Monster Rancher 2 is an old game Farla and I played when we were kids. I decided to pick it up again to examine it with fresh eyes as part of my mons exploration. (I skipped the first game because sources tell me it was basically the same, except grindier.)

In theory, this game is everything I want out of Pokemon. In execution it’s very half-baked, and I got bored of it pretty quickly, but it has a lot of potential worth examining.

The first thing that’s important to understand is that Monster Rancher is a radically different game than Pokemon. It’s a pet sim with RPG elements, not an RPG. You raise only one monster at a time, and the majority of the gameplay is spent training it and attending to its needs. Occasionally you can enter it into fighting tournaments, but these are short interruptions in a monster’s life of training.

This is simultaneously the game’s biggest strength and greatest weakness. It correctly identifies that we want the monsters to be our pets and to spend as much time with them as possible, and in this respect it knocks it out of the park. I think one of the most significant differences between this franchise and Pokemon is that it started off with 3D models instead of sprites, as it uses them to their fullest potential. Every monster is gorgeously animated and has a truly staggering number of unique expressions and movements. Monsters will visibly act angry, sad, happy, hungry, and tired in response to your actions, as well as idle animations when they are just walking around the farm. Every species’ animations are totally unique and add a huge amount of charm and personality to each. Even monols, which are literally floating slabs of rock, are incredibly personable and expressive because they have to give you the same feedback as any other monster. Every single monster is adorable and beautiful and I love them so much. (Except you, pixies. You’re just funny humans, get outta here.)

The problem is that it can’t come up with much in the way of engaging gameplay. Most of your playtime is spent selecting the same options from a menu in the same order, over and over and over again. The fandom literally has this down to a science; there is a specific training and feeding sequence that has been judged the most optimal, and there’s no reason to do anything else. The tournaments can be engaging, but they make up such a small fraction of game time compared to all the training you have to do to prepare. (Digimon World had a similar problem, where every new digimon had to spend ages getting trained up to par before you could do anything with it.) Though the game hands you such charming and lovable creatures, you’re forced to reduce them to just a set of numbers and algorithms.

There is one wrench thrown into this, which is that monsters will sometimes disobey you. This was the most interesting part to me from a design standpoint; we’ve talked extensively about the implications of pokemons’ perfect obedience, and even Digimon World only lets your digimon disobey on trivial things. But monsters in Monster Rancher have immense personality. They will cheat or skip out on their training, ignore your orders in battle, and demand bribes in the form of food or play. You have to strike a careful balance between love and discipline, as the monster’s overall obedience is an average of both — too much discipline and the monster will become miserable, too much love and you’ll spoil the monster into thinking it can get away with anything. Every monster species also has a base personality stat that determines how mischievous they’ll be. (Unfortunately, this mostly just makes the good-natured monsters boring since they’ll do everything without complaint.) However, due to the game’s emphasis on training for the tournaments, this interesting mechanic mostly just feels like an annoying interruption. The optimal strategy is to always refuse your monster’s requests to play, even though there are multiple fun minigames tied to it.

Probably the most interesting element of the game, though, is how the human characters treat the monsters. Your ranching assistant (who does all the talking for you, since you’re a silent protagonist) is extremely kind and empathetic to your monsters; she will warn you when your monster is tired or stressed (and yes, physical fatigue and mental stress are different stats), chastise you when you’re being too harsh, interpret them when they ask for a bribe, feed them cake on their birthdays, and cry inconsolably when they die — at which point she will beg you to pay money to give them a proper funeral. I never at any point questioned whether people genuinely cared about monsters; the characters really do treat them like beloved pets and not just tools to win tournaments with.

Also interestingly, there are realistic consequences to tourney matches. If your monster loses a lot of HP in a match or gets KO’d, there is a chance they will wind up with an injury and have to spend several weeks in the hospital. (This costs no money, which is even more interesting — they apparently have free health care even for pets.) And if you stupidly pit your monster against a much stronger opponent and they get obliterated in one hit, there is a chance they will die outright, which is how I lost my first monster.

This, I think, adds a lot to the premise: By acknowledging these serious and realistic consequences instead of pretending they don’t exist, the narrative gets to portray them on its own terms instead of leaving everything to the minds of edgy fanfic writers. When the game says that injuries are rare accidents, I believe it, because it shows that through its mechanics. Similarly, it is backed up by the game mechanics that, despite this, monsters enjoy battling: One of their bribery demands is to fight in a tourney, and their stress goes down when they fight. They also never refuse to fight despite being capable of refusing other things, even if they fail and get injured a lot, which means you aren’t giving them PTSD from this. Obviously from a Doylist perspective this is because tourneys are a core feature, but it is totally fine to make Watsonian narrative align with Doylist priorities! In a video game it’s incredibly easy, even — you literally control the objective rules of reality. It’s incredibly easy to not make your mechanics a confusing mess that contradicts your stated narrative, Pokemon.

This is all despite monsters being non-sapient! Unlike pokemon, their behavior is believably consistent with that of a smart animal. Though they can carry out complex instructions, they don’t talk, they make lots of stupid decisions, and their behavior is overall very childlike. This makes it completely reasonable that they need a human owner instead of doing all of this themselves. Unlike in Pokemon, I never felt like I was exploiting or enslaving these creatures, and I felt genuinely remorseful when they got hurt because I screwed up.

So. This game and franchise oozes potential and effortlessly solves worldbuilding challenges that Pokemon still bungles decades later. It’s truly a tragedy that the gameplay wasn’t good enough to keep the series mainstream. There were two more entries into the series that I have never seen, but I plan to look into them to see how the series developed.