Monster Rancher 4 starts, “A long time ago, people and ‘monsters’ lived in harmony….” After reading that, you probably think it couldn’t get any stranger. Guess again. The latest entry in the franchise provides a fun approach to the creature-building concept and features plenty of new elements to spice it up. MR4 revolves around creating very weird beasties, which are grown and trained to fight in Pokémon-like battles against other creatures. In competition, offensive attacks are accessed from “panels” of three moves each—kind of like choosing from the playbook in a football game. The controls are very simple—forward and backward leaps, and attacks are triggered with one button push. In Story mode, after initial training and early tournaments, RPG-style road trips offer confrontations against other monsters, enabling you to acquire helpful items and build up fighting skills. Versus mode provides head-to-head and tag-team battles. After the first monster is trained, new ones can be generated by inserting a disc—a music CD or movie DVD. How Tecmo manages this magic is unclear, but it’s consistent because putting in the same disc twice brings up the same creature. Tecmo has also enabled access to rare creatures; try any Ape Escape game, for instance. While the story line is relayed in a disappointing series of 2D images and conversation captions (no animated cut-scenes or voice acting), and even the fights don’t push the PS2 to its graphical limit, the interactive gameplay is entertaining enough to make up for it. Hey, humans and monsters may never live in harmony again—but who cares as long as it’s enjoyable?
