Happy October everyone, It’s my favorite time of the year once more, and to celebrate, we’re taking a look at one of the most under-appreciated Classic Halloween Gems in all of video games, Monster Lab! For its first ever time being analyzed from a vs perspective at that! I must say, I love this game, its amazingly well designed, great story, super fun mechanics, fantastic lore and witty writing, really was a classic of my childhood! Yet no one really talks about it, the only reason I ever played it is my mom got it for me for my birthday one year on the DS, knowing only the title and assuming I would like it cause I loved monsters. Boy was that a lucky break as to this day it's in my top 3 favorite games Ever and I’m super excited to share it with you!
Building Tier:
This is the basic civilian tier of the verse, containing all the ‘normal’ inhabitants of The Uncanny Valley, a vast and spooky landscape right out of 1930’s Universal. The Uncanny Valley is large, quite large, containing 6 completely different biomes, stretching across an entire Sea, an entire mountain range and contains numerous clouds that eclipse these mountains in size. Within it also houses multiple large cities, a vast unexplored forest area and a Swamp called the Neverglades, which is similar in size to the real life Everglades national park in Florida, which covers an area of 7,200 square miles alone. So the Cast of characters is fairly diverse.
Characters in this tier are at least Large Building Level, scaling off the player scientist being able to tank the massive explosion that blows the roof off a castle and expands into the far distance when failing an experiment, point blank I may add. Speedwise they would at least scale to the speed feats of Johnny Legless, who can run around the entirety of the tombstone rise in under a minute, which given its sheer size would be in the High Hypersonic range, albeit their reaction speed would be much more impressive.
This Tier includes all the Mad Scientists, these are people who create large monsters to fight and do tasks on their behalf. While each mad scientist has their speciality, every single one of them is required to have extensive knowledge in two completely different schools of science and one school of sorcery, or in other words there are a Lot of genius level characters in this verse. Most scientists can invent tech that lets them generate powerful force fields that vaporize people on contact, missiles that can shoot down MFTL alien space crafts and shrinking tech that can reduce someone down to nothing, so they can Really bolster their stats very quickly. Wizards like Señor De La Sombra can levitate, see the future, interact with spirits, purify evil, and open portals to the Astral Rift. The most impressive Mad Scientist however is none other than Baron Mharti, the main villain of the game, whose own Mad Science skills were enough to create and manipulate regenerating evil vines, invent tech that will drain away the energy of all his foes in the entire Uncanny Valley, and magically create an alchemical maze that spatially warps you through the astral plane, which can easily trap someone forever.
Beyond the Mad Scientists there are a few more characters and traits to note. Numerous characters in this tier have teleportation, as well as there being a large amount of intangible entities like ghosts and spirits, a strategy that you also can't use against the verse due to the massive amount of Anti-Intangibility attacks that exist here. Super senses are strong in this tier too, with Alien’s like Zig able to scan whole areas for tons of surrounding things, as well as the forest dryad’s who can sense the energies of the entire Wild Woods, NTM manipulate Earth and Fire, and presumably the other elements too.
So delving into effective strategies, we get interesting results. Manipulators and Stealth strategies aren’t very viable due to the high amounts of genius characters and anti stealth found here, the latter of which is especially bad because if you can’t hide, it’s really easy to be trapped or blitzkrieged by the scientist’s tech if you aren’t quick. You are going to need a way to get around intangibility, but it would also be pretty useless to try and use intangibility against them in exchange. There's also Forcefields, Remote Elemental attacks, teleportation, precognition and Especially the spatial manipulation to further prevent one from getting to the foes here to take them down, at the very least quickly. But what Flaws DOES this tier have? Well there's the fact that not even a single person in this tier is an actual fighter. In fact most of them are somewhat cowardly or clumsy and specifically make or request monsters to do fighting for them. Skill is pretty abysmal at this tier and pretty much any good fighter who could make it into close range with one of them would kick their butt, so if you could use some powers like teleportation or dimensional portals to get the drop on them it would be pretty strong. Other strong tactics would be utilizing Mental Attacks, taking control of their technology or using some type of immobilizing ability. A perfect example would be,
Hashi:
Hashi from The Black Heart series. Hashi can endure the force of a terminal velocity fall and survive a hit from Final’s lasers which can vaporize holes through people, he also has superhuman speed, not to the level of this tiers characters, but he doesn’t need it.
Hashi is a professional assassin with loads of fighting experience against numerous supernatural entities, and is able to hit ghosts and spirits just fine. Hashi is also able to teleport around and even to other dimensions thanks to Bako, and therefore cannot be BFR’d. It would be easy for him to teleport to any threat within this tier directly and overpower them in a physical brawl. Hashi can manipulate plants and use this to make bindings, projectiles bladed attacks and plant traps, as well as regenerate himself from injuries. Also Hashi can tunnel himself underground into a root system and reemerge practically anywhere even in different form, which would allow him to bypass defenses and make him next to impossible to target with rockets and other coordinated distance attacks.
That said if the speed gap is to concerning, you could always go.
Twice:
Twice from My Hero Academia. Twice is powerful enough to go head to head with Shoto and cut through his ice, which he can expand into massive building sized glaciers, as well as keep up with his boss, Tomura who can dodge bullets and therefore would be pretty on par with the characters here.
Twice is a well rounded fighter in all regards but his quirk is pretty broken, it allows him to make fake clones of anyone he knows, including himself but he shys away from that for personal reasons. Twice’s clones have the same memories, personality, physical capabilities and powers of whoever he was copying which gives him the ability to amass a small army of powerful people to use. He can make copies of Kurogiri to allow him to teleport to anyone and take them down, as well as escape dimensional sealing, Mr. Compress to spatially seal away any enemy and lots of other powerhouse characters to take them all down at once in one fell swoop of a coordinated strike. He could even make copies of some of the people In this tier and use them to take down others.
That said, Twice is a tad bit mentally unstable, and would be at risk if discovered too quick, for a stronger option,
Alphys:
Alphys the science dragon from Undertale. Alphys was able to deflect away casual attacks from Flowey, suggesting she should scale to ‘beginning of the game’ Frisk’s small building level, supersonic feats. These feats may not be as high as others but Alphy’s big brain more than makes up for it. Alphys can fly on her jetpack, manipulate electricity and hack into advanced technology. Like she could Literally hack into and reroute all the missiles that could target her back to sender, spy on the entire Valley, and make powerful armies of robots. Also Alphys as a monster can generate danmaku style astral attacks that harm souls so she has more than the means to destroy anyone in this series. While she cannot teleport to them directly, she can essentially take out all the reasons this would have been necessary, she could even calculate her way out of a Astral Rift with total ease, like characters with less good intelligence feats have done, she's the safe choice, a Mad Scientist and Monster in one.
Island tier:
Here we get into the powerhouses of the verse, or as it should be properly known, The Monster Tier. Monsters are superpowered artificial beings, made of body parts constructed from mad science and brought to life via a bolt of lightning. Monsters run on a battery housed within their torso that they must continually charge electricity into to use their powers, this is electricity they can generate themselves, making them wholly self sufficient. As long as this torso remains they cannot die due to it being their only vital part, and the only ways to defeat a monster ingame are to either Destroy its Torso, or knock off all its limbs so it cannot attack.
Monsters are well into the Island level rating due to numerous feats like Krake being able to conquer the entire Neverglades and coat it in his radiation, Boneshroud being able to spread his evil energies across the equally sized Tombstone Rise, Gloomthorn spreading himself over the whole of the Wild Woods as well as causing an earthquake in it just by emerging, and The Player’s monsters being able to endure walking into force fields that can reduce a person to particles. Speed wise however, Monsters are REALLY fast, being able to casually dodge attacks from electricity, lasers, and actual sunlight at a point blank range, and most impressively, move comparable to The Mad Scientist’s Rockets, which could shoot down Zig’s UFO as it flew by Earth. Zig says he’s from 7 galaxies over, which would put him in the Tadpole galaxy, about 420 million lightyears away from here, and states his friends should be here to pick him up in 50 of our years, which means Zig’s ship, and by extension these rockets must move 8.4 Million times the speed of light.
Going into the specifics of monsters, each monster body part is formed under a specific type of mad science. There are 3 types of Mad Science, Mechanical mad science, which includes killer robots, cyborgs, alien space crafts, jack-o-lanterns, killer puppets and armor monsters. Biological mad science, which includes mutants, plant monsters, werewolves, monsterous animals, cryptids, giant insects, superhuman beasts, maniacs, blob monsters and scarecrows. And Alchemical mad science, which includes vampires, zombies, mummies, ghosts, rock monsters, skeletons, dragons, gargoyles, mud monsters, ogres, elementals and demons.
Each of these branches has certain advantages and disadvantages over one another, for example Mechanical monsters are the most physically powerful and can easily overpower Biological ones, but they have no defense against the haxy abilities of the Alchemical Monsters. Meanwhile Biological monsters crafty intellect and powerful souls let them resist Alchemical attacks and trump them. The Strongest monsters are made up of body parts from all 3 branches of mad science.
Monsters can possess a wide arsenal of abilities depending on the parts they are composed of. Many types of monsters can Levitate or Fly, Regenerate from injuries, Breathe without Oxygen and sense their surroundings to a superhuman degree. A lot of monsters are wholly or partially intangible or logia beings, and Every monster has Anti-Logia and Anti-Intangibility to deal with this. Particularly well made monsters can have powers like Telekinesis, Gravity Manipulation, Electromagnetism, Attack Reflection or Invisibility as well as damaging traits such as being explosive, radioactive, acidic, or venomous.
To go into the powers available to standard monsters the player can use to fight, monsters can use claws, teeth or a broad arsenal of attached blades or bludgeoning tools upclose. They can breathe noxious fumes, spit acid or venom, roar sonic attacks and shoot lasers from their eyes.
Monsters can use numerous different elemental attacks involving water, fire, oil, smoke, steam, earth, electricity, lava, darkness and light. Plus they can fire lots of different projectile attacks from Bullets, heat seeking Missiles and Mortars, to Seeds and Magical blasts.
But we’re not done yet, as this tier also includes the Boss monsters, the powerful beasts created by Baron Mharti himself to conquer each section of the Uncanny Valley. These Maim 6 as no one calls them, possess exclusive powers that the player is forced to overcome.
Residentula is able to perfectly disguise himself as a house and has wide reaching detection and communication abilities, making him an ideal stealth opponent. He can also generate armies of hopping fire breathing Jack-O-Lanterns with building level Hypersonic stats. Even more extreme than this would be Boneshroud, who has necromancy powers strong enough to raise a massive Zombie Army up from the entire Tombstone Rise at once, as well as having the ability to boost his own stats with dark magic.
Probably the most haxy of these monsters is Gloomthorn, a plant monster who can manipulate plants and bats. Gloomthorn was able to spread himself throughout the entirety of The Wild Woods as a flower bio weapon, which spewed poison that transmutated whatever it hit into Mharti’s evil thorns. And lastly there’s the final boss of the game, Thrunch the ultimate monster. This powerful Angel-Centar thing is composed of parts from all 3 branches of mad science and utilizes Celestial energy to attack. His torso is so good at regenerating that practically the only way to defeat him is to knock off all his other limbs first.
So let’s look into what strategies would be effective here. Monsters here mostly use offensive abilities true, but their defensive abilities tend to be fairly potent to make up for the lack of volume. As for mobility, they are WAY faster than most fictional characters at this tier so I’d say they're doing fine in that department too. They are no slouches in secondary stats either, monsters are self sufficient, seasoned fighters with ghost powers, tons of long ranged attacks and are stated to be potentially as smart as the scientists who made them.
That said, they Do have a clear weakness, Lightning. Not so much vulnerability to lightning, but a Reliance on Lightning. Lightning is what gives monsters life, and furthermore it powers all of a monster's abilities and attacks, and even is what Monsters use to heal and repair themselves. Someone who would have a means of stealing, absorbing, disabling or otherwise cutting off their access to lightning, would be able to kill them regardless of what their defenses are. Piggybacking off of that, there are a lot of elemental attacks in this game, but one I always noticed was strangely absent was Ice, which seems like a pretty obvious one to include. But as it turns out it makes sense that Monsters in this verse can’t use it because it would freeze their electrical circuits and disable them. So Cryokinetic abilities would be strong too. Lastly a good strategy would surprisingly be to appear as a non threat, Monsters tend to be prideful and avoid fights with foes they think are weak when possible. With that in mind, some characters I think would be OP in this tier include,
MiMi:
MiMi from the Invader Zim series. MiMi is a heavily modified, upgraded SIR unit, and as such scales massively above the feats of the outdated GIR, who could tank the impact of The Wettening Balloon worth over half a gigaton, and fly interplanetary distances at speeds Dozens of times the speed of light.
MiMi would not come off as a threat at all due to her ability to holographically disguise herself as a Cat, as well as her stealth assassin skills keeping her from doing things directly. MiMi has MASSIVE Super Senses similar to GIR, able to see basically everything in the star system. She can also fly, fire lasers, massively extend her limbs, hack into and take control of technology and regenerate from immense injury. But really the best reason to pick her is her ability to release a huge wave of nanobots from her head in an area of effect attack that cuts all surrounding things off from their powersource. This was able to cripple Zim’s entire base instantaneously and would one shot any monster immediately as well.
That said if they discover her quickly, she won’t last. For the save option.
Letty Whiterock:
You can always use Letty Whiterock (outside of Winter) from the Touhou Project Series. Letty is significantly more powerful than Cirno the ice fairy, who could weave through particles of light, and toss enormous spires of ice at highly relativistic speeds putting the KE in the Gigatons, she would have stats quite similar to the boss monsters here.
Letty is the youkai of Winter itself, and as such has Extremely powerful cold manipulation abilities. Letty could completely freeze the circuits of everything around her with total ease which would obviously be a super potent one shot ability against all monsters. But she can also easily take any of them head on too with her flight, danmaku attacks, Low Godly regeneration, and the ability to hit Logia and Intangible beings. Also if you really wanna be mean to this tier Letty could simply wait till Winter where her stats will rise to the point she’d solo the verse, but she doesn’t need that to take this tier down, especially because, let's be real, she doesn't exactly look tough or scary.
Although she isn’t the perfect counter.
Chromastone:
Chromastone, Ben 10’s 26th Alien from the Ben 10 series. Chromastone is powerful enough to take serious blows from Vilgax, and Fly across the Galaxy at MFTL speeds that should put him in the same ballpark as the monsters here, if not with a slight speed advantage.
Chromastone’s Real strength is his potent energy manipulation abilities, he is able to absorb literally any type of energy, electricity, light, radiation, even magic into his body, to an up to planetary level. Not only does this mean he could go into their power cores and drain them of energy with his presence, but almost any attack they try to throw at him he can simply absorb and blast right back. Chromastone can also fly and generate powerful force fields, so even if they were to all gang up on him it would be super easy for him to simply evade long enough to drain them.
