Part 9: Rancher Mystery Dungeon

1Yr. 8Mo. 4Wk.





This update is going to be entirely out-of-character mechanical stuff; I'm not going to bother with the italics for that reason. The screenshots are all from the videos above, so you might want to watch them first for context; that's not necessary, though.



You may recall our monsters have Adventure Levels. By gaining experience on adventures, they gain levels, and with them, new skills. Some skills are battle skills, while others are useful on adventures (for instance, allowing us to search small holes).

What this means is that we no longer have to shell out thousands of dollars and an entire month to possibly learn a new skill. In fact, since we do it during weekend time, it doesn't even cut into training. However, monsters do increase in tiredness when they go on adventures, so you may have to rest them the next week when you wouldn't otherwise.



The red icon shows the percentage of our total energy that we have left, in pie chart form. We get more energy by taking along more and higher-leveled monsters. Incidentally, powerleveling by taking a high-level monster and two baby monsters to a high-level dungeon is not only possible but profitable; the young monsters will learn many techniques quickly--so long as your lead monster isn't KOed.

Next to the red icon, we can see the relative health of our monsters; they regenerate slowly as we run around.



Different items are good for different things. The Nunchaku can be given to a monster as a gift, reducing its stress. Other items can temporarily boost stats, reduce fatigue, or even improve the results of monster fusion. Some items also sell for a lot of money.



Fight whoosh! Random encounters are common on adventures. Naturally, as we get deeper into an area, the monsters we encounter get tougher; later areas will also have tougher monsters.



The monster in the ring when the fight ends gets twice as much experience as the others. We can freely change our accompanying monster out of combat...



...and in-battle too! If a monster's getting hurt, out of Guts, or just won't obey because you don't have a strong bond, you can swap in a different monster to finish the fight. If a monster gets KOed, one of your other monsters will jump in to save it, but then you can't use that monster for the rest of the dungeon, so be careful.



Under certain circumstances, you'll unlock a Team Up attack; I'm not sure what triggers this. Unfortunately, just getting it to unlock isn't enough; you have to then use it, and iScream decided to not listen to me, losing the benefits.



Monsters also sometimes survive a fatal attack with a single HP. This can happen to your monsters as well, but it tends to be more annoying than helpful, as (hopefully) you aren't cutting battles so close as to need to hope for just one more chance to hit.



Unique-looking chests like this contain extra-nice treasures; in this case, we find the ultimate object of our adventure. A LIF Tablet will unlock a goodie later, plot-wise.

So. We can adventure any weekend we don't want to do anything else (like participate in a tournament or go to town); we get items and, eventually, skills, but it tires our monsters out, which means less training. About how often do you think we should go on adventures?