#aaaaa i hope the two games actually cross over someday

[munny4hunny]

OH DUDEDUDE I KEEP FORGETTING TO SHARE THIS BUT NOT TODAY

WHEN I TELL YOU I SCREAMED READING THAT LINE—my mind immediately jumped to that scene in the days game

the ‘winner’ stick might be an actual thing that happens irl (never heard of it tho) but just let me imagine that twst made a reference to kingdom hearts ｡ﾟ(╥﹏╥｡)ﾟ

[tumblunni]

Bunni plays more monster rancher advance! Woo!

* I decided to go with Jade the golem. And I love her immediately. And she is my new daughter. LOOK AT HER

* Its neat that monsters now have traits! Its kinda like the abilities from pokemon, but you can have several of them and pass them down through breeding to get useful stuff on unexpected monsters. Jade was lucky enough to start off with one of those in her randomly generated stats! I’ll imagine that water resistance will really come in handy! And the other one seems to be the golem monster’s default ability, which looks like it’d be really good on a young monster and potentially critically awful in the big leagues when everyone starts bringing out one hit KOs...

* Also apparantly the super sparkly jade golem comes from crossbreeding with a Lesione, which is basically Nessie: The Monster. Its one of the cutest new ones added in this game! There’s also a kinda ridiculous action figure octopus thing with dog ears, and the chubby acorn-hugging cat creature i showed in my last post, and probably some more ones I’ll discover later. Its quite fun as someone who only ever played the early PS1 games! How many monsters did I miss???

* Tho it is WEIRD that now the status screen completely lacks mood and care style meters! this is gonna be tough! Seriously, they still have the items to reduce stress and raise discipline, but now there’s no way to even know what your current level is. Care style meter was CRITICAL, you had to constantly make sure you weren’t raising your monster too tough OR too spoiled, otherwise it can lose lifespan or training efficiency... Also its odd but neat that now the shop has a bunch of high priced key items you can buy that increase training efficiency, decrease fatigue, etc. In MR2 you had to find those very rarely in dungeons. Its a good change, now its more directly linked to how good you are as a rancher, not just how lucky you get. I have a nice goal to work towards!

* Also I LOVE THE SHOPKEEPER FOR THIS COUNTRY I still love the FIMBA region shopkeeper too tho, cos she was a nice older lady who was apparantly either Colt’s actual auntie or just a friend of the family. It was nice to have a bit of minor backstory to your assistant, and some relationships between the npcs. BUT STILL I ADORE MYSTERY SHOPKEEP What a cool design!! I hope we get some sort of sidequest to learn more about Crow (EVEN THEIR NAME IS BADASS) And its just kinda comical and endearing that all their dialogue is super polite and normal even though they look like this POST APOCOLYPTIC DOOM WARRIOR Crow is best npc aunt/uncle/mysterious nonbinary headcanoning person of awesomeness

* I found concept art of the npcs! I haven’t even met Ayase yet, she looks cute! Crow looks even more adorable badass when you can see their full costume. I do wonder why on earth they changed the name though? I would have thought that Karass would be rendered as Cross in english. That would have been badass too! It doesnt seem like anyone else got a name change, except Shamoa -> Chamois which would be pronounced the same.

* Also have a look at this random cute wallpaper from the japanese site! I wonder what festival they’re celebrating? I don’t know very much about japanese holidays but it looks really fun! Also: Aroma stop being a dick to your brother XD And it seems AGIMA is confirmed as Age Island Monster Association, tho its funny that the writing is a weird mix of english with russian letters thrown in at absolute random. O_O And I just found out that apparantly FIMBA stands for Fraternal International Monster Breeders' Association according to the wikia. Thank you, whoever added this ultra hard to find fact! I’m not really sure what it MEANS, though XD I guess its just an awkward japanese writer being like ‘fraternal = twins’... probably...? But that doesn’t even make sense cos FIMBA is supposed to be the first monster guild, and IMA is the one that split off from it, instead of vice versa...

* Look at this cool more detailed concept art of Crow from the sequel:

(I dunno why its split into two pictures, it was like that on the website)

Oh and apparantly Karasu is the japanese word for Crow, so the name actually is the same between languages! I feel dumb now XD I wish i could learn another language someday.

* ANYWAY BACK TO THE ACTUAL GAME ITSELF LOL Another change seems to be that now instead of training being split up by different exercises or jobs, its different monsters that tutor you. Whenever you retire a high level monster they can be registered as part of the interface here, and get to stay forever as part of the bakground animation. Thats actually really sweet, I hope I succeed in making Jade a trainer so she can watch over the next generation ^_^

Tho it is a bit of a shame that now all the exercises are more generic and unanimated, I guess they couldnt manage it with these really awful faux 3D models. And GAH, Golem seems to have an even lower framerate than everyone else! its just so visually awful, it looks okay in screenshots and falls apart completely in motion, its like friggin rotoscoping! Also wtf is up with this odd misalignment on the default monster trainers? I thought this was a sign someone else had already played the cartirdge, but I mean.. I started a new game and all...

* ALSO! This game’s obligatory ‘we translated Errantry as something entirely different’. It’s just called SPECIAL in all caps. At least training is called training and shop is called shop this time...

* I got lucky and Jade’s personality means she likes the one food nobody ever likes, lol! Apparantly her biggest dislike is battles, tho. I’ll try and not fight too much with her, I’ll just keep it to the mandatory test battles to rise in the ranks, and like.. as an absolute last resort when we’re running out of money. I wanna be a considerate pet owner!

* OH MAN MEGA UNLUCKY! She also dislikes the fatigue recovery item. I cant even tell if its reducing her fatigue at all, but i expect the effect is reduced a lot.

* WELL I FUCKD UP I immediately ran out of money and had to enter a tournement, which poor Jade lost awfully due to my fail technique as a mom T_T She has really good attack and defense but like ZERO accuracy! So enemies couldnt do much damage to her, but they were winning for doing ONE point of damage to her while she kept missing them til the time limit ran out... I made the same raising mistakes the first time I played the first game as a kid, I guess its been so long that I totally forgot... IM SORRY MY SPARKLE CRYSTAL BABY I’LL DO BETTER AAAAA

* There are some cute occasional random events to spice up your monster raising. Yay! I just got this one where your assistants are arguing over whether the AGIMA official boss wears a toupee, and he’s like ‘pull my hair if you want to prove it!’

Ilu grandpa chill bossman

* Also I ended up passing Jade’s first birthday without any sort of progress at all, I’m just desperately trying to not go bankrupt while I spam accuracy training til she can actually hit something :P I’M SORRY JADE aaaa i hope my dumb decisions in the first damn week havent doomed her to eternal failure now!! ive wasted so much time trying and failing at tournements just to make enough money to keep training her, she’s so behind on all the training and she’s so stressed and i’m SUCH A BAD DAD T______________T