Koei Tecmo has announced plans to release Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX to celebrate the series’ 25th anniversary, and it’s due to release this winter.
The Monster Rancher series never quite reached the same heights as Pokemon, but it did receive five main-line titles between 1997 and 2006. It even had a number of spin-off games, and its own cartoon series. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Koei Tecmo had announced re-releases of the first two games for the Nintendo Switch, iOS devices, and Steam!
While not quite the pop culture juggernaut that Pokemon turned out to be, Monster Rancher set itself apart with its focus on raising and training. Rather than RPG-like battles and environmental exploration, you would spend more one-on-one time with your creatures to help them improve. Tournament fights were more about earning money to expand your ranch than becoming famous, and your monster’s trust was essential to its performance.
Koei Tecmo’s announcement video doesn’t reveal much: just some in-development Switch footage and a mention that monsters are being “re-balanced.” There’s also the question of the series’ popular disk “scanning” feature, which let you pop in CDs to discover more monsters. While Koei Tecmo hasn’t stated how it plans to approach this in the re-releases, it’s likely that it’ll use tanhe online CD database like the Japanese versions that came out in 2019. According to Nintendo Enthusiast, the games will simply let you choose an album from a list of over 500,000 entries, and pull the monster data from there.
Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX will launch on Thursday, December 9th, 2021. Pricing information has not been revealed yet but who cares? It’s Monster Rancher and that’s pretty exciting!
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