Many people never finish their MR1 book, due to those few missing subcodes. However, a few do have complete books, due to using a Gameshark. I wanted to see all the monsters, so I used the code; however, when looking at the code, I saw the last digits of the code, the ones that alter the ram itself, were not complete. So, I changed them to FFFF, which would open every entry in that area.

The results were astounding.

In the Monster Rancher book, there are 460 slots:

1 for each possible combination of all 20 main breeds and 23 sub breeds. (The extra 3 sub breeds are the three possible /???'s some monsters have.)

So, I took all 460 of these images and, of course, put them into a neat table for your enjoyment. Now before I provide a link, I need to explain some things:

Each main breed is divided into 2 rows, since that is how it's done in hex.

1) Each breed covers 2 rows, and are in order by main breed. They are, in order: Dino, Golem, Tiger, Pixie, Worm, Jell, Suezo, Hare, Gali, Monol, Naga, Plant, Dragon, Magic, Hengar, Nya, Ape, Ghost, Doodle, and Disk. ??? is not a main breed.

2) The first row is the main breed and its first 12 sub-breeds. They are, in order: Dino, Golem, Tiger, Pixie, Worm, Jell, Suezo, Hare, Gali, Monol, Naga, and Plant.

3) The second row is the main breed and its 11 last sub-breeds. They are, in order: Dragon, Magic, Hengar, Nya, Ape, Ghost, Doodle, Disk, ???, ???, and ???.

4) If such a breed does not exist (like a second or third Golem/???) then an error image is usually displayed. Sometimes, like in the case of extra worms, a blank page is displayed. Notice the colors of these pages for some breeds. One notable exception is that of a third Jell/???. This was not edited by me; it appears this way in the game. It looks as if someone was going to edit the image, then stopped, and left it that way.

5) If such a breed from Dragon on does not exist (like Dragon/Dino) then it is replaced by a picture of the main breed, a good tactic to avoid errors in the game, such as the "Missingno." error in the Pokemon series.

6) The main breeds from Dino to Plant do not have subreeds from Dragon to Disk, and thus, all of these 8 entries are duplicates of the following 8 entries. Why they did this is unknown. It may have been a compensation for errors like above. Note that 8 is the ammount of bits in one byte.

I hope you like the list. Please comment on it. It is located at:

https://mk.sepwich.com/Monster_Rancher/book/index_hex.html

Cool stuff! Dialup users beware! Many pictures!

This is interesting to see, especially since this was Tecmo's first MR game, and they were coming up with protocols as they went.

I know that MR2 has more issues because it was in the middle of being developed for PocketStation support, then Sony told them to drop it, and they spent a lot of time editing that out instead of finishing some work on the rest of teh game.

Ah yes, I forgot, it's a good 2.5 MB, sorry I forgot to mention.

If I can find the time, I might be able to look into MR2's stuff to see if there's anything interesting. I recently started college, which is why I don't post much; I actually did this work weeks ago, I just didn't have any webspace to post it on.

I'm trying to get all the MR2 monsters legit; I got all MR1 monsters aside from the 3 missing subcodes all by playing, no cheating. But time constraints and interest may make me just look into MR2 before then.

Since MR2 has so many more, there might be a lot of interesting things in there :o

Holy cow! Someone has a lot of free time on their hand! lol!

I once had an idea to do something like this but never got around doing it. Pretty cool to see all of those aligned in a nice table. :)

Yeah, when I get bored, great things happen. I tend to get into a hobby very badly for a while, then take a long break. Maybe in the next few weeks or months I'll be inspired to do it for MR2.

Also, I noticed an interesting thing when it comes to the icons: they're all pre-made, not made by a script. I can tell by a simple error:

Apocolis (Dragon/Henger)'s icon is the wrong color. That brown color is used for monsters who's subtype is Ape (which, interestingly, is only seen on Ape/Ape).

Another interesting thing is the seperate models. When I looked at the full book with all the entries, I also used the view feature to look at them all. Many of them were the right model with the wrong skin, or vice versa. The easiest example to notice is Pixie; there are several different Pixie models, with the different ears.

I'll keep you all posted on any new discoveries.