Each title begins with you receiving your first monster with the help of a trusty assistant. You’ll then take the monster to your ranch, where you begin your illustrious monster-raising career. You advance through a calendar week-by-week, with different tournaments and activities available for your monster depending on the date. Depending on your monster’s energy levels, you can send them away on jobs and training trips to gain money and skills. Unfortunately, after the initial short tutorial, there’s no real guidance as to what benefit each of the many activities will bring, or the effects of different monster stats and abilities – there’s a huge amount of trial-and-error if you’re not willing to follow an online guide.

Participating in tournaments nets you fame and extra loyalty, and advances the relatively barebones story. If they perform well, you’ll be encouraged to praise them, while scolding them for poor performance will prevent them from growing slack. It’s classic Tamagotchi parenting, and it works well enough. Eventually, your monster will approach the end of its life (either through age or battle scars), and you can choose to allow it to die or “freeze” it for later use, which could entail breeding for a more powerful monster or combining it with others.

The delightfully retro twist of the Monster Rancher series is the ability to summon monsters via CD-ROM. There’s some fun in-game lore behind this, with the gods sealing creatures in “disc stones” centuries ago. In the original games, you could actually load any CD into your console’s disc reader, and depending on its contents a new monster would be created. Since most modern devices eschew the need for physical media, this DX release instead sees you typing in particular music track names to access new monsters. It’s a cool way of bringing the classic gimmick into the modern era, but it is a bit of a shame that the database of music tracks is quite limited – you sadly won’t be summoning any glittery Dinos by searching for Lady Gaga.

The other ways of obtaining new monsters are through breeding or combining monsters that you’ve frozen. This forms much of the appeal of the titles, and collecting, battling, and breeding monsters will prove fulfilling to anyone who has spent hours hatching eggs in Pokémon.

Presentation-wise, Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX are totally faithful to their PlayStation roots. Jagged polygons and blurry fonts are the order of the day, with some extremely “creative” monster designs. My first monster was a Jell, a truly horrific abomination that the game expected me to love and care for. While I adored this disgusting blob, good God, it was unsightly. Most of the designs aren’t quite as revolting, but they’re definitely not going to be winning any beauty pageants.

In an interesting move, the user interface seems to be optimised for iOS users. Buttons are large and touch-friendly, and take up a large amount of screen real estate. The controls themselves are also best suited to touchscreens, with strange keybindings on PC and an awkward controller layout making the console experience a little alien – especially since all of the gameplay is spent navigating different menus.