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

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.

There’s been SOME activity in MR in the last couple years…
MR1&2DX is a remaster of the first 2 games with some QoL improvements, on Switch, Steam, iOS, released in 2021
Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a crossover, though only on Switch, released in 2022
LINE:Monster Farm is a JP only mobile gacha game released in 2023, but some folks hope it will come to the west… it has some amazing artwork.

There’s also hope for MR3&4 “DX” release but those weren’t very financially successful originally, so it’s probably unlikely they’ll be rereleased, but everyone’s huffin’ that hopium.

for the remaster, the CD reading system is replaced with a built in searchable Song List. This is how you can play it on Mobile, Switch, Steam etc. The Song List doesn’t exactly equate to original CDs (the function is mechanically different) but there are a handful of entries that equate to their originals (this accounts for about 0.01% of entries within the 664,909 that create their original monsters.

The good news is, Everyone now has access to the entire game and can raise any monster they want to (once they’re unlocked, of course), and the Song List is 100% solved and published. You can Random Button if you like the surprise, but if you want something specific, you can just view the published Song List, Pick your Monster Main/Sub, then pick the Title/Artist suggestion for the variant you want. :)

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is also on Steam, Switch, and iOS!
It is a remastered per say. Not so much a new graphics engine or anything, but with bug fixes, item changes that function better, and GUI & other QoL improvements :)

Hey now… Monster Rancher is Legit and predates Monsters, Inc. by 4 years :)