FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

Hey! I'm gonna offload updates on how my Monster Rancher 1 DX playthrough is going here since I'm kind of hardstuck at rank B and I don't know if it makes for great streams anymore.

I wanna try knocking out two birds with one stone here:

1. wanting to free up my Wednesday stream slots
2. feeling never-ending nostalgia for screenshot LPs.

MR1 gets kind of samey after a while, and it's a menus game anyway, so I think it's a good fit for a quick lil SSLP treatment. If I end up getting a monster into A rank I'll stream the rest of their career run, but otherwise I feel like just posting updates here is enough.

table of contents

1. Catching up with 1000 Rocks
2. 1000 Rocks' Glow-up & the Dragon Invitational

***



Our current monster is 1000 Rocks, who's generated off of Ongaku Zukan by Ryuichi Sakamoto (obv. we wanted thousand knives but it was not available in the DX library). I wanted to try turning him into a tank so I sent him to the mines (++Life +Defense -Skill) but I've come to learn that the -Skill is a real killer. 1000 Rocks punches pretty hard as a Golem Golem but his hitrate even in Rank D is like, 20%. So it's been a lot of remedial +Skill work:



I'm also trying out something different with him, namely doing optional tournaments instead of just focusing on the official rank-up tournaments.



When 1000 Rocks hits, he hits hard. Dropping his Skill down to like 70 and having to play catch-up, as well as his starting stat total of ~750 means he's probably never going to be a contender for Rank S, but I don't think that's the goal with him anyway. He's kind of a "rebuild year" monster after we spent all our savings getting Sara up real high. The long-term plan is to get a bunch of money saved up from mid-tier optional tournaments and go big on our next guy, Ice Cream:



Ice Cream is a Monol/Gali I got off of fusing I think... Gamer, our first ever monster (Year Zero by NIN) and The Boss (Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen). 1029 is kind of a wild stat spread for a baby, certainly the highest I've ever seen. I still need to figure out what his build will be. Obviously Intelligence is the attack stat here, I just need to decide whether he's a Defense guy or a Speed guy. Starting off with Circus training (++Speed +Intelligence -Power) might be the go-to, but Mailman (++Intelligence +Skill -Defense) might not be too bad either. My experience with Sara has led me to think that Defense is a really important stat in MR1, so if we go the Mailman route I'll definitely have to mix in some Guard (+Defense) duty or Defense training.



Anyway, that's it for now! Next update will probably be a retrospective of how 1000 Rocks' career went, since these take just a couple hours to bang out.

I'll try doing at least one update a week of this, but I don't wanna formalize too much right now.

1000 rocks's

Work ended up being really light today, so I ended up playing a bunch more.



1000 Rocks' Skill rehabilitation period is a little rough, since he's only getting like ~4 a pop from Hunting. I really wish I hadn't accidentally messed up his training as a baby. After a while, though, he ends up getting pretty beefy, so I enroll him in the C ranking match.





Here's 1000 one-tapping Goregon, the other Golem in this tier. We go 7-0 in the tournament and enter Rank B.



Rank B is a whole different ballgame, though. RIston here especially makes the literal Skill difference apparent. Still, 1000 is not doing too bad in the side tournaments, usually going like 2-1.



I accidentally click past the dialogue, but in one of these side tournaments we run into a Dragon! A new monster type!




His statline is kind of nutty for Rank B, though, and he ends up fragging 1000 Rocks. Somehow that is Maccam's only win in this tournament, so 1000 still wins the prize.



After the tournament, Tesca comes over. We haven't talked to him since the intro, so it's been quite some time! He catches up with Holly, and they talk about an even stronger dragon in an invitational tournament in August. She says we can beat it, which I'm not really sure about, but I'm not about to go against Holly's dreams here. Apparently, if we win, we get a Dragon Tusk, which sounds like an item that... lets us combine a Dragon out of a Naga and Dino? I think? This is the most dedicated cutscenes I've seen in this game in a while, so I'm curious to pursue this quest.

1000 Rocks' performance in the B rank optional tournaments ends up being so good I decide to graduate him from jobber status and try the Rank B promo tournament.



He ends up scaring most of his opponents away, except for Riston...



chebbed ya dick



After getting into Rank A, we receive the invitation letter. 4th week of August is not that far away, plus there's another side tournament before that, so we only have like 5 weeks to get comfortable in our new rank. Karn also shows up after the letter, and even though I finally have the statline to go into the ruins, I really cannot afford my monster getting lost right now, so I decline. Maybe next time.



Here's 1000 Rocks against Garent, the Rank A Golem. He's got a full loadout of skills in all 4 ranges, but that doesn't really make up for 1000 walking up and KOing him in two hits. Kind of surprisingly to me, despite the really rough Rank C, 1000 Rocks is kind of holding his own now even in Rank A. And I called him a jobber!




The Invitational comes up. There's only one other monster in it, the Dragon, which makes this feel less like a tournament and more like an assassination setup.



That's scary.



...but not for me! Despite the extremely scary stat spread, 1000 Rocks' Power is enough to two-tap Megiras, who isn't fast enough to make the hit rate go below like 40%. What a glow-up, huh?



After the tournament, Tesca comes in to congratulate us and talk more about the Dragon Tusk thing. Apparently we now need specifically a Dino/Naga and a Naga/Dino—a "Grape" and a "Stinger", according to Holly—to actually make the Dragon. That's gonna be some hunting. I imagine this was intended as a "sharing the Naga/Dino CD around the playground" kind of thing originally, but that doesn't really work with MR1DX, but I also don't just want to look it up on a guide...

Anyway, I said this update would be the end of 1000's career, but he's like 4 years old in Rank A and not showing any signs of slowing down yet! I'm really impressed! He's on the path to become as good as Turnip, probably. Can you imagine, again, what he'd be like if I didn't tank his Skill down to 50 in the first year? That Defense has been working out really nice for him, but I really should've just done Guard training instead of Mine.