Games in the pet or monster raising genre are not exactly unpopular, but I do consider them more niche since I feel it takes a particular kind of person to find the idea of a game where hours of grinding is THE core mechanic entretaining. Most of these games have extra mechanics or details to add some variety and make them feel different from one another since the core idea is the same (raise your glorified tamagotchi untill is strong enough to do X thing), and that's where I feel MR2 shines the most, in these extra details and how it balances them.

For starters and to go quickly over this, the game looks fantastic. I was surprised by how good everything looks and the extent that they got for certain details. There's examples like how every single tournament has it's own actually unique and fully modeled 3D trophy, how certain attack animations on hybrid monsters look like a proper adaptation of the actual original animations of the two other monsters it came from, or just looking at your monster wander around in your ranch and catching how some details on the model's textures are way more detailed than what they seemed at first. The game also has plenty of 2D sprites and those look very pretty too, almost like a painting. The whole world of MR2 feel like a combination of steampunk/rural/ancient fantasy that is coated with these warm hues of color all over. I am amazed at how beautiful this game is.

Now talking about the actual meat of the game, I find amazing just how complex it is, the way you can influence every simgle thing you can do with your monster, is a bit hard at the beggining since the game is very vague about how stuff works, and in a game like this it can be frustrating since it can cost you time and money, but I feel that here is where the actual challenge of it is, because once you pick up how things work via trial and error then there's actually a lot of freedom in how to raise different kinds of monsters. You can be cruel with them which can make them stronger in some ways but shorten their lifespam, you can use "steroids", you can be caring and doting with them, you can raise them just to make money while you plan to breed your actual champion, the developers thought about a lot of stuff to keep you entretained. Again, I'm just amazed at how literally every way that you can train a monster has it's pros and it's cons, it's advantages and it's ways to kill your monster, and finding that balance is fun (I don't know why I liked the whole math side of this fun as well, I don't tend to care about specific formulas with games like these). To me the most telling detail is how the pause menu only has the options to go back to play or reset, which you can do even faster than in other games, and since MR2 has a lot of RGN events this feels intentional.

Battles are simple and fun but can have a surprising level of strategy to them sometimes, not much more to say about them.

This game has so much charisma as well, I found myself liking some of the monsters designs way more than I expected, maybe since you spend a lot of time with them and going through multiple events together and seeing them react to things helps you warm up to them.

And speaking of events there are so many, some necessary to unlock certain things but other that you can do just for the fun of it. Minigames, expeditions, upgrades etc. If you play the game normally you are bound to experience a bunch of them, but this is also a game from the era of super cryptic event based rewards that you can only get if you have a guide or knew a friend who did them too, and I like those games and I feel that in this case it adds to the mistery of this world.

This is a game that for some people is gonna be fun but are gonna be burnt out by in a while, but for others (like me) is gonna check every point of what makes this genre of sims so fun and worth to keep playing, and I don't think I can say the same about many other games like this...





Or maybe I have an addiction problem, idk.