MonsterFenrick

joined 1 year ago
[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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
[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 3 points 8 months ago

Monster Rancher
I'll toss in another vote for Monster Rancher ;) A Pet Raising and Breeding simulator that got it's roots from an earlier 1996 game "Gallop Racer" which was a Horse racing and breeding sim. Monster Rancher replaces Horses with Fantasy monsters, and swaps out Races for Real Time battles.

While the Raising aspect is highly menu driven as you make constant adjustments to your strategies for raising stats, learning new attacks, or doing "side-quests" in the game to unlock even more monsters, the Battle is in real time where you control your monster moving between near and far ranges to use attacks that are unique to those ranges. The attacks themselves also have 2 primary types (Power or Intellect) and 5 sub-types (Heavy, Crit, Wither, Hit, and Special). Using attacks has an associated resource cost (Guts) and your monster's guts regeneration differs based on it's breed (or mixed breed).

Loads of variety of strong looking, silly, or fun monsters to pick and choose from.

  • in 2021 the original first two games games were re-released as remasters on Switch, Steam, and iOS as Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX. with upscaled graphics, some overhaul in the UI, and a lot of QoL features added in, but for the most part still looks and feels like the PSX game, just a lot smoother and zero load times.
  • in 2022 a new game exclusive to Switch released asa crossover with Ultraman where you raise Kaiju from that franchise but with Monster Rancher rules.
 

The North American "Keywords" system, and Japan & Southeast Asia "Song List" for Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher has been solved.

What is Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher?

  • A pet raising simulation
  • Breeding simulation
  • Monster taming
  • Fantasy
  • Menu-based raising
  • Real-time Combat
  • Roguelike
  • Single player
  • Competitive

In the Playstation version of Monster Rancher, you could acquire new monsters by placing Music CDs or other games into your PSX when the game prompted you to do so.

Switch doesn't have an optical drive, obviously, so One of the primary ways to acquire a Monster/Kaiju in UKMR is to use a search for Music/Titles/Artists (in Japanese and Southeast Asia versions) or using Keywords (in North American version).

Depending on the chosen songs or keywords used, you can create a monster born with certain stats or attacks or other adjustments to their parameters.

Now that all versions of the game are solved, you can look up what you want to raise, and use the suggestions in-game to get the exact Kaiju you want! (You still have to play through much of the story to unlock some of the restricted Kaiju, however)

For those interested, the solved lists are posted here:

Hundreds of hours and multiple people's efforts have been put forth to solve these lists, so we hope you enjoy!
:)

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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 :)

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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 :)

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

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

 

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 :)

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I realize this is a bit late, but... I did end up making a tutorial video, showcasing how to use the app and extra features, and "Disc Swap" mechanic with Emulation of Monster Rancher 2, with no optical drive.

https://youtu.be/bhI02o8UAsw

 

Attempting to Cross-Post from Monster Rancher

Monster Rancher debuted in 1997, it's a fantasy Pet (monster) raising and breeding game which had a unique mechanic that, during gameplay, when prompted you could insert a Music CD, or another Playstation game, and it would generate a monster based on some meta data from the disc that was read.

In 2001 we learned how to extract that meta data from CDs and some games (a text file containing track information, referred to as ToC or Subcode data) and share them without having to share copied CDs or Games. You could create a CD and inject the ToC data during the burn process to make any CD have the same meta data as what the ToC files contained. There were limits to this, as it would be an identical Monster produced ("randomized" stat offsets are determined by this data and so would be identical to the original).

As original hardware becomes hard to acquire, many have turned to emulation, though, even most PCs today no longer even come with optical drives to be able to use this mechanic.

5 years ago, We (superfans/nerds of Monster Rancher) completely reverse engineered the CD Read Process and were able to create a web app that could generate the meta data on demand, including all possible randomized offsets that would normally be produced by CDs and games in the wild.

We named this app "Make-A-Monster", and the data/files can be used with original hardware, or in emulation. We included the ability to create any Monster, On-Demand, but also allow the use of randomized creation, and also blind creation so you just don't know what you'll get at all and be completely surprised.

There is a remaster of Monster Rancher 1&2DX on Steam, Switch, and iOS that came out late 2021 and has quality of Life improvements and such. It also has several old bugs re-introduced, since the game is based on the original Japanese Monster Farm which were fixed in their NTSC and PAL localization, but overall is a very positive experience as well, and introduces new monster variants that never existed in the original.

I hope there's some Ranchers out there that will enjoy this, if you're still playing the original games, and also hope there's folks out there supporting the Remasters as well :)

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Links to MR2 tutorial (mostly the same with a couple extra things) and links to the app
https://kbin.social/m/MonsterRancher/t/496208

 

I apologize if this isn't cross-posted correctly. New to KBIN and difficult to find how to do this.

This is for use in Emulation of Monster Rancher (1), a Playstation (1) game which is a fantasy pet raising and breeding simulator (often accused of being a Pokemon Clone, though it's not really a Pokemon style game). Additionally, this app can actually be used to burn CDs for use on the console as well, but the files themselves can be used directly in several emulators, even if you have no optical drive at all.

The original game used a mechanic that involved (when prompted during game-play) to take out the game disc and insert a music CD or other PSX game to generate a monster. The game would read some meta data on a disc to determine the Breed, if it had a mixed sub-breed, and what seemed like randomized stat offsets. This is difficult with emulation, especially in the days of no optical drives.

The Monster Rancher 2 "Make-A-Monster" app is more robust, and i'm working on a tutorial for this too, which supports Offset variations of the 33 Breeds (many of which can be crossbred) and 19 uniques, totalling over 609k total possible outcomes (and equating to every possible entry within the game that a CD could make.

The files generated consist of a table of contents file with track data (what the game reads to make a determination) and a data file with empty data that equates to the size of the disc expected. (There's no copyright data generated by this, no copies of CDs or Games, just the necessary track information and blank data file of the expected size to trick the game into THINKING it's a given disc).

If there's any ranchers out there, I hope you enjoy :)
(ALSO, there's a remaster, MR1&2DX, on Switch, Steam, iOS with a revamped Shrine mechanic that we've also cracked)

 

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is only on the Nintendo Switch.

Learn how to use the Fusion Calculator app on LegendCup, for creating powerfully strong baby Kaiju . With just a few button clicks You can make perfect fusions, and get fusion suggestions, all without needing to know how the fusion mechanics actually work.

If you play Monster Rancher 1&2DX Also on the Nintendo Switch, there's other apps for these games as well to help master raising your virual pet monsters :)

If you're unfamiliar with the series, it is less of a monster taming/catching game -- and more of a fantasy pet breeding and raising sim. Your monsters have a finite lifespan and you must raise them as best you can with your available budget which you can increase by fighting and winning tournaments. There are also often many locked/hidden monsters that must use story progression to access.

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Small, but huge correction. I forgot to include (omit) replacements in my napkin math above. There are 60 indices and two index fields that are summed to the offset result. so index 0 & 5 produce the same result as index 5 & 0 etc.

  • Offsets can be a combination of 60 indices. Each breed with offsets is a choice of 2 indices from a set of 60 with replacement (1 & 5, and 5 & 1 are the same result), so (60-1+2)!/((60-1)!x2!) = 61x60/2 = 1,830
  • 1,830 x 333 (breeds that offsets can be applied to) = 609,390 spawns total
  • There are 60 ??? spawns in NTSC and 19 special spawns that aren't ???
  • There are 70 ??? spawns on PAL and 19 special spawns that aren't ???
  • There are 6 different monsters in the market and those spawn with base stats
  • 609,390 + 60 + 19 + 6 = 609,475 total monster spawns on NTSC
  • 609,390 + 70 + 19 + 6 = 609,485 total monster spawns on PAL

In MR2DX, the Indices work almost the same, except each index value has a range that it is randomly rolled, so if 2 same indices are together they can still be different. I'm not even sure how to math the possible value range for those but since the original game are static indices, it's much easier.

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

The newest game "Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher" on the Nintendo Switch (A cross over between Ultraman and the Monster Rancher franchise) has a feature for reading NFC (basically anything except amiibos -- probably a licensing thing).

I'm not sure how one would read NFCs using a Switch emulator, but that's kind of a next evolution of it I suppose.
There's also a Keyword system (type in any word in 2 input fields) to generate the monsters as well. The Keyword system has been fully cracked, and some mechanics of NFC has been cracked (for NTAG215 anyway).

[–] MonsterFenrick@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Well, the 1999 NTSC version of MR2 has 391 playable breeds (factoring in all mixed, pures and rares).

  • There's a very small handful of additional non-rare breeds that are hard coded, I can't recall off the top of my head but roughly 10.
  • There's 58 Rare breeds (Special skins) that have no offset adjustments
  • There's 333 monsters that can have born-with stat offsets and there's 60 offset ranges x 2 offset parameters to determine final born-with offset stats.

I think this means there's roughly 1,198,868 total variations of the 333 breeds that can have offsets plus the ~68 rares/special spawns that don't have offsets.
This may not be exact, but it's a close ballpark.

There's several other apps on LegendCup that are amazing for playing the original or the new DX version if you are into Monster Rancher, but those aren't really emulation specific, and didn't want to risk being off-topic discussing them.
However, the Make-A-Monster app is for the 1999 NTSC and PAL versions for original console or through Emulation, so I thought i'd risk posting about it :)

Glad even 1 person knows what Monster Rancher is tbh!

 

I thought I would share an app for use with a fairly niche game in the Monster Taming/Sim/Raising genre, Monster Rancher on the Playstation (1). I don't expect many to know what this game is, but there might be a few that remember it. It frequently is called Pokemon ripoff or clone, but it's really a pet (monster) raising sim where you raise a monster up from a baby through it's life all the way through it's death. You can also cross-breed monsters (fuse them; parents are consumed in the process) to create new breeds or new babies with significant advantages over 1st gen monsters.

Monster Rancher had an interesting gimmick in that, while playing the game you could visit the Shrine, where part of the lore allows found "Disc Stones" (CDs) to be used at the shrine to create monsters. The game would prompt you to pop open the lid and put in any Music CD or other PSX game, it would read the meta data of the disc, then prompt you to re-insert Monster Rancher back into the PSX, at which point your new baby monster would be born.

In 2001 we discovered what data was being read and how to extract it from a disc so that the meta data could be shared without passing around copies of games and CDs themselves, then you could burn a blank disc with the meta data and use this to get special monsters that might be hard to get (or without having to buy hundreds of CDs/Games just to get a monster.).

In 2019 we fully reverse engineered the CD Read Process and how the game interprets the track data to create the monsters which allowed us to create an app to generate any monster on-demand and on the fly via the Make-a-Monster app. This process not only allows you to pick any monster on demand, but also any of the "random" stat offsets monsters can be born with.

With the Make-A-Monster files you can still burn physical media to play on console, or generate just the files for download to use directly in emulation where no optical drive is present and the app supports Duckstation, ePSXe (2.0.5), PSX, PCSX-R, CloneCD, ImgBurn

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX was released which is a remaster released in 2021 and includes a baked in CD Database to search and look for albums and songs, but for anyone still playing the original version of the game on Emulation, there's options for the CD Swapping gimmick for MR1 and MR2. One of the Monster Rancher community members has a ticket open with PCSX2 to try and get more emulator support for the Playstation2 versions of the later games but at the moment that's a bust.

Anyway, hopefully there's some ranchers here that will appreciate the research over the years that have lead to creating this :)

 

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is a Remaster of a Playstation monster raising simulator with the ability to Fuse parents to make new babies with inherited attacks, traits, or stats of the parents. (cross breeding but the parents are consumed in the process). Like a fantasy version of Tecmo's horse racing simulator (Gallop Racer), Monster Rancher will have you budgeting your Money and your creature's lifespan to provide a balanced feeding and drill schedule to raise it's stats, learn new attacks, and fight your way to Master rank. Along the way you'll have story opportunities to discover hidden/locked monsters and raise them as well.

The original gimmick in 1999 was being able to visit the "Shrine" in game, and be prompted to replace the game disc with Music CDs or another game. When prompted again you would reinsert your game and a monster would be generated. The downside of this was it ended up leaving a lot of people excluding from a large portion of the game's available monsters to raise.

DX replaces this gimmick with a built in Song List to generate every monster, giving all players complete access to the game's entire library of monsters, along with many new variants (same given breed but with different attributes) not present or possible in the original game.

There's a Discord community for this niche game, along with the last remaining English fan-run resource/guide site LegendCup.com entirely dedicated to Monster Rancher since the 90s.

Members of the Monster Rancher community use the game's save upload system to run AI v AI tournaments across many different formats and stat caps to include players of all skill levels. The game is cross-region, and cross-platform compatible for these types of tournaments so DX allows you to play on your platform of choice.

Hope to see you on the Ranch!

 

Do you like pet raising sims like Monster Rancher?
Do you like Ultraman Kaiju from the 1960s?
Do you like competitive battles with a fun community?

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher released October of 2022 and has a place in the Monster Rancher community Discord and monthly tournaments run by volunteer hosts, and loads of UKMR Guides and tools to help get you caught up!

Ultra Kaiju MR is normally $50 with the sale price bringing it down to $34.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, "Monster Rancher is a pet (monster) raising sim that began in 1997. It differs from other Pet taming games in that it plays very much like a sim with the nuances or a creature having multiple life stages from Baby to Prime to elderly. Your budget is your Monster's lifespan + your money to try and accomplish the most you can during your short time with the monster. Monster's can also be bred (fused) so that babies can inherit attacks and attributes of it's parent(s). Battles are also in Real Time instead of turn based. Your resource continuously builds up over time in the match (how fast varies based on breed or mixed breed), your attacks consume an amount of this resource to execute, and attacks have designated distances in which they can be used as you maneuver close/far from your opponent to position for a given attack.

Competitive battles are held AI v AI since the only way to hold manual battles is to be in the same room on the same console. The meta is to engineer your monster's attributes, attacks, personality and traits so that it performs the best it can while hopefully eliminating as much bad choice that the AI can make as possible.

Monster Rancher is a fairly niche game with a rather small community when compared to other franchises. Monster Rancher 2 DX (On Switch, Steam, iOS) is easily the most popular game in the franchise and the most played. However, we just want more people to play with, and UKMR is a niche within a niche. The competitive scene is very welcoming, no one is holding back information to gain an advantage, we want other players to perform well for exciting matches, so you can expect lots of help from the community even as a new player or new competitor.

Hope to see you on the Ranch!

 

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a cross over between Monster/Pet raising sim "Monster Rancher" and Kaiju from the Ultraman series, mostly from the 60s version of the show.

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher was released November 2022 on Nintendo Switch in Japan (JP), Southeast Asia (EN), and North/South America (EN). The two English versions can play competitive with one another but the EN and JP versions are not compatible.

In the Monster Rancher Discord there is a dedicated channel for each Monster Rancher game and tournaments are held frequently, discussed in the Tournament channel, and tournament Hosts will schedule dates on the Discord calendar.

See LegendCup's Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher guides for raising tips, maps, unlock help, and other tools, but the Discord is very friendly for new and inexperienced players and will help you get up to speed and answer your questions if you stop in.

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