Your character is your normal, everyday variety Monster Rancher with an assistant named Colt, who also has a strong interest in Battle Cards. Tomorrow is her birthday, and after talking to her father, you become convinced that for a gift that you’ll give her the coveted Phoenix card that was passed down to from your own father. The next day for presents Colt receives flowers, a Battle Card tablet and – soon enough - the Phoenix card from you. After placing her own Battle Cards in the tablet, in addition to ones from Colt’s friend and the Phoenix card, a light sparks from the tablet, and Colt mysteriously disappears. It’s now up to you, Colt’s father and Colt’s friend to collect enough Battle Cards to fill the tablet up again and save Colt.

Understanding how to play Monster Rancher Battle Card truly requires the player to actually have a hands-on experience; it’s difficult to grasp through words. Nevertheless, here is a brief rundown. At the start one player will pick from two cards (the one with the rock is the winner) that will determine who will attack first. Next, five cards will be distributed to each player. The player who won the rock card will have the opportunity to attack using any cards that have a “GUTS” value of 0. Once that’s over with, you move to the GUTS phase. GUTS are what allow you to attack (each card has a separate GUTS value, ranging anywhere from six to eight), and picking the right cards for GUTS is crucial. Each card in your deck that you did not use during the attack phase can then be turned into a single GUT. Once you’ve chosen your GUTS, the second player will choose their GUTS, cards will be distributed and they will attack. Then the process repeats itself.

Losing can happen in a couple of ways. The most obvious is if all three of the Battle Cards lose all of their health points during the battle and are KO’ed. The other possibility is that you are careless with what GUTS cards are drawn out and end up using up the stack of 50 cards that are distributed at to each player at the start. If when you move to attack phase that you do not have enough cards in the stack to draw a five cards in your hand, you lose.

Understanding the battle engine does take some time, but the game provides enough detailed tutorials that it should not be hard to pick up within the first game or two. It seems simple on the surface, but there is a deep strategic layer to be exploited, which will become painfully obvious during an early match up where you and the opponent are forced to use the same exact cards, resulting in each having to muster up attacks and defenses based on strategy alone. A downfall to the battling as a whole is that the matches do not end quickly; it takes quite a bit of time to dwindle down the health of three cards. It won’t be uncommon to spend more than 20 minutes on a single match, so it does require some time dedication – especially when it comes to the tournament sections. This downfall is why, if I had to choose, it would seem more convenient and easier to sit down and spend that time on the portable GBC version, rather than on the PS one. That is merely simple preference on my part, however; yours may differ.

Compared to the 3D battle engine used in the other Monster Rancher titles on the PlayStation, there is slight disappointment in the visual sense when playing Monster Rancher Battle Card. All of the attacks, defenses, items, special attacks and the game environment take place in strictly 2D. Don’t get me wrong, there nothing wrong with 2D, but this isn’t fully animated, fantastic looking 2D, more like crude looking one framed sprite moving across a screen with a scrolling background 2D. It certainly is not the worst thing; this is a card game, but they're still somewhat second-rate nonetheless.

Collecting cards to advance the plot is easy enough. At first it consists of merely challenging the beginner opponents who have an extra card or two to share, but soon you will be entering into full-fledged tournaments that will give forth many powerful and necessary cards, but also are much more time consuming and difficult to pass through. Making sure to manage your skill cards is also crucial; if you have too many skill cards thrown on a weak and pointless attack, it will significantly weaken the overall battle scheme. Making sure to properly balance what monsters are in what line ups is also taken into consideration, since you surely don’t want three super powerful attackers that can only attack when you have four or five guts powered up; small one or two hits can go a long way to determining the final outcome of a match.

Monster Rancher Battle Card certainly won’t win any awards for visual prowess, but it is an incredibly addictive and entertaining card game in its own right and definitely worth picking up. It might be worthwhile to check out the cheaper and more convenient Game Boy Color version; while the plot is different, the game rules are exactly the same. Either way, it's nice to see Tecmo branching Monster Rancher out, and doing so successfully.