Important Stats & Why - Monster Rancher 1
In the Monster Rancher series monsters will typically want to focus on one of 2 stats for dealing damage and one of three stats for defending themselves. As far as dealing damage goes you have Power and Intelligence, physical attackers will want to focus on Power and "casters" or ranged monsters will want to focus on Intelligence.
When it comes to defensive stats you have Life, Defense and Speed. Some monsters will combine two of these stats but typically you'll focus primarily on one of them and build your monster around that. Monsters like Worms typically will focus entirely on Life whereas Hare monsters will focus almost entirely on Speed. Other monsters like Golems and Monols will focus mostly on Defense.
Every monster breed in this game has different stat gains as well - this means that some stats they gain at a higher rate than others. If you've done any Work tasks and only got 2 or 3 of a stat and wondered why - this is your reason. To see the different stat gains for monsters I recommend you check out the Legend Cup's Monster Data webpage. It has a pretty solid write-up explaining all the different breeds and what you need to know.
To maximize your stats on a monster in Monster Rancher 1 you'll need to use items every single day to alleviate your Fatigue and Stress levels. You should never Rest your monster since it'll waste one week of time. Also, you should pick a few stats that will be important for your monster and ignore the rest. Depending on your monster and what you want to use your monster for the most important stats will change.
Now that we got all of the preamble out of the way, let's take a look at all of the stats you can raise and what each of them do.
(Lif) Life: Determines how much health (Life) you have during Battles.
(Pow) Power: Increases how much damage Power attacks deal and it also allows you to clear POW obstacles on Expeditions.
(Def) Defense: Determines how much damage is resisted when you are attacked.
(Ski) Skill: This is the stat that determines the accuracy of your attacks. It also helps you find items on Expeditions and clear some obstacles.
(Spd) Speed: Speed allows you to dodge attacks; the higher your speed the less chance you'll be hit by enemies.
(Int) Intelligence: Intelligence increases your damage with Int based attacks. It also helps you find items on Expeditions and clear some obstacles.
Fame: Fame is mostly meaningless, you'll earn it when you win tournaments and perform well. You need at least 40 Fame to do Expeditions but other than that I don't think it's used for much
Loyalty: Loyalty is important for monsters you plan to battle, the stat gauges how often your monster will obey your commands. Low Loyalty means he'll disobey you often and not attack when you tell him to, high Loyalty means he'll never disobey.
For those of you who are raising a monster that will be focusing mostly on battles you'll want to pick a damaging stat, a defensive stat and also raise Skill. So, let's say you're raising a Hare monster - you'll want to do Power, Speed and Skill as your main 3 stats and pretty much ignore everything else.
Since all monsters gain stats at different speeds, depending on what you want to accomplish determines what sort of monster you'll want to raise. Monsters that you plan on doing Expeditions with you'll want to raise a little differently, Speed would be useless for Expeditions so instead Power and Skill would be your main focus. If you didn't have too much of a penalty to Intelligence that would be good to raise too.
Almar's Favorite Battle Stats List:
Life: 5th favorite, Life is one of the least useful defensive stats in the game. If you have high Life but low Speed you're always going to get hit and if you have low Defense all of the hits will do a decent amount of damage. Some monsters focus on Life as their main defensive stat and they're typically the weakest monsters in the game at high ranks.
Power: 2nd most important stat for monsters that deal damage with Power based attacks. You'll also need to bring a monster with a high Power stat on all of the Expeditions to clear a lot of the POW obstacles.
Defense: 4th favorite, Defense is a good defensive stat and it's better than Speed for some monsters
Skill: #1 most important stat for all monsters in this game. No matter what type of monster you're raising or what you plan to do with it, you're always going to need Skill.
Speed: 3rd favorite, this is my favorite defensive stat even though it makes the battle basically come down to luck. With high enough Speed you can dodge almost everything thrown at you.
Intelligence: 2nd most important stat for monsters that deal damage with Int based attacks. This is also one of the more important stats for Expeditions as the better your Intelligence the better your odds of finding items.
Other Notes:
- Keep in mind that every stat has diminishing returns in this game. The first 200 of a stat are typically the most important. You will notice this with the defense stat, with 100 defense the hits you take aren't extreme but with 1 defense every hit is basically a one shot.
- The Steam Version of this game has a few changes, one of which that is important is that monsters gain more or less of a stat depending on their life stage. Monsters in their prime gain more than adolescent or elderly monsters. This is how future Monster Rancher games work too but this system wasn't added in their first release -- so they added it into the Steam remaster.