All of your old favorite monsters are back in this version, as well as several interesting new ones. There is still the chance to make variations on the basic monster, but this time instead of mixing two monsters together, you take your monster to one of the unlockable training areas and your monster adapts to that terran!
Train your monster underwater and he develops water-based powers. Train him in the desert and he gets rock and sand-based powers. Other terrans include Forest, Jungle, Ice, and one that for now remains a
, which I'm hoping will be revealed as I continue unlocking terran. Unfortunately, it seems that your monster will only have 2 or 3 chances to make these adaptations in his lifetime, the first when it reaches 9months old. I've not yet seen if they can adapt more than once.But the best part is the reward you get for allowing your monster to die. In the prior games, the death of a good monster meant losing everything you'd put into it. All the training and hard work gone, plus losing the chance to mix it in the hopes of a stronger baby monster. In #3, when a monster dies, all of its stats and ablities are stored in a 'Heart' gemstone. When you give your new baby monster this Heart, 1/4 of the dead monster's stats are added to the baby's totals, as well as gaining additional attacks modeled on the dead monster's abilities!
What does this mean for you? When your Level S Monster with Life 800 and 4 attacks dies, you feed your baby monster his heart and baby now has Life 200 and at least 1 new attack!
Now, the down sides.
You will spend many hours playing this game, wanting 'just one more week', or 'I'll stop when they reach X'. You will grow to love your monster to the point you don't want to leave.
The training clips are fun the first few viewings, then they get old. Luckily you can skip them, but you will stil be spending a lot of time training your monster up to maximum levels.
Yet again, you have a cutesy young girl helping you train. Yes, she's still annoying. You also have Rival Breeders who stop by occassionally to Talk, Trade, or Battle with you. Sometimes they actually have good advice or nice trades. Other times they're just annoying. Especially in Arena battles where they think their monsters are the best shit around. It's fun watching them lose.
"Baldur's Gate" for PC, "BG: Shadow of Amn", "Icewind Dale", and "NeverWinterNights Gold" all give you the basic Mocchi monster, a little pink and green soft squishy monster that was introduced in Monster Rancher 2.. It seems to be a BlackIsle thing, maybe because of copy protection or some other code on their discs.
The "Baldur's Gate" soundtrack gives you a basic Suezo, the one-eyed monster with the long tail and longer tongue. Both monsters I consider to be good opponents, but nothing I'd ever consider raising.Still, all in all, I highly recommend Monster Rancher 3, especially now that it's available for $20 in most stores. It's a very fun little game that has a lot to offer.
