Tero beats PSX Monster Rancher 2 Part 30

Part 30 of a playthrough of Monster Rancher 2 for the PSX, played on offical hardware and with no save scumming.

Playlist start at:
   • Tero beats PSX Monster Rancher 2 Part 1  

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Two of the most important items in Monster Rancher 2 are the Silver and Gold Peaches, which reduce your monster's age when you give them to it. You can only use each one once, but they reduce age by 25 and 50 weeks respectively, so they're extremely powerful. The age reduction is done as straight subtraction from their current age, so you want to feed the peaches 25 and 50 weeks after your monster enters its prime growing period for maximum benefit. Note that if you battle you'll have to feed earlier because each battle adds 3 extra weeks to your monster's age.

Of course, this makes it important to determine exactly when your monster enters prime, which is the 5th stage of their development. There's no in-game notifaction (well, Colt CAN tell you about it, but she very rarely does), the main way to tell is to look at their size. Monsters have 3 sizes, and they grow once at stage 3 (Adolescence) and again at stage 5 (Prime). Unfortunately, since their shape doesn't change at all, only their size, you have to watch quite carefully to tell when it happens. The best way is to check how tall they are compared to the feeding window at the beginning of each month since the camera location is fixed here. Your stat growths also improve in Stage 5, of course, but this is a bit unreliable since the exact gains after a drill are random.

Unfortunately, I was watching so carefully for Cookie's size change (because I missed it with Scarlet) that I actually ended up thinking she was in Stage 5 when she was only in Stage 4, so it was her 4th stage that I ended up extending with the peaches. Luckily, stage 4 is only slightly weaker than stage 5, but it probably cost me about 50 points of Def and Lif from inferior Swim drills. Don't make the same mistake I did, make sure to determine your height against the feeding box accurately. The change is quite substantial for most monsters.

"Tero, this is an important time for Cookie,
I guess you could say it's in the prime of its life.
Lolol psyche! No prime notifications for you!
You're on your own for this one."