@Superbear:
I loved this game, I finally got the Pheinox at one point. Still want Muu though.
Muu is actually impossible to get stateside without a cheating device. He was tied into a Japanese cd, and when the codes were redone for america, there was no particular soundtrack or game given to unlock his unique data. There were rumors that one particular soundtrack unlocked him, but no one ever verified it.
@RuNa:
Hey…I like the anime. And the real anime ending, the one with Genki thinking everything was a dream and then seeing his disc was gone, was totally awesome. I really loved that ending....then it continued.
That's actually how BOTH seasons ended. The second time around was pretty much the same.. but the American version cut the sad part off of that, as well and just rolled into the credits, leaving it on the note that Genki was uhm… still in the world with all his friends alive, I guess.
@Cyanotic:
The new DS game is supposed to be a lot like Monster Rancher 2 so I'm thinking about trying it out. All of the games since MR2 (epecially 3, eugh) have been pretty crappy.
4 and 5 let you train multiple critters at once, which was so, so, SOOO incredibly useful. And they stopped dying after reaching their peak, they just… didn't gain more stats, also good. Unfortunatley, you got locked into raising them for a certain single stat for multiple generations of the same critter and that got tedious. They also made the battle system better, trimming it down to 3 actions instead of 4, and letting you pick and choose the abilties you wanted instead of bluntly overwriting them.
Part 5 finally fixed the breeding system so that stats would carry in a meaningful way, but actually made it TOO easy, each gen was legitly stronger than the last and the stats became insane pretty easily... after raising a couple generations.
The biggest problem with the franchise is, unlike say Pokemon, they didn't find a method that worked and then keep improving on it... they started from scratch practically every time and got into all sorts of wonkiness, never really building upt o a fantastic game, and instead just getting a lot of mediocre ones.
It really is interesting the MR 2 seems to be the favorite here.