For months after getting Monster Rancher 2 for Christmas, I had a Saturday morning ritual. As just a tiny thing, I understood my mom couldn’t afford new albums, so I’d shuffle outside for a newspaper and look up garage sale listings. Constantly searching for ways to spoil me on a tight budget, my mom would oblige and drive me to sales where I’d buy used CDs in bulk with saved up quarters and dollar bills. The artists were almost always unfamiliar, but I didn’t care—that wasn’t the point of my purchase. All I needed was for these discs to read on my PlayStation. It may not have been the original intent of their production, but I used those endless stacks of songs to unlock secret companions in Monster Rancher 2. Spending hours at its summoning shrine is one of my fondest childhood memories, and it’s why I’m feeling a little disappointed over the new collection's lost mechanic.
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If you missed Monster Rancher’s late ‘90s and early ‘00s installments, then perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the whole gimmick. The game’s setup has you chasing down Disc Stones to unlock monsters for training, battling, and companionship—yes, kind of like Pokemon. Those Disc Stones were created by a god, who at some point just got so pissed off at us for causing so much trouble that the entity wound up locking away creatures in said stones. It’s all awfully petty, but we’ll roll with it because the actual simulation of finding these stones and unlocking them was brilliant.
In order to replicate the feeling of finding and summoning monsters from Disc Stones, Monster Rancher asked kids around the world to raid their parents’ CD collections and drag them to their PlayStations. In the game, you’d travel to a shrine and ask to begin the ritual of unlocking companions from their Stone Disc prisons. While images on-screen showed ancient relics swirling to life, I was using another tiny, Cheeto-dust-covered finger to swap the game disc with albums from my mother’s Bon Jovi collection—holding no regard for their safety.
Looking back on it, the whole process was kind of cumbersome. I’d ask the game to summon; it’d prompt me to remove my Monster Rancher disc, then there would be an awkward pause. After quite some time, an NPC would signal that I could finally drop my CD in, it would slowly read, and minutes later, I would have some hideous version of Suezo materialize. Since the whole exercise took so long to load, Monster Rancher really didn’t require much of a collection to keep me busy, but I could spend hours glued to that process. That’s what I loved about it, though—it was all needlessly convoluted and long, but I adored Monster Rancher’s inventive summoning system.
All of this is just to say: I’m going to miss this mechanic. Over two decades and a lot of technological advances later, Koei Tecmo is reviving Monster Rancher 1 and 2 with a new version that replaces my piles of CDs with a digital library to search from. My childhood ritual is gone, something I can admit holds no real charm without an element of nostalgia, but it doesn’t make me long for it any less.
I understand why Monster Rancher can’t recreate the process. I don’t know many folks that still have their Hanson Mmmbop album and Spice Girl collection at the ready. We’ve moved on from an era of Sony Walkmans and graduated to Spotify and Apple Music. Sure, we’ve still got physical discs for PlayStation and Xbox, but the digital future demands portability and the slow, tragic death of tangible media. Plus, I’m not sure how we’re forcing that copy of Celine Dion’s Titanic album in a Switch, but I reckon Monster Rancher diehards would argue for an adapted cartridge-based system. I’m still thrilled over the collection and rerelease, but I won’t ever be quite as enchanted as I was as a little girl with a sea of her own Stone Discs.