So this is the Game of the Year. Spoilers!

Yeah, when this was announced, I knew it would rank highly as one of my favorite games this year, but I didn’t know exactly how much.

This is a series that us non-japanese people haven’t gotten any of in a long while. The last game in the series we got in the west is Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, in 2010. We missed on the Pro version of Joker 2 (which is particularly stupid because the Pro version came out in Japan 6 months before the vanilla version came out in the west… where’s the logic?). We missed on Joker 3 and its “Pro” version. We missed on the 3D remakes of DQM1 and DQM2. We missed on all the mobile games (Wanted, Super Light, and the mobile port of the 3D remake of DQM1) except for Tact which barely counts. And we even somehow missed on Terry’s Wonderland Retro which is just a port of the Game Boy version of DQM1 with some extra UI added around the game screen (with stuff like monster stats and labyrinth info)… which is a really fucking stupid game not to port to the west considering an english translation literally already exists from 25 years ago… It IS a fantastic series, but Squeenix hates us.

But when this was announced for a worldwide release, the hype was off the charts. FINALLY we get a new one!

So let’s see exactly how good it is… or whatever it is I’ll write after this, I have no idea.

The good

I think it’s actually kinda weird how the game’s story is the story of Dragon Quest 4 on the NES. You play as Psaro, the villain from that game, though the events are all handled differently, such as his father cursing him to be unable to hurt monsters, so he has to learn to be a monster wrangler to fight. The characters from DQ4 pop up here and there too which is pretty cool, even if their overall role is minimal. For a lot of the game, Psaro is actually treated as an antagonists, and it’s fucking funny. Dude just goes up to Rosalie, tells her “Hey dude bro, I’m gonna kill all of humanity” and leaves, and her response is just “Well I hope you don’t”. The game does end up being its own unique take on the character and story (with pretty funny dialogue considering every time you have a dialogue option from someone asking if you’re evil, they never believe you if you say you’re not evil, right up until a certain point), so it’s decently enjoyable.

Visually, it’s still the regular Dragon Quest, Toriyama-core shit the series is known for and it looks great. The monster designs are good as ever, the character designs are exactly what you’d expect, the game is overall extremely colorful and lively, it’s good shit. Really no problems here whatsoever. Same with the music, it’s just classic DQ shit, 10/10 music.

The core of the game is much the same as the previous games in the series. You go into dungeons/exploration areas, find items, fight and collect monsters, go back to base to fuse them to make stronger monsters, fight bosses and go through tournaments to progress the story. The tournaments are a bit more optional here (there’s only a few ranks that are actually required for story progress) but they have okay rewards here and there. You get teleporting stones to get to new areas as you progress. Each new area I’d fully explore in all seasons before progressing (and getting points you can Zoom to). When you finish an area’s boss, you get slightly better chance of scouting enemies in the region, so you can then start collecting fusion materials more easily.

Scouting monsters is done in battle by spending your turn attempting to do so. This will fill up a meter which will determine your random chance of adding the monster to your team. The meter goes up by comparing the target enemy’s stats to the stats of each of your monsters’ stats. You can affect that percentage further by giving the target meat, or by hitting them a bunch. Certain large enemies are really hard to scout, even with monsters that are several ranks higher and higher-level. There’s a chance monsters will try to join you even without meat or scouting, but the chances are pretty low (I think it happened to me 2 times in the full game, with a hellspawn and with a clockwork cuckoo).

The other way to get monsters is through the egg system. Basically, at some point eggs will start popping up in the different “overworlds”. Those eggs have 4 different rarities that you only see after you actually interact with the egg. White is bad, Silver has some okay things, Gold has good stuff, and Rainbow has absolutely cracked shit that you want for sure like DQ Waifu monster Krystalinda. The egg system is a little bit weird, as you can respawn eggs after finding all of them in one overworld, then getting into 10 fights, then if you go to another overworld and come back, there should be 3 new eggs for you to find. Some levels are “better” for that because you can see the eggs better from a distance so the search is smoother. But some maps have different egg-exclusive monsters (one I wanted but never got for a specific fusion was in Circle of Fortitude – Upper Echelon eggs). There’s a similar idea with metal slimes, minus needing fights in-between spawns, where you just warp to locations that have very close-by metal slime spawn spots, so it’s very useful for grinding (one liquid metal slime gives a shitload more EXP than any non-boss battle, and there’s Metal Slime Kings that are even better (with a super bonus ball, killing 3 gives you 1.8 million EXP)).

So once you’ve collected monsters, they become tools to make even better monsters. You can fuse any monster with any other monster. Once you’re chosen 2 monsters, there’s always going to be at least 2 resulting monsters you can choose from, that being the “materials” themselves. Then there is usually (but not always) at least one other choice which will be different. Usually it’s based on the “family” of each monster and their ranks. So a random C rank Demon and a random C rank Slime should all have the same sets of possible results. But then there’s also unique results from fusing specific monsters. 2 regular blue slimes makes a King Slime. A King Slime and a Platypunk makes a Greater Platypunk. There’s a really fucked up fusion method that requires fusing 4 monsters, which is weird as shit. Basically, for these, you need to fuse 2 specific sets of 2 monsters each (it has to be the correct ones), and then you have the fuse the result of both of those fusions, which leads to a unique fusion you couldn’t get otherwise… that’s a bit odd, but I did get one of those for my final team.

What fusion does, in general, is combine some of the stats of the 2 parent monsters for a stronger resulting monster. Then each regular monster has 2 “skills”, which can be fed skill points to make your monster stronger (may it be new moves or stat boosts). When fusing monsters, you select 3 of the skills between both monsters. If a skill is maxed out when you do the fusion, sometimes it “creates” a new skill with better stats and/or moves. And some monsters have their own skill as well, so if you get fuse a Greygnarl, he will have a “Greygnarl” skill regardless of what the parents had. Once fusion is done, transferred skills will have half the points they had on the parents, and at the same time some of the leftover skill points come back and you can assign those too, alongside what you’ll get as you level up the monster.

As a tip, when going to fuse, I recommend using the Reverse Search option, because it gives you all the possible fusion results between your monsters, and it highlights all the best choices (generally the ones that are either unique fusions, or ones that are a higher rank than the parents) by placing a golden background behind them. So do that and get better monsters. Yay! Also, this is a game where I’d totally recommend, once you’re in the endgame (and not before, because you don’t need to care THAT much for most of the game) to use guides to know how to get S/X rank monsters. I mostly used this massive guide by game8: https://game8.co/games/DQM-Dark-Prince which has both a synergy guide and a reverse synergy guide.

So I guess last point I really need to talk about is combat. It’s a turn-based Dragon Quest game. But this works a bit differently, since you’re not, by default, selecting your team’s moves. You can select just the fight option, and your monsters will choose whatever they see fit, based on which tactic you have them on. You can set their tactics before this, so it can be trying to just use the most damaging moves, focusing on debuffing enemies, focusing on buffing your team, focus on healing and not using MP at all (so just regular attacks). But with the Order option you can just tell each monster what to use and they will. You can also use an item, which is something Psaro does himself, so using an item means your monsters still get to act. It’s fairly straightforward JRPG combat, so you have attacks that hit single targets, multiple targets, random targets, some apply buffs or debuffs. Damaging magic seems to hit regardless of accuracy, though status effects are generally random. It’s good shit overall.

The one place where combat is different is the tournaments. Those are all about team-building and basic strategy, because the tournament battles remove the individual order option. You have to trust the AI. But you still get to change tactics. This works out quite nicely. There’s a few of the tournament ranks where I went in with an underleveled team, but managed to win because I’d switch tactics every round to adapt.

The bad

The performance is bad. I don’t think there’s a single area in the game that has decent framerate. Combat is actually mostly smooth, but the parts where you have to do movement, oof. This is related to weather effects. And inputs are based on framerate in this game, so if you get some skipped frames, you can’t move or jump during them. So enemies you’d usually avoid battle with might just get you because the framerate dipped and ate your inputs. Really annoying, and it’s further shitty during certain weather effects. Though I will note that, as I’m writing this, they have tweeted that a fix is coming. So if you buy this game later, this might no longer be a problem. But, for now, I need to point out this one blemish in an otherwise amazing game.

The season system is also crappy, but before the very end you do get an item that mitigates it entirely. You should totally get that earlier, because the only way to change seasons before then is to wait, or to use “seasoning” which is a stupidly rare consumable item. To be clear, what the season system does is that it changes the environments so some parts become accessible in certain seasons that aren’t in others, and it changes the monster selection in the map. If you don’t have seasoning or the flute item, the only way to change seasons is to fucking wait. If it wasn’t for the waiting or having to use a hard-to-find consumable item, I’d have little issue with the system. There’s also a weather system (in some overworlds it’s a day/night system) that I never really tried to understand, I feel they should’ve decided on just one of the two.

… That’s about it. Really there’s only a few things that I think could be improved, like actually explaining the 4-way synthesis mechanic (if you don’t look up a guide you’ll have basically no idea it’s a thing you can do and I didn’t see any hints about them… though I might just have not paid enough attention to some of the dialogue, who knows), and possibly having more hints towards synthesis “recipes” because it’s pretty unclear which monsters will lead up to good shit. There’s some QOL that might help out the game without making it shittier.

Overall

This game was purely addiction to me. If I didn’t have a full-time job, I would’ve completed this shit in less than a week.

It’s a pretty simple game, as Dragon Quest usually is, but I’d say this has way more depth than the average mainline DQ because of the fusion system and the way larger amount of team building. It’s pretty close in quality to the average mainline DQ game, really.

It looks great, the music is awesome as usual, it plays amazingly… It’s really good. I actually have trouble really expressing how good this game is.

This comes as my most recommended game this year. Buy it.