I wanted to get back into writing about the leaked Monster: Ancient Cline prototype and datamining stuff that's in there, but I never really explained what this is or why I'm so excited, did I?
Now obviously, saying "it's a furry 2D fighting game" should be enough. That's catnip to me. But there's more to it and why I love it so much.
Monster's a doujin game from 2005, and it's really unique in design. It feels like a midway point between the fast combo anime fighters that were dominating at the time and something more oldschool, with a slightly slower and more methodical pace. Its signature system, the "shift" system, also adds a huge amount of variety to gameplay; you pick a defensive, offensive or combo-based style along with your character, and can then spend a super bar during battle to switch into your alternate mode which transforms the properties of every one of your moves for a limited time.
The character designs are interesting, too. This was a doujin game for a small audience, so he knew that the audience was a self-selecting circle of freaks. Why make a game filled with simple, straightforward characters when you could make weird, intricate fighting styles tailored to the exact kinds of weirdos who're going to be playing your game? And listen: I love weird over-complicated characters. I don't pretend to be good at them but I don't have to be. I just want to mess with weird intricate systems and see what I can make out of them, and Monster is the perfect fighting game for that.
Monster was a solo dev project by a single guy, Sho Kawakami1, but there's one big collaborative element: the character designs. Out of the ten characters in the game, he designed a few of them, but the rest were borrowed from his friends. It's a cute little snapshot of the Japanese furry scene in the mid-00s, and even though it all gels together pretty well it's got that mixed character design/art style thing that really sells the idea this was a passion project for a group of friends.
It wasn't a huge breakout hit like Melty Blood, but it definitely had a little scene going on in Japan and internationally. I got to play it online with a random player just once, but it was a great experience - I wish I'd been there when it was at the height of its popularity, but I didn't find it until maybe 2008 or 2009.
2005 was right in the middle of the fighting game dark ages. It was honestly kind of a weird time to be into fighting games. (If you're a fighting game old head you can skip this paragraph.) Fighting games had been in decline starting in the late 90s, and the "dark ages" pretty much starts with SNK's bankruptcy and Capcom giving up on 2D fighters in 2001. There were fighting games getting made, but they were scrappier and weirder. Smaller devs making niche games for the people still playing fighting games.
It's also about the time that doujin fighting games were getting big, so small indie games were finding players who were getting left behind by big fighting games dying. Obviously this was around the time Melty Blood had made it big2, but there were a lot of smaller games getting communities and having fun. As much as arcades were struggling, a few companies saw doujin games as an opportunity and started offering the more polished doujin devs the chance to expand their games for bigger commercial releases in arcades—like Melty Blood, or Akatsuki Blitzkampf.
Monster: Ancient Cline was supposed to be the big update for Monster, its proud moment in the sun. It was picked up by publisher Examu, the Arcana Heart company, for a commercial release on their new PC-based arcade platform - it would have gotten it in front of far more people than the original PC version, and it really seemed like he'd finally made the big time. It was announced in 2008, for release the same year, and the announcement showed a kind of incremental upgrade over the PC game: high-res versions of the original art, and six new characters - pretty ambitious for a game that only had ten to begin with.
Development kind of dragged on after that, but it finally got location tested in 2010 and it seemed like it was finally going to come out. That version was very different from what was shown off in 2008: completely new artwork for every character, which was drastically improved over the original game, and a slightly smaller cast of 14 characters including four new ones.
And then, after the long anticipation, it quietly disappeared. It was never publicly cancelled, but as far as I can tell ShoK simply burned out and wasn't able to finish it. There were a couple attempts to revive it by someone who may or may not own the rights (I'm not getting into that today...), but otherwise it just disappeared.
...until a PC build suddenly showed up on archive.org a few months ago. As far as I can tell this is probably an online testing build from before the location test; I'd already known that a few western players had been recruited for volunteer online playtesting in the leadup to the location test, but I hadn't found anyone who still had their copy. I guess someone else did!
The file dates give it a build date of December 3, 2009, or about two months before the location test. It's a very similar build, with the same set of characters and what looks like pretty much the same gameplay as what was seen at the location test. It seems very much like development petered out after that location test, so this is pretty close to the final build before it was cancelled.
But what's here is really interesting. It's already very, very playable, and it's far more different from the first game than I expected. It really feels like he was making some changes to the game itself and to the returning cast, rather than just an up-port of the original game with some new characters like it was announced as. I can understand how he burned out under the pressure to make something like this, but I'm grateful to have had the chance to play it.
I've already made a few posts in the Monster: Ancient Cline tag, and I'll keep tagging the rest of my posts to make them all easy to find. I don't know how organized I'll be exactly, but I'm going to start with a general systems overview before I start digging into specific character changes and cut content.
And in the meantime, if this sounds cool to you: you should play with me online!! You can get the original game here and Ancient Cline here.
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A pseudonym, which hasn't been active since Monster: AC was cancelled.
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First release 2002, after French-Bread had been making smaller-scale indie fighting games for years.
