Awesome! :)
Don't forget to consider jumping into the Monster Rancher Discord if you want to hang out with other nerds that love this game. If you're interested in what the Online Tournament scene looks like, we keep a Calendar of Tournaments & Events as well. These are posted in the Discord Events, but if you're not keen on joining discord and would rather take a peek first you can find tourney hosts and times here.

DX being cross platform with Mobile and Switch, the Shrine CD Reading process is completely overhauled and doesn't work remotely in the same way it did for the Playstation. The built in CD Database/Song List totals 664,909 Title/Artists entries. This not only includes albums but individual songs as well as albums and games etc.

One might think this is limiting since the original could use "all the CDs in the world" but the game is only built to give you a limited number of monsters based on meta data read from the Discs. DX provides much more than the original game is capable of doing, even with an finite number of entries.

To compare:

1. MR2 1999 has 391 playable Breeds (Pures/Mixes/Rares) plus a handful of roughly 10 variants of a few those breeds totaling 401 playable monsters. Even with 10 billion different and unique CDs you'll never be able to acquire more than this.
2. MR2DX has has 415 total playable breeds due to the inclusion of Japanese rares + Boss monsters onto the original roster of Pures/Mixes/Rares, and a whopping 803 variants on top of the primary baselines, totaling 1218 playable monsters.

• What is a Variant? It's a monster that has Stat gain patterns not typical of the normal breed, or starts with an extra attack they don't normally start with, faster or slower guts regeneration, or otherwise has different core baseline than the standard of the breed.
• What about different Starting Stats? Random starting stats aren't the same as a variant, these are separate from the core baseline of a regular or variant breed. DX even has many monsters that have true starting stat randomization rather than the "Static" randomization that CDs provide.

A few other bonus mentions for DX: There's a FF (Fast Forward) toggle to speed up the game, it's got upscaled resolution and textures, but it is still the base game underneath (not a 100% remaster, more like a light-remaster). 10 bonus freezer slots. Items now stack in your inventory (though the total number of inventory slots is the same based on your House size), Items can be bought or sold in bulk now, and load times are eliminated when going back and forth from ranch to town or entering a tournament. There's also a handful of mods created by the MR community. It's not a perfect remaster but it's definitely my favorite version of the game now.

If you have any questions about DX, please feel free to ask :)
I don't know if it's worth it to have a whole separate post about it or not but for now I guess i'll keep it here.

Oh, if you have a Switch, there's actually a whole new Monster Rancher game barely a year old. Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher ... It's a franchise crossover where you raise Kaiju monsters from Ultraman. The mechanics are basically the best features of MR1 and MR2 with new stuff because Kaiju. it's familiar enough that you can jump right in, with enough new stuff to keep you on your toes

There is a newer version of the game Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX that's on Steam, Switch, and iOS... this has a built in CD / Song database so you can access all monsters without being limited to what's on hand. LegendCup.com is fully updated to include the DX changes in the game if you need current resources (Many of the old sites are gone, and many old guides have bits of out-dated info that's been debunked or data-mined since then) and includes the Song Lists for EN and JP versions if you want to jump straight into raising a monster you've never seen or raised before.

Also, the DX remaster has both the JP and EN rares available in the same game, in addition to enemy/boss monsters legally obtainable and are unique playable monsters too! Most of the online tournaments use the newer DX version which is cross-platform and cross-region. However, the Combo Breaker tournament will be played on an emulated PSX version of the game due to logistics. DX needs reliable internet connection to access people's uploaded monsters from around the world and heavily crowded conventions aren't known for their internet reliability. Even if you don't have the PSX version, MooseBones will be converting anyone's qualifying submitted monster from DX into a monster on a PSX game save to be used locally at the tournament.

I'm happy to see even 1 response to this haha.. It's such a niche game/genre I was kind of expecting this to just be an empty echo into the Ether.

Monster Rancher is alive and kicking!

• There's a remaster of the first 2 games (Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX) on Steam, Switch, iOS and release a couple years back.
• MR2 has a huge competitive scene, with lots of community run tournaments. it's even going to be at Combo Breaker, a fairly large annual event/competition for fighting games!
• There's a Spinoff/Crossover game "Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher" released just over a year ago, where instead of traditional monsters, you raise giant Kaiju from the Ultraman franchise. (Switch only)
• There's a Japanese only mobile gacha game LINE:Monster Farm that's hugely popular atm

for the remaster, the CD reading system is replaced with a built in searchable Song List. This is how you can play it on Mobile, Switch, Steam etc. The Song List doesn't exactly equate to original CDs (the function is mechanically different) but there are a handful of entries that equate to their originals (this accounts for about 0.01% of entries within the 664,909 that create their original monsters.

The good news is, Everyone now has access to the entire game and can raise any monster they want to (once they're unlocked, of course), and the Song List is 100% solved and published. You can Random Button if you like the surprise, but if you want something specific, you can just view the published Song List, Pick your Monster Main/Sub, then pick the Title/Artist suggestion for the variant you want. :)

I can agree for sure. I do like the game and at it's core, it's still a fun game as it's an interesting mish-mash of MR1 and MR2 mechanics. But I can say that after multiple 100% playthroughs, it's always a reminder that this could have been a legit true mainline sequel rather than a spin-off.

There's a TON of nods to Monster Rancher. The obvious ones are the Kaiju rare subs that are Monster Rancher breeds, but there's also a lot of dialogue or the occasional random mail that has some references for fans of the series. There's even a Pure-breed Plant sitting in grandma Teresa's shop that I only noticed for the first time after someone pointed it out haha.

I did put some effort into learning a bit more about Ultraman than I knew before, which made it slightly more enjoyable, and also fun for naming them, because I'm a sucker for Punny names.

Like this one.... Kaiju is a Melba.
I named him... Idris Melba. (First he fought Kaiju, now he IS a Kaiju! lol)

Hey now... Monster Rancher is Legit and predates Monsters, Inc. by 4 years :)

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.

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 :)

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 :)

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).

• Keyword Solver for manual entry of any keywords you want, to see what it will produce
• Curated list of Keywords: Pick a Kaiju main, then Kaiju sub. Below the choice will be a scrollable table of all the Script-found Kaiju and fan-submitted Kaiju

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