Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a Switch game on sale on the eStore for half-off! It is a Spin-off / collaboration of the mainline franchise Monster Rancher and Ultraman franchised Kaiju instead of traditional "Monster Rancher" breeds.
What is Monster Rancher? MR is a fantasy Pet Raising and breeding simulator that has:
- Creature raising that can vary based on your personal choices of ... everything.. Feeding, drills, battles, what breed, or mixed breed you've done etc.
- Creature breeding via Fusion (Parents are consumed in the process, but babies created from it can inherit stats and attacks from parents)
- Tournament style progression
- Unlockable roster of monsters through story and side-quests
- Real time combat mechanics which your success is based not only by how you've raised your monster, what attacks you've taught it, but how you directly control your monster and execute attacks. (Monster Rancher itself is also technically a spin-off of a Horse racing/breeding simulation "Gallop Racer" by the same developers (Tecmo / KoeiTecmo).
Ultra Kaiju monster rancher plays very similar to an amalgamation of MR1 & MR2 with some new stuff thrown in because... well.. Big Ol' Kaiju!
If you're curious about the roster of Kaiju, you can view all of the Field Guide Kaiju which includes the ones available from the start and all of the locked, DLC, and hidden Kaiju as well.
If big Kaiju aren't your thing, there's always the remasters of the Originals... "Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX" which is on Steam, Switch, and iOS. MR2 specifically is the franchise's most popular game in the series and PVP tournaments are still frequently run. If you have any questions about either, just ask :)
This is the most interesting part of it.
"A New Regeneration Method!
NFC compatible devices such as transportation IC cards and more can be used to generate Kaiju. The NFC device will generate a unique Kaiju based on various properties. Experiment with NFC devices to find out what kind of Kaiju will be generated!"
Monster generators have spam ed from audio CDs to barcodes and now to wireless signals. Interesting to think of a bunch of kids asking to scan Mom's bus pass or throw their old amiibo on to see if they can get something different.
Most people don't actually use the NFC, It's just not as highly accessible in North America as it is in other places (Also, very specifically, Amiibos will not work, and this is an in-game notification as well. No idea if this was a licensing thing or what). It's an interesting gimmick to replace how Swapping out CDs worked for the original Playstation game, but most people use the Keyword generation in the North American version.
Thankfully, we solved how keywords worked. After scripting out auto-solving more than 2 million keywords, and filtering out duplicates, we have published options for every baseline, and every variant (stuff that has different stat gains, starting stats, starting techs, or faster guts regeneration from the baselines).
NTAG scanning and Bus Passes are solved too.
The bus passes are fun/interesting because the remaining balance of Yen on them is what determines what it makes. Many of the numbers are references to Ultraman or Monster Rancher lore. If you're curious about that, check out: https://legendcup.com/faq-ukmrnfc.php
I still prefer to think of it as magic. I hope they keep that appeal of 'i dno wtf gonna happen when I pop this in' from the original game in future games.
The remaster of MR1&2DX (Steam/Switch/iOS) does have a random button in addition to a searchable internal database of Albums, Song titles, and games.
For whatever reason, the Random button in Ultra Kaiju is absent from the North American version, so you just either have to enter in some random letters/words in the Keywords field, or use NFC. The Japanese and Southeast Asia versions of Ultra Kaiju have a CDDB and Random button, though the "CDDB" is a bit misleading because it actually uses the keywords lookup to generate the Kaiju from the CDDB entries. In this regard, at least, the North American version is superior since the Keywords aren't locked to a pre-defined list.
Why did JP and SEA get a Song List and NA got Keywords for UKMR? Maybe copyright or licensing, though it's honestly anyone's guess.
But it still would have been nice for them to keep the Random button :)
You know a lot about this
haha, yeah.
I started the Fan Site back in 1999, and even got Tecmo's blessing in writing, and I've also got IMDB/game credits in two of the games in the franchise from before the KoeiTecmo merger . It's been a hobby/obsession for over 2 decades that all started... mostly because My wife had beat the 1st game before me in '97, just waiting for me to get home from work to show me.
The Monster Rancher community is much smaller and overshadowed by other communities by comparison. MR's genre is pretty niche and hard to spread the word because of it, so I try :)
You try editing the Wikipedia page too?
If you're referring to the Fandom wiki, that's an interesting topic of much debate, and I have nothing to do with it. It's got 1 or 2 main editors, but the real contention is the wiki attempts to link everything between every game plus the anime as a single cohesive piece of information, which ends up causing a lot of made up fan fiction just to connect the dots. The source material has been argued to be legitimate, but when pressed for the source, the wiki authors admitted that the data was from a Japanese cooking blog... which is never named, and no longer exists and cannot be found on any internet archive to cross reference
Additionally, the fandom wiki contains many completely made up monster lores and flavor texts from the Japanese translations that don't correlate. I did make an attempt to explain to the editors, using 1 particular monster as an example comparing the English text to the Japanese text. I provided the real translation and the likely meaning behind the name and lore description based on the direct translation of the name itself and the flavor text. This singular entry was changed, but none of the other hundreds (maybe thousands) of entries have been touched. Much of the guide information on the Fandom wiki is also out of date, or based on pre-data mining posts from the 90s/00s and not updated to the current findings that engineers and code hackers have discovered and published. If there's one thing the Fandom wiki has going for it, is that it has an impressive number of images across the many genres and platforms Monster Rancher has appeared on. I just wouldn't recommend trusting it for actual game information.
LegendCup isn't trying to connect everything to everything just for the sake of it, and doesn't acknowledge the Anime as a source of cannon for the games. Sort of like if you were to purchase a game guide about something, Each game's FAQs and guides are researched and dissected in isolation mechanically, and doesn't attempt to be a guide to the lore and history of monster rancher outside of providing references of actual in-game flavor texts of monsters within their respective games, along with data mined mechanics and information within each game.