Game Reviews

Though often compared to Pokemon, the Monster Rancher series is more of a sub-species of the popular franchise rather than a clone. Centered on your relationships with beasts, you'll work to become the best monster breeder in the world by training, battling and combining creatures with the help of your peppy assistant, Cleo. With a similar collect-them-all mentality to the pocket monsters, it's fitting that Monster Rancher also has the same gameplay problem -- repetition grinds away the fun.

Originally a PlayStation game, Monster Rancher utilized some interesting technology back in the day. Instead of collecting creatures in a game world on the screen, you inserted another CD or DVD into your console and it would unlock a new species of monster for you to play with. Now, Monster Rancher DS is morphing its formula to fit the Nintendo DS's strengths -- the touch screen and microphone. This time around, you can summon new species by drawing a picture on the screen or speaking an incantation into the mic. There's theoretically some science behind these methods, but you can rattle off gibberish, curse words, or even nothing at all while summoning with your voice, so that has to be randomly generated. The idea is neat, but since what you do doesn't always matter it loses its luster. Once you've received your new special friend, you'll want to help him be the best he can be. To do this, you'll need to send him to ranked tournaments, which will help him level up his class. Instead of battling until your monster drops like you do in Pokemon, every fight is limited to one minute. You can either control the battle or let your monster fend for itself -- there doesn't seem to be an advantage either way. Letting it fend for itself does mean you get to have a minute-long nap, though. If both monsters are still standing at the end of that time period, the one with the most health wins. This is a good thing, because the hit ratio of your moves can be very low, meaning that fights would go on for an uncomfortably long period of time. Of course, the more skilled your monster is, the more damage he'll do and the quicker you'll win. To raise your monster's stats and create a bona fide killer, you'll need to train him. Every in-game week you'll choose one of four activities for your creature to perform that will raise a specific statistic, i.e.