I love me some Dragon Quest. Squeenix, or at least the people who decide which of their games are localized, don’t seem to always agree with me, as the likelihood of even getting any of the games in the series to be officially localized is up in the air. With Treasures being a spin-off, that put the odds WAY low… but it did actually get a worldwide release, so that’s good. Now if only the last 3 Dragon Quest Monsters games could come out here (Joker 3, Terry’s Wonderland, and the rom of the GBC game on Switch), that would be great.

This gave me some Monsters vibes, but obviously this was gonna be different from the Monsters game with the focus on treasure hunting. So I thought it was pretty interesting.

Well, let’s go and see if this is a cool one!

Developer and Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: December 9th, 2022
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Action-RPG

Review

This is a prequel of sorts to Dragon Quest 11. It takes place when Erik and Mia are still hanging about with the vikings as kids. They decide they’re gonna sneak out of the viking boat to get some treasure of their own to prove themselves to their viking.. buddies? As they escape they liberate these 2 flying creatures (one’s a green pig, the other’s a red cat thing) and take a smaller boat to get away. They’re directed to a small island, find 2 magic daggers, end up being able to understand the flying creatures when they speak and are brought to another world. That other world is set on top of 2 extremely big dead dragons floating high in the sky, forming a set of different islands with different biomes. Mia and Erik end up setting up their own treasure hunting gang, with their quest being to help the 2 creatures (which end up being “junior gods”) find 7 dragon treasures. There’s a pirate villain, a group of nice treasure hunters, and the conductor of a train system that has been in disrepair (which you end up helping to fix). There’s only a small handful of characters here, most of which will give you some sidequests.

It’s not a super deep story, and the actual connection to DQXI is pretty dubious beyond featuring 2 of the characters that are in it, but it works nicely. Gives you a decent villain but nothing super-crazy (doesn’t have Erik killing a god as a kid or something, even though he does fight some pretty strong stuff, which can be explained away by the fact that it’s mostly monsters doing the fighting), gives you a decent goal, has a few decent characters even though there isn’t much development happening here, and it opens things up for a post-game in a way that almost makes sense.

I guess I gotta talk performance since people are suddenly worried about performance with games running on a potato recently. For the most part this stays close to its 30fps goal, but there’s a few areas with very occasional stutter. Overall the game does look really nice and non-blurry, with the bigger problem being the usual “Nintendo forgot to do anti-aliasing” thing that has always been a thing with the Switch. Overall, functional.

This is an action RPG where you explore the world and find treasure. The core game flow is pretty simple. You’ll have a PILE of sidequests (and main quests) that you can do in basically any order you want. There’s a few islands you can visit, which has its own monsters, treasures, quests and so on. There’s 5 islands to visit, plus the island your gang is set up in where you do some prep before treasure hunting.

You play as either Erik or Mia (it doesn’t matter which you choose, the stats transfer between the characters so just choose whichever you prefer), who has a pretty simple moveset. You can move around, jump, dodge roll, heal (uses MP, you do this by holding the dodge button), attack with your dragon dagger and aim/shoot your slingshot. When aiming the slingshot you can switch pellets that you shoot. There’s healing pellets, buffing pellets, nerfing pellets, pellets that cause status effects, pellets that make it more likely a monster will join you, and a variety of damaging pellets, from different types of physical attacks to a pile of different elemental pellets. This means you have the means to deal a lot of damage by hitting weaknesses or by incapacitating enemies. Also you can crouch, which has 2 main effects; It makes it easier to sneak to surprise enemies for a ton of bonus damage with your dagger, and you can “pinch” which is just stealing materials from enemies (I didn’t really use this feature, unless I had to). The dagger starts out pretty useless, but as you power up and get more crit chance, it can become your main source of damage.

You can recruit monsters. Killing monsters gives a chance that they’ll want to join you. At your base there’s an NPC that will list which enemies that you fought decided they wanted to join you, and as I mentioned there’s some pellets you can shoot that increase likelihood of joining. Enemies can actually join you even if they’re way higher level than you, though I don’t know if there’s a limit to that (I don’t think so but I might be wrong). When they offer to join you, they have a fee required before they do join you, which will be a set of materials. You can find the materials from killing monsters, stealing from monsters, finding them in chests, buying them in stores, finding them laying around, and some also want food which you can find or cook (if you did the canteen sidequest).

The point of monsters is twofold. They help in battle, by attacking and moving around automatically.  Fairly simple stuff. There’s a system called medley where attacking enemies around the same time as your monsters in a sequence might deal extra damage… I don’t quite understand how this works. The other use of monsters is Fortes. Each monster has one of 5 fortes. There’s Launch, which lets you move upwards way higher than your jump. There’s glide, which… allows you to glide. There’s Scan, which will highlight things in your direct vicinity (such as materials or non-treasure chests). There’s Sprint, which lets you ride the monster for faster movement. And there’s Stealth, which hides you, usually in the ground somehow, so enemies can’t see you (and also letting you pass through small entrances). These allow you to get to places you normally can’t with your base moveset. Also, each monster has a super attack (you have a super meter that fills up to 3 times, a super attack takes one of those meters), and you also have a “transformation” that makes you way faster and a bit stronger. So in battle, it’s a pretty standard strategy to let your monsters distract enemies as you stay far and shoot pellets from your slingshot.

Powering up is fairly simple. Kill things, get EXP, level up. Yay! You also have slots on your character and monsters (which you unlock more slots as you level up your gang). Medals can be found in chests or dropped by monsters when you kill them (each medal representing a specific monster with an image of them). A medal can come in various rarities, and the higher the rarity, the more types of stat boosts you get from that medal and the better they are. A bronze medal might just give 8 attack, but a gold medal of the same monster might do 16 attack, an increase to crit chance and an increase to slash damage. You can use this to make your monsters a bit better, but more notably, I think good medal setups on Mia/Erik can make them insanely strong. One of the best things you can do in battle is get crits. Those deal absolutely massive damage with your dagger compared to non-crits. Or instead of a crit setup if you can get the medals for it, an HP/defense setup is also really useful, especially in some post-game battles where you might get hit really hard.

But this is a treasure hunting game, so let’s talk about that. Each monster has a number of treasure chests they can carry. These are different from chests you see in the open (or hidden in harder-to-get-to spots), which you can just open once and they have a set item in them (recipes, medals, pellets, materials). Instead, you can’t see treasures in the open. Your monsters have an acute sense of treasure location (and will indicate that with an icon above them), and your dagger gives you the power to find the direction treasure is in. When you’re close enough the icon will change. Using your power at that point this gives you a vision from each of your monsters of where the treasure is (that vision changes a bit based on the monsters, such as drakies seeing in black and white), so you can look for context clues in the environment to find the exact location, which will glow when you’re close enough. Then you can dig and get that treasure which will be a gold chest (which are the better treasure). There’s also silver treasures which just pop up randomly as you go around. Also rival gangs might attack you to try and steal one of your displayed treasures, and also if you have unappraised while on an island, there’s a chance a rival gang will try to attack you to steal your treasures.

Each monster actually has a type of treasure it prefers. When you go into one of the islands, there’s a changing “schedule” of treasures, so treasures of certain types are more likely to appear, and if those types are prefered by your monsters, you’re overall more likely to find treasure. This goes for dispatching monsters as well (which generally just finds materials, but there’s gonna be a likelihood to get treasure as well when you dispatch). I didn’t fully end up caring about this system, though a higher percentage on an island did mean treasures were way more plentiful.

Once your treasure slots are full you might as well go back to base (either using a chimera wing or going back to a train station)… unless you have a sidequest you’re doing. There your treasure values will be determined. Gold treasures are always worth more, usually close to or above a million gold (I’ve seen some of the not-plot treasures be as high as 12 million), while silver treasures are rarely worth much more than half a million, usually less. All the treasures you just brought back also get a bonus value based on how many treasures you got. I think it’s a 5% bonus per gold chest you brought back and a 2% bonus per silver chest (I might be slightly wrong). This adds to your gang’s value, which, when it gets to certain amounts, increases your gang’s levels. This can increase the number of dispatches you can do at once, the number of medals you can equip, likelihood of monsters joining you, number of monsters that can join you, bonus treasure value and all sorts of other shit. There may be story progress at certain levels as well. In the vault you can display your favorite treasure, and there’s a chance someone on the base polishes a treasure that’s displayed to increase its value while you’re out hunting.

The sidequests are actually mostly not bad. I’ve complained about sidequests in Harvestalla being boring shit where all you do is just talk to whoever the game tells you to talk to… that’s boring. Here the sidequests are at least in the spirit of the gameplay. There’s a few “go talk to this person” ones that are dumb (especially when an NPC exists in multiple places but you need to talk to that NPC in a specific spot), but mostly side-quests are actual gameplay goals. Finding materials, cooking food, recruiting monsters, killing enemies, finding treasure, using specific skills like pinching… It’s all stuff that you’d basically want to be doing anyways, so that’s all great. And the rewards are frequently solid too, usually valuable treasures to level up your gang. And there’s a bunch of these, from side-character stories to daily quests to increasing your own options like opening more train stations, there’s plenty to do. And there’s temporary quests that dispatch teams may find, like bases for rival gangs to raid, metal monsters for some EXP, bejewelled monsters, and sometimes your base gets raided so you can stop those enemies.

This game has a decent amount of post-game, with extra quests, extra boss battles, and “full completion” tasks such as finding all the iconic treasures. Or self-determined goals like getting all the monsters, and also there’s a sort of shiny system here, I’ve noticed some things like some monsters wearing hats (those monsters that aren’t normal have a special icon, the first slime you get has one). This is certainly a game that you can play for a while.

So yeah, the overall flow of going on hunts, bringing back treasure, doing sidequests, progressing the main story quests, recruiting monsters, it’s all fun stuff. There’s not a TON of depth to all the systems, but there’s a lot of systems, and they’re all fun to play with.

Overall

I really had a lot of fun with this one. The core gameplay is pretty simple but it works very well. There are a lot of callbacks to previous DQ stuff with the treasures, the story is actually not horrible, there’s a good amount of content for completionists… Basically there’s not much to complain about here. Maybe that combat is a bit on the easier side, but post-game alleviates that a bit.

This comes recommended for sure.