MonsterFenrick

That game where you popped your Music CDs into your PSX, generate a monster, then raise it and battle it? Yes, that game! Combo Breaker is one of the largest Fighting Game tournaments in the world, and MR2 will be there in under All In Together.

At Combo Breaker, this will be an In-Person Live event and you'll have complete control over your own monster

Historically Monster Rancher is a game that relied on the community to run tournaments with community vetted rules and entrants. I pioneered this in 1999 with the use of a DexDrive and emailing save files or even physical memory cards to host and broadcast tournaments (over dialup this was painful compared to today's available resources lol). "Recently", KoeiTecmo ran 1 official world-wide tournament when Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX (Deluxe remaster) was released and held in 2022, but KT hasn't held one since. Japan does have some in-person tournaments as well, but this is the first time a live and in-person event has will be held in the West!

MR Community member and content creator Nash (MooseBones) will be hosting this event at ComboBreaker. If you plan to attend ComboBreaker, and you like Monster Rancher this will be of interest.

Event Date:

• Combo Breaker 2024, May 24th - 26th

Location:

• Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel Marriott
• 1551 Thoreau Dr N, Schaumburg, IL, 60173 USA

Event Links:

• ComboBreaker Home - _https://combobreaker.org
• [email protected]_

ComboBreaker MR Tournament Sign Up and Rules/Restrictions/Stat Caps - https://www.start.gg/tournament/all-in-together-2024-combo-breaker-community-tournaments/event/monster-rancher-2

Game Resources, tips, preparation:

• Guide site: https://legendcup.com/faqsite.php#mr2
• Monster Rancher Discord: https://discord.gg/venPxfG (@moosebones for any tournament clarifications)

Please contact @moosebones on Discord for any additional questions you may have regarding this event!

What is Monster Rancher?
If you'd never heard of Monster Rancher, you might have heard of the gimmick it was famous for... During game play, you could swap out the game CD and put in your favorite Music CD or Playstation game and a monster could be created from it.

Gimmick aside, however, It is basically a menu-driven virtual pet raising and breed simulator with fantasy monsters in a semi-roguelike environment where you keep your personal achievements and progress but it may take multiple raised monsters over time to fully complete the game. In-game progress is done by taking your raised creature and battling it out in tournaments with real-time strategy and resource management, gauging your situational awareness with your own monsters stats and attributes versus the in-game opponents. In the single-player game you have the option to outright over-raise your monster so that fights are a bit easier, but in PVP there are rules and Stat Caps/Weight divisions to consider for more equal footing.

I can't attend, but I'm interested in Online Tournaments, is that a thing?
Good news! the Monster Rancher Community regularly holds online tournaments for MR2DX and other games in the series, even the newer Switch-Only Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, however due to limitations of the game, Online tournaments are not manually controlled. Instead, the meta is to engineer a monster within a given tourney's ruleset and stat caps to make as few bad choices as possible and let them have at it. Often best of 3, or 5, in Round Robin, Elimination, or Double Elim depending on the number of entrants.

Please share if you'd like. Monster Rancher is really niche and could always use more players :)

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:

• North American Keywords List
• Southeast Asia Song List (English)
• Japanese region Song List (Japanese obviously)

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

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 :)

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.

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!