Cue the generic ’70s funk
I’ve never been the world’s biggest fan of Pokémon, but I’ve always had a fondness for the adorable and sometimes weird Pocket Monsters that have graced our lives for some twenty years now. But back in the PS1 days, I was absolutely fascinated by the Monster Rancher series. It baffled my then ten-year-old mind (and even now at 31, it’s pretty freakin’ cool) that you could generate new and quirky monsters by just putting a random CD into your PlayStation and letting the magic of computers take the wheel. The fact that you could breed them was icing on the monster cake.
Well, now a game aims to combine elements of the two franchises to bring us back to the days of breeding and collecting monsters. Newly launched on Kickstarter, Monster Crown looks right up my alley to scratch that itch I first felt twenty years ago.
Monster Crown is a monster-breeding game boasting over 200 monsters to collect, battle, and breed. The big promise here is that breeding different monsters will combine elements of both parents into the progeny. It’s unclear if all monsters are compatible with one another, or how many generations one can mix, but the Kickstarter page does say there are “countless combinations to breed,” and also mentions that stats, moves, and appearances change down the generations until it’s impossible to tell the original parentage. So there’s that.
I think what I’m most looking forward to is going back to my Power Rangers action figure days and slamming two monsters together until something comes from it. Hopefully it doesn’t chip the paint like on my Pink and Green Rangers.
In addition to the monster breeding, a massive world, a “dark story” (which again harkens back to some of the seedy circumstances under which Pink and Green Ranger got it on), and even online fighting and trading are planned.
In production since February 2016, the game is already seemingly quite far along in the development process. When I first saw the Kickstarter page, it was about 85% of the way to its goal – it has since then passed its meager funding goal (only $5,000) and is on its way toward some of its stretch goals. The full game is tentatively scheduled to release in February 2019 on Switch, Vita, and Steam.
Monster Crown [Kickstarter — Thanks for the tip,LaTerry!]