Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Monster Rancher 3

Written by Brandon Shaw on November 16, 2001

Full Review: Gotta catch them a... I mean, gotta be..the...best....trainer ever!

I was very skeptical when I first saw Monster Rancher 3, figuring that it would be another rip off of other popular monster raising games until I saw someone else play it for a while. I couldn't have been more wrong. Monster Rancher 3 is a very interactive game, as well as being time consuming and difficult. I find hard to wait my turn to play.

The monster creation portion of this game is one of Monster Rancher's best features. You can make a plethora of different monsters by inserting random cd's or dvd's into your PS2. Some of the monsters turn out to be cutesy looking puff balls inside a pumpkin, but others are large dragons, lizards, golems and on and on. The goal of Monster Rancher 3 is to raise your monster into a champion that is known across the land. Sure, your monster will eventually get old and die, but how soon that happens is all determined on how you treat and use your monster. If you get angry at your monster and don't feed it, continuously get the tar beaten out of it in combat, and yell at it too much, it wont last long.

One of the most entertaining, and at the same time frustrating, things about your monster is its attitude. If your monster becomes unhappy, it will not listen to your orders during a fight, choosing instead to ignore you and let the other monster pound on it. After fights and really good training exercises, you have the opportunity to help shape their attitude by providing "verbal" feedback to your critter. You can talk to your monster and either chastise it or praise it for doing well in several different degrees. This response helps to either strengthen or destroy the bond that you and your monster share.

When raising your monster you have control over which of your monster's attributes you wish to increase, albeit indirectly. There are multiple training grounds that you can go to for different kinds of activities, each of which will affect your monster's attributes differently. Succeed in your training and voila, your monster's statistics increase. Fail and you have to try and rally your monster's morale back up. You can view a calendar to see when tournaments are going to be, and how much time you have to train and rest before them.

The battles are at the same time both simple and complicated. You have three different ranges of attacks against your opponent, each range allowing you to use only a couple of your learned skills. You have to find the lord of the land to teach you new attacks, which you can then train with and raise levels in. While this doesn't sound too bad, keeping your monster alive long enough to reach the highest level is very difficult. The controls for the battles are fairly straightforward as each of your attacks are assigned to one of the four buttons on your controller. The only other thing you have control of during combat is how far from your opponent you wish to be. Everything else is up to the monster.

Being a PS2 sequel to a PS one franchise it is almost expected that the game is going to just be a prettier version of the last one title in the series. This, in and of itself, is true. The graphics are now in 3D and are as bold and vibrant as they come. No real new ground has been broken but it looks good just the same. That seems to be the overall feeling of the game, no new ground broken, but a good time just the same. Perhaps being able to have two active monsters at once and being able to breed them together would help to give this genre a little extra kick.