Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is selling well in Japan with physical copies being hard to come by

Bandai Namco Entertainment has acknowledged that physical copies of Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher are difficult to find at some retailers in Japan and apologized for the situation via the game’s official Japanese Twitter account.

Sure enough, the game was sold out across the online retailers we checked. Even the Koei Tecmo Games official online store isn’t planning to ship copies until November 16, so it looks like fans will be having trouble getting their hands on a physical copy for a while. As for the download version, even as of October 28, over a week since the game’s release, it was sitting at the number 3 spot of the Nintendo eShop download rankings.

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher is a monster-raising simulation game for the Nintendo Switch and a collaboration between the Ultraman series and Monster Rancher, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary. It was developed by Koei Tecmo Games, the company behind the Monster Rancher series.

Unlike Monster Rancher games we’ve seen so far, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher has players raise Ultra Kaiju. These Ultra Kaiju range from Kaiju that appear in the Ultraman series to Kaiju that are original to the game for a total of over 200 Kaiju.

In a conversation between the game’s producer Kentaro Matano of Bandai Namco Entertainment and Monster Rancher series executive producer Kazumi Fujita of Koei Tecmo Games, they talked about steering Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher toward showing a cuter side to the normally ferocious monsters. These cute Kaiju and their silly reactions show a side to the Kaiju that can’t be seen in their original works and have drawn a lot of attention on social media. Judging by the response, it looks like they were right about which direction to take the game.

Additionally, the popular VTuber Inugami Korone began streaming the game just before its release date. That first broadcast has surpassed 400,000 views as of this writing. Another popular streamer by the name of Junichi Kato streamed the game on its launch date and that broadcast recorded over 870,000 views. Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher receiving exposure through popular streamers and social media likely got a lot of eyes on the game and contributed to its favorable sales.

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-10-28 21:46 JST)