Level Up: Monster Rancher Battle Card GB

We are still celebrating Cheap Dam-Month. At the start of the month, I mentioned that most of the real versions of these games were fads. However, this one would be included as I know no one that played it. I saw it for sale in card shops, but never bothered with it. I somehow ended up with a copy of the video game version though, so let’s look at the only game this month that I haven’t played the real version of. Here’s Monster Rancher Battle Card GB for the Game Boy Color.

Monster Rancher Battle Card is played with 3 chosen monsters and decks of 50 cards mostly composed of attack and defense cards for your monsters. See, though your monster have a pre-set HP the other games, it may only attack if you have an attack card in your hand for that monster. For example, if I have Mochi on my team and a Mochi’s Slap attack card in my hand, I can use it. However, if all I have are Golem and Tiger attack cards in my hand, only they may attack, and Mochi will have to sit out the round. You may attack once with each monster per turn if capable.

However, most attacks also require guts points. At the end of every turn, the player may discard any number of cards from their hands for one guts point each. (Note: your hand refills to 5 cards every turn). Tiger’s Charge attack, for example, requires two guts points before he can deal the 4 damage. So kind of like with Digimon Digital Card Battle, you have this strategic decision to make between keeping a card, and sacrificing it to use other cards. The best move will be determines by your unique play style.

There are also defense cards that you can activate after an enemy has attacked to reduce or nullify any damage that would be dealt to your monster. However, like attacks, most of these are powered by guts points, you often have to choose between defending now and attacking later.

And finally, there are All Monsters and Breeder cards. These act kind of like the trainer cards in Pokemon: some increase your attack, some damage your opponent directly and some can heal your monsters, among other things. There are other strategies involved too (like making a combos, different kinds of attacks, etc…) but I’m now getting into specifics that you’ll learn along the way. A match is won when an opponent gets all three of his monsters KO’ed or is unable to draw a card.

Graphically speaking, the game is really good. It has an odd, old-world style, but I think that’s reflective of the main series, so I can’t really complain about it. Other than that, the over world sprites are great, easily comparable to the ones from the Pokemon Trading Card Game, but with more unique designs (since monsters seem to really exist in this world). The cards are well detailed and do a great job at uniquely depicting what each chard does, even with the limitations on space and color (though again, I haven’t seen the real ones, so I don’t know how faithfully recreated they are). Where this game shines though is the fact that you see all your monsters on the field and they are exquisitely drawn. There are only a handful of monsters in this game, but they did a great job for all of them. They also have animations for each attack, which from my memory looks pretty good, but if you’re like me, you shut off the animation because it just takes too long.

I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed Monster Rancher Battle Card GB considering I almost never heard of it before playing this game developed by GRC and published by Tecmo. The main difference between this video game and other card based ones is that it moves quickly due to having to burn so many cards from your hand to do basic stuff and the small amount of HP your monsters have.  The big downside to this game is that, compared to most other “collection” games like this, you don’t seem to have many cards to collect, so it seems like you’re stuck using the same ones (and collecting new monsters is a rare occurrence). If you’re looking for a lengthy find-and-collect game with long epic battles, this might not be the game for you. If you want to play something fast and unique, then you might want to check this out. I give Monster Rancher Battle Card GB for the Game Boy Color 8 levels out of 10.