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August 22, 2020

My favorite video game growing up was a PlayStation game called Monster Rancher. There were many sleepless sleepovers in my childhood where we would spend hours unlocking monsters and exploring new dimensions of the game.

The monster breeds were memorable. The most iconic was the one-eyed yellow monster Suezo who had an indelibly mischievous laugh. There were also familiar breeds like Plant, Hare, and Tiger. But others like Gali, a mystical magic-carpet sun god, and Monol, a monster who could be characterized as a flexible block of charcoal, were so imaginative I wish I lived in that world. Also adapted into a TV series, Monster Rancher was the first in a series of at least four games that I played, and in the later installments, they introduced new breeds like Mocchi, a pink monster with the likeness of the Japanese treat, and Color Pandora, the cutest thing.

The premise of Monster Rancher was straightforward. You trained monsters and battled against others in contests to increase your monsters’ rankings and win prizes. The game admittedly grew repetitive after raising a few monsters to the highest ranking, but what kept it entertaining past sunrise were the mechanics to generate monsters.

In Pokémon, the other monster game that evolved into childhood religion, new monsters were obtained primarily by catching them in the wild. The history in Monster Rancher is that God sealed the spirits of monsters in objects called disc stones, and in present day, monsters could be acquired by summoning them from these disc stones at the Shrine.

The disc stones in the game translated to CDs and DVDs in the real world. When you visited the Shrine, the game prompted you to take the Monster Rancher CD out of the PlayStation and insert a different disc, like another game, music, or a movie. After the console scanned the data on the disc and captured the spirit of the monster therein, you reinserted Monster Rancher, and that monster emerged. This technology was mind-blowing for third-grade Toshiki, and the creativity of this mechanism still impresses third-decade Toshiki. I have vivid memories scavenging my friends’ parents’ music collections, armful of plastic cases scattered on the floor.

Surrendering to the adorable Animal Crossing advertisements during escapist trips to Target and convincing myself that it would be the perfect quarantine pastime, I bought a Nintendo Switch as a 30th birthday gift to myself. Serendipitously, the Japanese version of Monster Rancher had recently been released on the Switch, and after figuring out how to download a Japanese game to my American console, I dove relentlessly into nostalgia.

Revisiting a game that’s more than 20 years old reminds me of the resurgence of the still older technology of vinyl records. It’s becoming commonplace for me to appreciate a record player and a shelf full of records at a friend’s apartment. As someone who typically listens to albums and soundtracks rather than playlists, I also started collecting records about a year ago. I would hardly call myself an expert of sound or, honestly, a consumer of good music, but since I started learning more about audio production, I appreciate that records transform the sensory enjoyment of music into something tactile. Especially now, to feel something physical I think is important.

I’m lucky that, for the most part, my work could be done remotely, and this summer I moved to Dallas to weather the pandemic with family. I dug up elementary school yearbooks and paintings from when I painted. I also acquired my dad’s old vinyl records. My portable Bluetooth-enabled record player is a futuristic upgrade compared to the giant wire-laden machine that my father previously owned, but riffling through ABBA, Marvin Gaye, and a TOEFL listening comprehension sample test transported me to a time when my existence was just two immigrants’ dream.

Alongside an old game and old music, another aging specimen that I’ve studied carefully during quarantine is myself.

I’ve been living with depression since ninth grade, and before that, I was living with something that I was trying to find a name for. Throughout my adolescence and adulthood, the feelings inside me oscillated between nice and crisis, and for the most part, I made it without damaging everything around me. A recent revelation is that I’ve been living with PTSD since 2015, and to find a name for it clarified critical moments in which I lost control of how I reacted. I was experiencing symptoms of PTSD. In the past year, I damaged everything around me.

When people describe how their year feels drawn out and report that standards of productivity have become unrecognizable, I think about how depression feels like that. In January, I remember going to sleep, wishing that the world would slow down. Without the language to express myself, I became my own conspiracy theorist. If everyone around me stopped, I could catch up. I would catch up on work. I would catch up on how I feel. In March, when the country started enacting lockdown, I was granted my wish, and now in August, I finally feel caught up.

On every FaceTime and WhatsApp, there has been much discussion of silver linings. Without New York, I spend time with family on a weekly basis. Without restaurants, I make Sonoko Sakai’s curry. Without social obligations, I mourn past relationships and form new connections with people I’ve known for years. Without an audience, I smile again in photographs.

Revisiting Monster Rancher at a time I’m in Dallas underscores the sentimentality of this game. The last time I experienced the game was here. When I started playing it on the Switch again, all the details reanimated childhood memories. The clunky 1990s graphics, the “Now Loading” screen, the different sounds it makes when you press A and B, pretty much everything was preserved from the classic game. Because of the format, however, they did adapt the monster generation feature. When you visit the Shrine, you’re no longer prompted to insert a different disc. Instead, the game opens a new window, checks to see if you’re connected to the internet, and presents a search bar where you can enter the name of any artist or album title. This database represents a million armfuls of CDs. I generated monsters from albums I owned as vinyl records and raised them.

When training Pokémon, monsters are programmed to have specific characteristics. Pokémon increase levels as they gain experience battling other monsters, and an oversimplification, the stats of a given Pokémon scale linearly as they level up. For example, a Pikachu will have a higher speed stat compared to a Charmander of the same level, both at level 5 and at level 100. Also, the techniques they can use during battle become available at predetermined levels. I think this system is standard for a video game, but I was also drawn to Monster Rancher because, as the trainer, I could determine what stats and techniques my monsters focused on and worked toward.

There are six stats in the game: life, strength, defense, skill, speed, and intelligence; and there were tasks that monsters performed to gain points in certain stats. Without getting too technical, I understand that a monster is inherently better at gaining some stats over others. For example, Suezo is talented at increasing its skill and intelligence by nature, but there was nothing stopping you from training a strong or defensive Suezo either. I liked that.

There also wasn’t a concept of leveling up, and instead, monsters aged and celebrated birthdays. Rather than acquiring a technique at a particular level or stage in their development, monsters learned techniques after successfully completing what could be described as training camps. The options to customize a monster and make it feel like a true companion felt limitless, and these mechanics felt more realistic. Like humans, simply gaining more life experience doesn’t mean that you automatically acquire knowledge or skills that you’re predetermined to. They’re earned through concentration and diligence.

Monster Rancher monsters could also get fat. Sometimes they ran away if you scolded them too much. They also died.

Because of the myriad of possibilities that could play out, I religiously utilized the Save function. Most outcomes in the game could be anticipated. Battles were scheduled at specific intervals, and before enrolling in a contest, you could evaluate whether your monster was strong enough to defeat opponents of a given ranking. The assistant in the game also narrated your monster’s stress level and mood, so it was simple to predict whether your monster would succeed in performing a task or learning a new technique. Nevertheless, it was ritual to save the game before every activity that could end negatively. In case I didn’t like what happened, if I lost a battle or failed to learn a new technique, I could quit the game, reopen it, and continue from saved.

On the PlayStation, the save mechanism involved a memory card. Instead of saving directly to the game itself, a player deposited their data onto a memory card that housed multiple save slots, and therefore, numerous iterations of a single storyline could be stored and retrieved. Perhaps because only a limited number of monsters could be raised at one time, I understand that this feature was popular. On the Nintendo Switch version of the game, two save slots were available initially, and more could be purchased.

Saving the game before every set of binary outcomes helped me nurture the perfect monster that boasted ideal stats, techniques, and no battles lost. For this method, only one save slot was sufficient, but in rare cases, I did utilize multiple save slots when resolving more long-term existentialist training decisions. What would happen if I raised my monster like this? What about raising it like that? How could I create a more perfect monster? I yearned to explore every set of possible conditions, and that pursuit would undoubtedly require more than just one save slot.

The act of iteratively engineering every span of time to result in success is reflective of my struggle to better myself. Thinking of the loud and silent moments where depression overcame me, I wonder how I could have changed the circumstances so that I would be the best iteration of me today. Playing an old game and listening to old music, I think deeply about my future.

There will be worse and better times, but depression isn’t something I have and then don’t have. It’s something I’ll always carry, but it’s my will whether it consumes me. The rhetoric that a mental health disorder is like fighting demons is incorrect. For me, fighting my demons was futile. I just had to learn how to live with them. Like my monsters, I’ll train and fail. I’ll fight and lose. I’ll get fat and die. But the ability to continue from saved is not only about correcting an unfavorable outcome.

This pandemic has been described as an opportunity for a cultural reset. The global movements toward political change and scientific trust inspire me. In the six feet around me, this year also serves as a personal reset. I don’t have a perfect iteration of myself from the past to continue from, but I have the power to decide how the future iteration of myself will turn out. In June, I celebrated a milestone birthday alone, but as Monster Rancher revealed, new knowledge and skills don’t come with age alone. I’m working to create something new.

Photo by Josh Phillips