role-playing

I played both Monster Rancher Advance I & II. Certainly, it is neat to enter random sequences of letters and numbers to generate new monsters. The story is reasonable strong although slow paces. Unfortunately, I found the game tedious after a while. The challenge of training monsters wears thin after about the 1ooth time. It is particularly frustrating when your monster is forced into retirement just before completing a battle that would advance the story. Also, the time frame is somewhat unrealistic, I figure that my game lasted about 100 years or so (within the game). Each monster lasts roughly 4 years and it took me about 25-30 monsters to complete the game. Although monsters age your character and other characters in the game do not. I played this through to the climatic battle, and while that was cool I'm not sure it was enough pay-off. If you like doing the same thing hundreds of times, this game is for you. If you like a good story and can tolerate doing the same thing over and over, you might enjoy it too.

I've played Monster Rancher 3 (for Ps2), and I think this game is better because 1. Regenerating monsters is easier, 2. You can go exploring, 3. It's easier to earn sertain monsters (Dragon, Durahan, etc.),and 4. Monsters don't die, they can retire or turn into coaches, so you can train your other monsters more effectively.

On the other hand, on Monster Rancher 3 1. food is cheaper, 2. You can battle your rivals more often,and 3. you can train in different places.

They're both good games, but you don't need to use other games to regenerate monsters on MRA 2, and you can take it anywhere. That's good enough for me.

The agme starts out with good game play, but after a while you lose the needed story line.