Or, otherwise known as, the game with the worst name EVER.
Hello again! In lieu of my recent acquiring of a brand spankin' new, shiny DS, I decided to reward myself with a new game for it, to accompany the Final Fantasy game I got a week or two ago. This time it was Dragon Quest Monster: Joker, the latest in the Dragon Quest (Or Dragon Warrior for all us Americans) Monster series, which is a spin off of the regular Dragon Quest series, which was recently made popular again by the release of Dragon Quest VIII.
To those of you in the know, this review should come as no surprise, but to establish the series to the rest of you, the Dragon Quest Monster series has long been regarded as one of the deeper monster collection/training games to come out of the primordial ooze that was shat out by Pikachu and all of his pals. The first two games came out on the original gameboy and are regarded as classics from that system, so it's been a bit surprising that we have had to wait so very long to get our hands on a new one.
Fortunately, it seems, the game has been worth the wait. DQM:J is so far the best in the series, both in terms of accessibility and gameplay. Gone are the dungeon-crawling elements of the previous games (which revolved around going into portals that led to monster infested "stages" and having to survive far enough to fight the boss at the end.). Instead, this game takes more than a few notes from it's bigger brother, DQVIII--you travel around impressively large overworlds and seamlessly slip into caves and towers that dot the large islands that make up the game's world.
To wit, this is possibly the most technically advanced DS game I've ever played. The game is GORGEOUS, with fully 3-D environments intermixed with 3-D cel-shaded models, all made up in the stylized proportions of series artist Akira Toriyama (love him or hate him, he's recognizable.). You can see how grand the game's actual design is from the get-go, as you walk on a cliff and stare off at a distant island and make out the individual details of that island's landmarks. It fully encapsulates the "go-everywhere" nature of Dragon Quest VIII while translating it into the portable language.
Monsters roam the world, visible for you to run into and engage, and there's no slow down, even when there are a large number of monsters on the field. Plus, speaking of the monsters, they animate incredibly smoothly, with individual animations for different attacks, depending o their types, and the wide, wide variety of monsters available to you constantly affords you a sense that you are never seeing the same thing twice (even if there are crap tons of recolors.).
Battles are fun. They can be as fast as you want, with you being able to press a button and your monsters carrying out whatever they feel is best (and they are usually pretty damn smart about usin magic and not using magic--I've yet to see them try to cast a fire spell on an enemy that absorbs it.) or you can set up individual orders for them to carry out, if you want to try and conserve MP and other valuable resources.
Battles can range from very easy to surprisingly difficult, especially when you are trying to build up your newly acquired monsters. Monsters in this game are recruited through, effectively, intimidation--you have your monsters "scout" the enemy, and thus try to impress them with a show of your strength. The stronger your monsters, the easier it is to recruit other monsters to your cause. This gives a big incentive for leveling up and fighting monsters over and over again, in order to try and win their hearts and minds.
Unlike every other Dragon Quest game, money is very easy to come by, and besides items, you can also buy spears and whips to equip to your monsters, thus giving them extra damage against certain enemies (like slimes) or else allowing them to attack all enemies at once. It's a kind of simple gesture, but greatly appreciated to give you something to think about besides just synthesis and skill points.
Synthesis is a rather large part of the game as well. Once you have two monsters that are level 10, you can fuse them together and create a new, souped up monster of epic proportions, that shares the other two monsters' skills and traits. With the wide variety (over 200) of monsters to choose from, synthesis is pretty much a game within itself.
Better yet, all of these things I've mentioned work nigh PERFECTLY. There's even a Day/Night system, where at night different monsters roam than during the day, and new things can be found depending on if you look for them at night or during the day.
But, alas, the game has some flaws, and the flaws can be glaring. First of all, these "flaws" are nothing that hardcore DQ fans are not already familiar with, the first one being:
GRINDING.
Oh god, yes, the GRINDING. This game doesn't just encourage grinding, it forces it down your throat with all the subtlety of a barbed-wire enveloped club. Grind, grind, grind grind grind grind grind, you'll be doing a LOT of grinding and while the results more than make up for the effort, a lot of people may get sick and tired of fighting the exact same monsters over and over again--especially with some of them being difficult enough to force you to limp back to the healing spots after just five battles. First of all, none of your monsters learn any abilities until at least level 5, wherein you can then allocate your skill points. Monsters cannot be synthesized until level 10--and, trust me when I say this, it takes a lot longer to get to level ten than you may think.
As the monsters get harder, of course, exp gets higher, and it's highly likely that by the midpoint of the game the grinding WILL decrease, but come on! The Dragon Quest series is somewhat reviled in America because of things like this, and making this game almost MORE grindtastic than the PS2 counterpart is NOT going to win you any points, no matter HOW wonderous your monster-taming abilities are.
Besides grinding, though, I haven't really gotten so far as to see any real troubles with the game. It's got a STORY, per se, or maybe a slim skeletal ghost of one--in monster training games, with the exception of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the story is not something you are really playing for, so there's no real need to get upset at it, and for what it's worth, the plots got some interesting bits to it that make the surrounding atypical "battle tournament" setting all the more enjoyable.
End line is that this game is probably one of the best RPGs on teh DS. If you like Pokemon, you'll likely enjoy graduating to the bigger boys of monster raising, such as this game, and if you liked Dragon Quest, chances are you already own this, but how about the rest of you? Well, the game's addictive. It's terrifically addictive and if you can get a thrill out of spending hours fighting and fighting and fighting just to get the ONE FINAL LEVEL and be able to create that super powerful ubermonster to lay your foes to waste, than you may want to pick this game up. Heavens, it's just a DS game--what else are you going to do with 30 dollars, and you may actually enjoy yourself.
Of course, if you hate RPGs, slowness, quirky characters, monsters, cel-shading, or just about anything that doesn't involve sticking a sharp object through somebody's head and watching their bloody carcass flutter in the wind, you may not like this game. But, then again, you'll probably be too busy sodomizing kittens and immolating parakeets to be reading this review anyway.
END RESULT: Very, Very Good.
RECCOMENDED? Yes.
Hello again! In lieu of my recent acquiring of a brand spankin' new, shiny DS, I decided to reward myself with a new game for it, to accompany the Final Fantasy game I got a week or two ago. This time it was Dragon Quest Monster: Joker, the latest in the Dragon Quest (Or Dragon Warrior for all us Americans) Monster series, which is a spin off of the regular Dragon Quest series, which was recently made popular again by the release of Dragon Quest VIII.
To those of you in the know, this review should come as no surprise, but to establish the series to the rest of you, the Dragon Quest Monster series has long been regarded as one of the deeper monster collection/training games to come out of the primordial ooze that was shat out by Pikachu and all of his pals. The first two games came out on the original gameboy and are regarded as classics from that system, so it's been a bit surprising that we have had to wait so very long to get our hands on a new one.
Fortunately, it seems, the game has been worth the wait. DQM:J is so far the best in the series, both in terms of accessibility and gameplay. Gone are the dungeon-crawling elements of the previous games (which revolved around going into portals that led to monster infested "stages" and having to survive far enough to fight the boss at the end.). Instead, this game takes more than a few notes from it's bigger brother, DQVIII--you travel around impressively large overworlds and seamlessly slip into caves and towers that dot the large islands that make up the game's world.
To wit, this is possibly the most technically advanced DS game I've ever played. The game is GORGEOUS, with fully 3-D environments intermixed with 3-D cel-shaded models, all made up in the stylized proportions of series artist Akira Toriyama (love him or hate him, he's recognizable.). You can see how grand the game's actual design is from the get-go, as you walk on a cliff and stare off at a distant island and make out the individual details of that island's landmarks. It fully encapsulates the "go-everywhere" nature of Dragon Quest VIII while translating it into the portable language.
Monsters roam the world, visible for you to run into and engage, and there's no slow down, even when there are a large number of monsters on the field. Plus, speaking of the monsters, they animate incredibly smoothly, with individual animations for different attacks, depending o their types, and the wide, wide variety of monsters available to you constantly affords you a sense that you are never seeing the same thing twice (even if there are crap tons of recolors.).
Battles are fun. They can be as fast as you want, with you being able to press a button and your monsters carrying out whatever they feel is best (and they are usually pretty damn smart about usin magic and not using magic--I've yet to see them try to cast a fire spell on an enemy that absorbs it.) or you can set up individual orders for them to carry out, if you want to try and conserve MP and other valuable resources.
Battles can range from very easy to surprisingly difficult, especially when you are trying to build up your newly acquired monsters. Monsters in this game are recruited through, effectively, intimidation--you have your monsters "scout" the enemy, and thus try to impress them with a show of your strength. The stronger your monsters, the easier it is to recruit other monsters to your cause. This gives a big incentive for leveling up and fighting monsters over and over again, in order to try and win their hearts and minds.
Unlike every other Dragon Quest game, money is very easy to come by, and besides items, you can also buy spears and whips to equip to your monsters, thus giving them extra damage against certain enemies (like slimes) or else allowing them to attack all enemies at once. It's a kind of simple gesture, but greatly appreciated to give you something to think about besides just synthesis and skill points.
Synthesis is a rather large part of the game as well. Once you have two monsters that are level 10, you can fuse them together and create a new, souped up monster of epic proportions, that shares the other two monsters' skills and traits. With the wide variety (over 200) of monsters to choose from, synthesis is pretty much a game within itself.
Better yet, all of these things I've mentioned work nigh PERFECTLY. There's even a Day/Night system, where at night different monsters roam than during the day, and new things can be found depending on if you look for them at night or during the day.
But, alas, the game has some flaws, and the flaws can be glaring. First of all, these "flaws" are nothing that hardcore DQ fans are not already familiar with, the first one being:
GRINDING.
Oh god, yes, the GRINDING. This game doesn't just encourage grinding, it forces it down your throat with all the subtlety of a barbed-wire enveloped club. Grind, grind, grind grind grind grind grind, you'll be doing a LOT of grinding and while the results more than make up for the effort, a lot of people may get sick and tired of fighting the exact same monsters over and over again--especially with some of them being difficult enough to force you to limp back to the healing spots after just five battles. First of all, none of your monsters learn any abilities until at least level 5, wherein you can then allocate your skill points. Monsters cannot be synthesized until level 10--and, trust me when I say this, it takes a lot longer to get to level ten than you may think.
As the monsters get harder, of course, exp gets higher, and it's highly likely that by the midpoint of the game the grinding WILL decrease, but come on! The Dragon Quest series is somewhat reviled in America because of things like this, and making this game almost MORE grindtastic than the PS2 counterpart is NOT going to win you any points, no matter HOW wonderous your monster-taming abilities are.
Besides grinding, though, I haven't really gotten so far as to see any real troubles with the game. It's got a STORY, per se, or maybe a slim skeletal ghost of one--in monster training games, with the exception of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the story is not something you are really playing for, so there's no real need to get upset at it, and for what it's worth, the plots got some interesting bits to it that make the surrounding atypical "battle tournament" setting all the more enjoyable.
End line is that this game is probably one of the best RPGs on teh DS. If you like Pokemon, you'll likely enjoy graduating to the bigger boys of monster raising, such as this game, and if you liked Dragon Quest, chances are you already own this, but how about the rest of you? Well, the game's addictive. It's terrifically addictive and if you can get a thrill out of spending hours fighting and fighting and fighting just to get the ONE FINAL LEVEL and be able to create that super powerful ubermonster to lay your foes to waste, than you may want to pick this game up. Heavens, it's just a DS game--what else are you going to do with 30 dollars, and you may actually enjoy yourself.
Of course, if you hate RPGs, slowness, quirky characters, monsters, cel-shading, or just about anything that doesn't involve sticking a sharp object through somebody's head and watching their bloody carcass flutter in the wind, you may not like this game. But, then again, you'll probably be too busy sodomizing kittens and immolating parakeets to be reading this review anyway.
END RESULT: Very, Very Good.
RECCOMENDED? Yes.
