As the name sort of implies, Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX is a game about raising monsters to the best of your ability. However, because it’s also a Japanese sim, it’s not going to hold your hand throughout. You’re not on a narrative adventure here, you’re trying to become a famous monster breeder. To help you with that, we present our Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX Monster Raising Guide.
Getting Started
One of the greatest things about the Monster Rancher series is that there’s no one right way to play these games. Each person has their own style, and realistically most styles can probably squeak out a victory with enough perseverance. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some stuff you can do to make things easier on yourself.
First up, you need to understand that throughout the course of the game, you’ll need to raise two different types of monsters: warriors and workers. Warriors are monsters bred for high-level combat, while workers exist purely to earn you money to fund the training of a warrior. Technically, there's also a third type, depending on which Monster Rancher player that you ask, which are bred for expeditions exclusively, but personally I've found that the act of breeding warriors makes them a little redundant.
Worker Monster Raising Tips - Raise a Good Worker Monster
Now you know about the three main types, we can get into the business of how to actually raise your monsters. For the most part, the game doesn’t favor trying to max out all of your monster’s stats. Each monster has a specific lifespan that goes up and down but is severely limited. If you try to slowly build up every stat, then you’re going to find your monster dies before you hit that goal, unless you use some very specific and tricky methods.
With any monster, you should focus on three stats at most. Your first stat is going to be either Pow or Int depending on the monster you’re working with. Then, try to choose two stats that your monster has an easy time leveling up. To figure this out, check out your particular breed’s statgain scores online. Anything C or above is a safe bet most of the time. Once you know what stats you’re aiming for, it’s time to start working. The way this will go depends on which game you’re playing.
Monster Rancher 1 - Worker Monster Raising Tips
Your first year should be spent pretty much entirely working. This will help build up your stats, loyalty, and cash for when the fights start. Follow the schedule below for each month, though the schedule will have to change depending on what type of work you’re doing.
Easy work is any work task that increases a single stat. Hard work is any task that increases two stats while decreasing another. Hard Work not only increases fatigue quicker, requiring more rest, but it’s also only viable if you’re building up the right stats. Don’t even do heavy work that’s going to diminish a stat that you actually want to be raised.
- Easy Work > Easy Work > Easy Work > Rest - Repeat
- Hard Work > Easy Work > Rest - Repeat
Repeat these schedules for the entire first year with your monster. Do not pay for the more efficient training at this stage, since you’re trying to build up funds. I also recommend that when given the option to either scold or praise your monster, that you alternate between saying yes and no. So if you don’t scold the first failure, scold the second, and so on. The same goes for praise. Though if you’re constantly being told that your monster is spoiled, feel free to scold once or twice in a row to bring it back down.
Once you’ve done a full year, take on one of the unofficial fights. If you win easily, you can start spamming these fights as often as they come up. Just make sure to rest your monster as well. If you’re barely coming out on top, or still losing, spend some more time raising stats until you win easily.
At this stage, you have a couple of options available to you. You can just keep raising and fighting with this first monster, or you can introduce a second and eventually third monster. If you continue with only one, it’ll take longer to earn money, but it’s less complex so it might be more suitable for beginners.
The single monster method requires you to spend your off weeks working to raise stats, fighting in unofficial tourneys as often as possible. Once your favored stats get high enough, enter the official tourney and move onto Rank D, then repeat the process to build up more funds. Keep doing this until your get an ‘old age’ warning for your monster. When this happens, go to town and freeze it, and start again with a new money-maker.
Using more than one monster involves a lot of going to town and freezing your monster. After a fight, rest your first monster, then immediately freeze him, and use the weeks with no fights scheduled to raise your second monster. Then, whenever an E-rank fight pops up, rotate your second monster into the freezer, and thaw your fighter to take part in the fight. Remember to rest your E-Rank fighter after combat before you freeze him again.
You can continue this method by adding more and more monsters if you feel comfortable doing it. Either way, once your second monster is strong enough, start it fighting in D-Rank fights and start rotating between E-Rank and D-Rank combat to build up funds. Once a couple of years have passed, you should notice that drugs have become available for purchase in the item store. At this stage, you should have enough money to start raising your warrior monster.
Monster Rancher 2 - Worker Monster Raising Tips
Unfortunately, raising stats doesn’t earn you any money in MR2, so you’re going to have to battle at least a little in your first year to make sure that you’ve got enough money to keep your monster fed. It’s also much more important that you don’t let your monster get stressed out or tired in this game. If your assistant tells you that the monster is stressed or tired, then you’ve screwed up. Having said that, if it’s on your Worker monster then it’s less of an issue.
Once again, you have to focus on specific stats. Pick either Pow or Int based on your skills, then two stats that are easy to raise for your specific breed. Then you can follow the rules above for the most part. If you start to run low on money, enter an unofficial tourney to get some prize money, then keep going. Once you’re able to win E-Rank fights easily, it’s time to start spamming for cash.
Because stats raise after fights, your monster will continue to get stronger. Without raising your monster’s rank, you can actually also take part in D-Rank fights too, which sometimes offer bigger prizes. Under no circumstances should you take part in the fights labeled F at this stage. They’re free-for-alls that typically have some decently strong monster in them.
Once again, you can choose to do this with a single monster at a time, or you can rotate monsters using the freezer method described above. Either way, you want to build up about the same amount of money, between 10,000 and 15,000 gold.
Warrior Monster Raising Tips - Raise a Good Warrior Monster
Now comes the fun stuff, time to raise yourself a warrior. This process is a lot more expensive but well worth it. Part of the reason that it’s so much more expensive is that you’re going to be relying on a lot of store-bought items and feeding your monster meat to enhance their training as well as to extend their lifespan as much as possible. Once again, there are some differences between the first and second games with these methods.
Monster Rancher 1 - Warrior Monster Raising Tips
So, you need to get yourself the breed of monster that you want to be your warrior, which can be pretty much any that you like, but some of the rare breeds tend to be more useful or powerful. Then pick 3 stats as you did for your money monster, and start the same sort of raising method, only this time, you’re going to feed it meet regularly. You can go for every month if you’ve got the dough for it, but you can probably get away with doing it every other month if you want to save the cash.
By now, you should have access to all of the training courses as well. Send your monster on them every few months between regular training, but be sure they’re not overly fatigued either. You can do this by feeding your monster 1 or 2 pieces of taffy and mint leaves. Mint reduced stress and form while adding fear, but taffy reduces fatigue and increases spoiling and form. Effectively these two items in a combo will completely balance each other out in terms of their negative effects while clearing huge chunks of fatigue and fear, meaning that you won’t have to rest your monsters if you have enough of these items.
Use mint and taffy before training sessions to ensure they don’t come back stressed out or tired. You can also use them after 3 weeks of work to prevent the need for them to rest ever, giving you more time to max out their stats. The final step is to buy stat-raising drugs from the shop. Since you can use an infinite amount of items on your monster in this game, you can just buy a bunch of these to raise the stats you need (as long as they don’t lower other stats that you also need) and force feed them to your monster until it hits max stats. Then, freeze the monster and only bust it out for big battles because these things kill your monster’s life span like nothing else. If you’ve got a golden peach you can use it to get some more life out of them, but it’s still best to reserve them only for the major fights like ranking up or the big 4.
Monster Rancher 2 - Warrior Monster Raising Tips
Unfortunately, Monster Rancher 2 has limits on how many items you can feed to your monsters, so you have to be a bit more clever about raising a warrior in this game. First thing’s first, you need to get your hands on some Gemini’s pots. During the 4th week of May, each year is the Gemini cup, winning gives you a Gemini’s pot. These items have a minor stress reduction each week, but they also increase fear which makes getting loyalty much easier. You’ll also need to acquire a buttload of magic bananas during the D-rank cup in the first week of March, but you probably should have both of these in large amounts from your money-spinning monster.
Fort his method you need to feed your monster tablets each month, but you’ll need a different amount of Gemini’s pots in your inventory depending on whether your monster likes, dislikes, or doesn’t care either way about tablets. Check their data to see their food likes and dislikes. You’ll need 5 if your monster likes tablets, 7 if they’re neutral towards them, and 10 if they dislike them.
Once you’ve got the money to make this method viable, follow this schedule:
- Nut Oil + Hard Work
- Magic Banana + Hard Work
- Nuts Oil + Hard Work
- Mint Leaf + Easy Work
(Magic Bananas have a random effect. Save before you use them, and only carry on with your schedule if your monster’s loyalty has risen by 10)
This method will mean that you can constantly train without resting, resulting in an incredibly powerful monster. However, you’ll also need to make sure that you praise your monster and treat it well to ensure that your raising style sticks close to balanced, or your monster could potentially have a breakdown mid-battle and become useless to you.
Just ensure that you’re saving the game regularly and you should end up with an insanely powerful monster to use in battles.