can be leveled up.  This is the only time when you are actually able to increase the vital stats of your monster.  Also, they need rest between each performance.  They can only perform about once every five weeks, making raising your monster a long drawn-out process.  During the circus performance you play the mini-games that you can practice during the training times.  The better you perform in these mini-games, the more the monster’s stats go up.  You have a time limit, so if you don’t get a score of 100 for the monster, you can go back and try to increase your score.  The mini-games do get progressively harder, but they aren’t much fun.

Finally you have the adventures.  During these adventures you take three monsters along with you and travel a map, fighting monsters and opening chests along the way.  Eventually this leads up to a boss battle at the end.  During these battles you send all three monsters in to fight at the same time instead of the previous one-on-one battles.  You can move each monster towards and away from the enemy monsters, but you can’t move them sideways.  Once a monster is close to another monster, the two monsters are considered links.  If allied monsters are linked they can perform special combo moves together.  If two enemy monsters are linked, they must fight each other.  However, you can shove your monster away by repeatedly hitting the Square button.

The biggest issue with the fighting is the difficulty.  Because you can only level up your monsters sparingly, the difficulty of the game is rather high.  Trying to match up against some of the easier monsters is no easy task, and the boss battles can be absolutely brutal.  It doesn’t help that the process of leveling up your monsters is rather tedious and boring.  Monsters also retire or can be injured.  If a high level monster gets injured, you might have to start all over again.

If you can play the game in short spurts, you might find the game entertaining.  Ultimately the game feels more like a chore than something fun.  The frustration factor can be very high for the game, so if you are impatient you would best look elsewhere.

A game like this should have a large amount of replay value because the number of monsters you can create is only limited to the number of CD, DVD, and game discs in your collection.  While some monsters will be from the same race, they all have a unique look to them.  Since the raising of monsters takes a long time, you really don’t get a chance to experiment a lot to see which monsters you get from different discs.

You will put a lot of hours into the game, but with the boring monster raising and hair-pulling difficulty, you’ll wonder if your time would have been better spent with an actual pet.

Tecmo should be commended for trying to move the Monster Rancher series forward.  The circus setting is definitely a unique setting that hasn’t been seen in many games.  They also tried to incorporate a lot of different game styles into Monster Rancher Evo.  Unfortunately, the flaws of the game stand out so greatly that the game becomes frustrating.  If you are a fan of the Monster Rancher series, you might have an issue with Evo because of the number of changes made to the series.  Unless you have the patience of a monk, you’ll be better off getting one of the previous games in the series and playing that.

Gaming Trend Score

59

1. Graphics: 62
2. Audio: 52
3. Controls: 70
4. Gameplay: 52
5. Value/Replay: 65
6. OVERALL:59