Monster Rancher for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

I've played and loved many Monster Rancher games. Perhaps my tastes are changing, but this game just comes off as trying too hard, to me.

At first, you're really excited. You want to get right into the game and start battling. Well... you can't. First you have to sit through a bunch of BS text intro and then you can finally generate your first monster and go to your ranch. The intro is VERY slow in this game, and the storyline drags because you don't really care about it- it revolves around your assistant, and has very little to do with you... so why WOULD you care?

Training is slow because you can't skip the training animation, and also despite having the touch screen and being perfectly able to make every training activity a minigame which you could play and actually influence, it's pretty random if your monster succeeds, fails, cheats, or excels.

Your monster also has a variable of like and dislike for each type of training. This means that if they dislike defense training, they'll fail and cheat at it a lot more than any other type of training. My monster happened to dislike power and defense training, yet his INT based moves never connect despite having a high INT.

Speaking of moves not connecting, monsters dodge A LOT more. Even if your probability of hitting is over 70% they can still dodge and take no damage, similarly if the enemy monster has a probability of 30% your monster can sit there like a doofus and get pummeled. Battling is really unbalanced in that way. INT based moves like magic and such are always less likely to connect than a physical move as well, I've never had an INT move get above 40% probability and over two monsters lifespans I've had maybe 5 INT moves connect, granted I don't try them often. Also, if it's a draw, you always lose.

Lifespans are much shorter too. There will be no maxing out of your monsters stats in this game. Just over two and a half years was the lifespan of my first monster.
It tries, but it just... fails.

this game was a horrible train reck unless you cheated with an action replay then it was kinda cool