Monster Rancher/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Anime series in general has always being a big Headscratcher for me. Don't get me wrong, it's a great anime, but it seems to waste all the potential of a serious Slice of Life Mon anime Monster Rancher games originally had. Just think about for a second or two. We are talking about an anime that could have plenty (and justified) tournaments, existential dilemmas, speculation about the Power of Friendship, Wangst and drama about Monsters death and Monster abuse, peer pressure, fame pressure, world traveling and exploration and even more things! Then why did they decide that the right way to go was doing a Meta-series, where one guy has to save the digital-world?
    • YMMV. I think if they'd made it like the games it would've been different, sure, but it'd lose some of what made it unique. There WAS angst, existential dilemmas, and drama about Monster abuse and death; the second season even ended with the heroic characters sacrificing themselves. And when they did adapt the tournaments in the third season, making it more like the games, the results were mixed.
  • Why do the trials in the Drill mode of DS don't seem to be connected at all with the attributes they are supposed to be raising? In the forest, the monster gets stronger by... jumping on branches(swimming does make sense, though)? In the beach, your monsters raise Int by... smashing watermelons with its head? In the woods, Ski is raised by... swimming and jumping? In the ruins, Def is raised by... pushing walls, opening chests and across gaps? Only the alps make sense, since I guess jumping out of the way of giant snowballs and running upslope would raise the Spd. But why didn't they create some more fitting trials for everything else?
  • What kind of demonic fiend programmed the monster AI for the Errantry in DS? I clicked in a spot, it went to a completely different direction half the times. I clicked 50 times IN THE SAME SPOT, it ignored me. The monste is almost dying out of exhaustion, so you'd expect it'd go almost automatically back home right? Well, tell that to my Pancho. I spent at least 10 minutes trying to get it back home from the Woods with its health literally depleted and it kept on wandering back and forth from the way out. This makes no sense, how much you must not care to do such a shoddy work of AI?!
  • Why does Genki call the game "Monster Battle"? It's an anime of the game and they can't even use the name?
    • Possible it was the name of the tournament, or the name of the game he was dreaming about.
    • The anime had a lot of Bland Product Name's. The PlayStation clone called "U", the game disc Genki had was called "Monster 200X", "Mecto" instead of "Temco".. If this anime was advertising a game series why couldn't they use the actual names?