I actually bought this game like a year and a half ago during my last super obsession with GameBoy stuff, but tried it only a little and bounced off of it pretty quick. Well this time, I ended up returning to it during this most recent obsession with Dragon Quest games I hadn’t gotten to yet, and after finishing DQ8 and having fun with its monster arena system, I decided to finally take another crack at this one. I played through this game’s sequel when I was much younger, in fact (probably late high school or early university), but couldn’t quite beat that one (and it’s soon on the hit list as well XD). I was determined not to let this one beat me again, and this time I was able to see it through to the end~. It took me a bit over 40 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (a real cart played mostly via my GameCube’s GB Player and my GBA SP).
The story for DQM is a pretty simple one. Terry, the very same from Dragon Quest VI but as a child, is playing with his older sister one night, when she suddenly tells him they need to go to bed quick, or monsters will come and take them away! Terry pretends to go to bed, and gets back out only to run into a montser, Warubo, coming out of his dresser and stealing his sister away! Stricken with panic, Terry is then met by another, nicer monster named Watabo, who is the good-version counterpart to the earlier sister stealer. He takes Terry through the dresser drawer to the kingdom of Taiju, located in a giant tree. The king is a bit of a goofball, and he has no idea where Terry’s sister is, but he can still help, well, sorta. The night of shooting stars is coming up soon, and whoever wins the monster arena tournament at that festival will be granted any wish they desire! Terry could wish for his sister to be saved, and so he sets out on a mission to compile the best and strongest monster team he can to win that tournament! It’s a pretty simple story, as far as plot goes, but that’s not too unusual for Dragon Quest of the time (the time in particular here being 1998). What’s also normal for DQ of that era is a bunch of silly, colorful characters with funny dialogue, and it’s something this game has in spades. The story and world aren’t too deep, sure, but I think they succeed well at making an entertaining and engaging world to partake in the mechanics of the game. Coming out over two years after the original Pokemon games, this is without question a Pokemon competitor, first and foremost, but it’s also one of the more ambitious ones I’ve seen of the handful I’ve run into on the GameBoy. The main gameplay loop consists of going through procedurally generated portal dungeons to find monsters, and then using the monsters you have in your party to go through successive ranks of the arena until you’re good enough to beat that final rank of the arena for the story. While you can directly order around monsters in dungeons, in arena matches, they’ll only act by general behavioral patterns (like “go all out!” or “focus on defense/ healing”, that sort of thing), so having a team that can handle both is paramount to a game-winning monster team (my personal team at the end was a Servant, DracoLord1, and an Akubar). The portal dungeons usually have bosses at the end you’ll need to fight to complete them, and you can even often recruit these powerful foes as party members themselves! Recruiting monsters just involves beating them, and if a hidden dice roll goes well enough, they’ll join you. But thankfully you can increase those odds by giving them better quality meat treats in battle, at least. However, even the most powerful wild monster is still gonna be pretty pathetic. Not unlike how SMT handles this monster-catching rpg genre, where real power lies is in pairing your monsters off to make stronger offspring. But while SMT has demon fusion, DQM has monster breeding. But unlike something like Pokemon (which didn’t actually have a breeding mechanic yet in 1998), you don’t keep the parents. You’re just stuck with the baby, so it’s a lot more like SMT demon fusion. What is a lot less like SMT demon fusion, however, is that while SMT demons don’t level and are simply as powerful at “birth” as they’ll ever be, DQM monsters *do* level up. In fact, not only do monsters get stronger as they level and need to be at least level 10 to breed at all, but a child monster actually inherits the strength of its parent monsters. This isn’t like how Pokemon would eventually do it, where Pokemon have inherent stats upon birth that will be passed down genetically no matter what. DQM monsters will get better stat growths if their parents were stronger when they were born (i.e. a monster with level 10 parents will be far weaker than a monster whose parents were both level 20). This is also combined with that monsters don’t simply give random offspring. The monsters you’re breeding, and even the order you give them to the monster breeder, have pre-set algorithms for what offspring they’ll give you. While later generation monsters will generally be much more powerful no matter what they are, different monsters have different stat growth biases, so there are plenty of monsters who are simply better and stronger and you’re gonna want those if you wanna win. Additionally, offspring can also learn their parents’ spells as well, but only if their parents already know those spells in the first place, so that’s one more incentive to just grind grind grind those levels up before you breed more monsters. Using a wiki to make the most optimal path to whatever big smashy powerful monster you want is very highly recommended unless you want to spend forever just grinding blindly only to end up with crappy monsters. This is honestly my biggest complained with DQM as a game. Compared to something like SMT or Pokemon’s far more straightforward monster raising systems, DQM’s systems are incredibly arcane and difficult to parse. Especially for a younger kid, the very nature of needing to breed monsters to get stronger ones is so alien from something like Pokemon that I could never recommend DQM over Pokemon to them. Like 95% of DQM is just grinding, and it’s a gameplay loop that incentives assuming grinding is necessary over progress. DQM ain’t an easy game, and those arena tiers (not to mention the two or three mandatory portal dungeons) are no slouch, and you’re gonna need some real ass-beating monsters to beat them. I found myself falling into loops of just endlessly grinding up monsters to breed for more monsters to breed for more monsters, since why not just get better monsters now rather than throw myself at the arena and waste my time with that? The game even has a baffling mechanic where, if you’ve ever had a monster before (through either befriending it or breeding it), recruiting it again is 10s of times more difficult, and you’re going to need to expend some very valuable monster-befriending meat items to recruit a second of something to have an easier time breeding a strong family tree. I assume this is to encourage you to breed monster’s with your friends’ copies of the game, but all it amounted to for friendless me was an even further pressure to use the wiki to grind and breed my monsters in the most efficient way possible. That lack of a world to explore and get engrossed in, and the combination of both monsters to get attached to like Pokemon (or family trees, in this case) who are yet also very disposable like in SMT makes DQM a very odd beast of a game. It feels like it was made for older folks, teenagers and people in their 20’s and 30’s, who were big DQ fans *and* big Pokemon fans. There is fun to be had here, sure, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s better executed or polished than what guys like the Pokemon Company or Atlus had been doing for years, and a lot of the biggest issues seem to be self-selected problems in the very conceit of the gameplay loop. I think, at the very least, Dragon Quest Monsters does a really good job of making a monster-raising rpg out of the existing mechanics in Dragon Quest, however I do not really mean that as a compliment so much as I mean it as a description of fact. The presentation is quite nice, though a bit underwhelming for what is technically a GameBoy Color game. The graphics are pretty, and the visual effects on the attacks in particular look quite nice, but you’d be forgiven for mistaking it as just a quite nice looking GB game rather than a GBC game. Though, in the game’s defense, it’s a VERY early GBC game. It’s such an early game, in fact, that while it’s a black cartridge (indicating it works on both GBCs and normal GBs) in English, it’s a grey cartridge here in Japan! It’s a GBC game that actually predates the release of the GBC itself, so it’s hard to be too harsh on it. They do a really good job of using the 4 colors available per sprite on the GBC to make some really nice looking monsters, and the monsters are very recognizable from their console DQ origins, and there are a LOT of them, at over 200, and they even have overworld walking sprites as well for when they’re following you in your party! The music is also quite nice, GameBoy-ifying familiar DQ tracks in a very pleasant way. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I would hesitate to call DQM a bad game, I think it is a game that really commits to a pretty flawed formula. While being a flawed RPG on the GameBoy is something that basically every RPG on the platform can be described by, I think in DQM’s case, the sheer strength of its competitors and *just* how much of the gameplay loop is grinding is going to justifiably turn away a lot of people from trying it out. If you’re a big DQ fan and you enjoy monster-raising and you don’t mind grinding, there’s a good amount of fun to be had here. But if you’re just a more general monster-raising rpg fan, especially if you’re not someone who can put up with grinding easily, I’d say this is a game to stay away from, or at the very least approach with great caution.
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Still not wanting to get off of the Dragon Quest train yet, after DQ3, I hopped right into DQ8~. I’ve technically played a little bit of this before, getting to a bit past the first boss in the English PS2 version over a decade ago, and while I enjoyed what I played, I never went back to it. I was determined to fix that this time, and finally saw DQ8 through to its conclusion. It took me about 70-ish hours to get the normal (non-post-game) in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
DQ8’s narrative is about you, the Hero (whose canon name is Eito), traveling with a strange little goblin and a bandit-looking fella in a horse-drawn cart. That bandit-looking fella is Yangus, an ex-bandit who has decided to follow you as part of your adventuring band out of respect, and that little goblin is the titular Cursed King, Torode of the English version’s subtitle, while the horse pulling the cart is the cursed princess of the Japanese versions’ subtitle. Toroden Castle was attacked and cursed by the evil mage Dhoulmagus, and you, as the only surviving member of the royal guard, are on a quest to defeat him and break the curse on your leige and the princess. Writing-wise, I have very mixed feelings on DQ8. On the more positive side of things, this is easily one of the best presented narratives you’d seen in a game by 2004. The recently born Square Enix was really putting their money where their mouth is, and compared to contemporary Tales of or Atelier games, DQ8’s recreation of Akira Toriyama’s art style is incredibly impressive. While characters don’t have any VA in the original Japanese version, their facial expressions and gestures, when combined with the camera direction in cutscenes, tell a really impressive story nonetheless. On the more negative side of things, there are the nittier grittier details of the writing and the themes that make me wonder if the game is like this through genuine intent, lack of ability, or just simple lack of time. The game’s first third or so has a lot of really impressive cutscenes and character beats as you pick up the other two members of your party, and it makes for a really strong first impression. However, after you get your fourth party member, what seems like a very character-focused story suddenly pivots back to the more familiar “adventure vignette” style that so many other DQ games (especially 7) use so well. This would be all fine and dandy (albeit a bit disappointing) if not for the game still occasionally wants to have bit character beats. Near the game’s conclusion, it just suddenly decides to bring up larger political ideas from one of the minor antagonists (who is heavily tied to one of your main characters) that are very quickly discarded and never really addressed. The game then more or less doubles down on the notion that his (good) points don’t matter and are wrong in the post-game content (whose contents I looked up rather than played myself), and the whole game ends up with this weird vibe of being somewhere between glorification/apologia for royalty and the nobility of being status-quo warriors. For most of the game, I figured that the worst things I’d have to say about the writing were the very of-the-time sexism and the unevenness of the character writing/narrative pacing, but instead I was left with something that you need to kind of try and look past its themes to try and enjoy it. Were the character writing more complete and fleshed out beyond the first 20 or so hours (where most of the cutscenes are), perhaps this wouldn’t have been such a big issue, but as it is DQ8 is a very confused product narratively if you peer even a little beyond the surface level. Dragon Quest as a series is generally pretty good at having stories about adventures that don’t try to say much with their larger themes. While DQ8 is mostly that, it also decidedly isn’t in a way that makes for a very uneven experience. It’s not something that will bother everyone, but it’s something that casts an unfortunate shadow across the whole experience for me. While it at least manages to end on a relatively strong beat, with how confused and messy (or, with a less charitable reading, outright bad) the themes are, it’s well below a lot of other JRPGs of the time for me. If I had to choose in terms of just narrative, I honestly prefer DQ7, if only because it’s such a better realized product than 8 is, and that’s to say nothing of contemporary games with much better realized character beats and themes like Tales of Rebirth or Atelier Iris. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as to say that DQ8’s writing or story are outright bad, but I definitely cannot deny just how disappointed the whole experience left me. Mechanically, at least, DQ8 manages to be a very significant improvement over DQ7 in just about every way. The basic mechanics are still very DQ (spells, weapon types, items, that sort of thing), but the big change from DQ7 (and by extension 6) is that we are rid of the incredibly grindy job system! In its place is a much better executed skill system, where each of your four characters has five skills that gain levels as you put skill points into them with each level up. Each character has four weapon specializations and one character skill, with each weapon skill giving more power and moves to use when using that weapon, and the character skills giving anything from new spells, to new moves, to even special passives you’ll always have. This system isn’t perfect, mind you. The total inability to redistribute these skill points is a pretty damn mean choice, as even though you can technically max out all 5 by the time you hit level 100, you’ll also most likely be beating the game around level 42 or so like I did, so if you mess up and try to do a “jack of all trades” build not realizing that that’s terrible, there’s no way other than a LOT of grinding to get yourself out of that hole. DQ8’s difficulty curve is kinda all over the place (it peaks around the time you get the boat, at which point I had to do like 8 or 9 hours of grinding to get to a level where I could survive going forward), and the final boss was definitely one of the easier DQ final bosses I’ve fought, but on the whole I’d say this is certainly one of the harder DQ games I’ve played, so play sub-optimally at your own risk. My main piece of advice is to pick *one* weapon skill and then your character skill, and then max them out before starting to max another weapon, because it’ll make life a LOT easier. The presentation, as mentioned earlier, is really stellar. The cell-shaded graphics and camerawork do an incredible job of bringing Toriyama’s art style to life in 3D, and it still looks great even through composite cables on a PS2, as far as I’m concerned (which is more than you can say about a lot of other 3D PS2 games, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you). The music in the Japanese version isn’t the orchestral version, but I still liked it a lot, as it’s that familiar Dragon Quest-y goodness that makes the other games so nice to listen to as well~. The game has some performance issues in some areas and even some boss fights, with the framerate very visibly struggling to keep up with the action, but this being a turn-based JRPG, that doesn’t really affect gameplay at least. The last thing I’ll mention about the Japanese version being different from the English version is the UI, which is very different. Rather than the very stylized and picture-heavy English UI, it’s a UI much more evocative and familiar to what prior DQ games used. It felt like no change at all going from DQ7 to DQ3 to this, which I didn’t mind. Honestly, I like how simple and streamlined the Japanese UI is, but that’s something more down to taste than one being outright better than the other or anything. Verdict: Recommended. Wonky difficult balance and sloppy writing aside, I did still quite enjoy my time with DQ8. The grinding goes quickly enough that it makes the weird difficulty curve not so bad, and the strength of the presentation does a lot to make the inadequacies of the writing in the places where the themes aren’t in turmoil. I would never say it’s my favorite DQ game, and it’s far from my favorite JRPG on the PS2, but DQ8 is still a good game that a fan of DQ or JRPGs will likely have quite a good time with. The 3DS port also adds some very nice quality of life features like sped up battles, enemies visible on the map, and making alchemy instant (because good god does it take an unforgivable amount of time in this version), and if you’re thinking of playing DQ8, that’s probably the version to play. After playing DQ7, I still very much had the bug for more playing Dragon Quest, so I thought what better time to finally tackle the one DQ game between 1 and 7 that I’d yet to beat: DQ3. I’ve technically given this a slight attempt before many years ago on a Famicom copy, but as soon as I saw that the game auto-scrolls text until that particular text box is done (meaning especially with my poorer reading skills of the time, there was no way in hell I was reading anything), I immediately put it down and shelved my DQ3 ambitions indefinitely. Until now! It took me around 35~40 hours (once again we have a game that doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on emulated hardware using save states instead of saves (and for one or two things in particular that I’ll get to later).
DQ3 is a prequel to DQ1 and 2. Loto (or Erdrick), the legendary hero they bang on about all the time in those games? That’s the main character here! Your father goes off to slay the demon lord many years ago, he never comes back, and on your 16th birthday, your mother sends you to the king. He tells you to go slay the demon lord Baramos where your father failed, and that’s how your adventure begins! Though this is technically a remake from December 1996 (which does add a few things that I’ll get to later), the text part of things is largely unchanged from the Famicom original from 1988, so it’s a pretty simple story that does what it needs to. It’s still largely remarkably solid for 1988, though. A lot of the silly and fun aspects of miscellaneous character writing are very much here, and there were a few NPCs in particular who absolutely had me in stitches with the weird stuff they’d said x3. The narrative even has some cool twists I really didn’t see coming, which was an added bonus. It’s hardly anything thematically meaty to sink your teeth into (with an exception or two here and there), but it’s a simple and fun story that it’s pretty easy to see where the DNA of successor DQ games originated in. The mechanics are for the most part pretty typical Dragon Quest of the time. First-person turn-based battles against several enemies; your four party members each get a turn and then things play out from there; you explore the world, dungeons, and town in that familiar over-head style: It’s nothing that will be unfamiliar to anyone who’s glanced at an older JRPG before. What’s quite novel for a JRPG from ’88 is the job system. Instead of the party being bespoke characters like most DQ games (not to mention DQ2 and 4), your first stop after meeting the king is going to the bar in town to recruit some generic party members to add to your merry band of heroes (i.e. just you). There are an assortment of classes to choose from, and you can change classes later in the game (similarly to DQ 6 and 7), but unlike later games, class isn’t an aspect of your character. It IS your character. Your main hero can’t job change, because it’d mean they stop being a hero, but any of your recruited guys can. Once they hit level 20, they can get a new job at the job changing temple, which will halve their current stats and set them back to level 1. This means that there’s a fair amount of replayability and experimentation in this game in terms of finding which parties work best, and if your current loadout seems bad, you can either job change your party members or just get whole new ones. You can even dump your whole party right before the final boss and regrind them up to more useful versions if you so chose, though it’d likely take quite a while. All it’ll take is your time to grind it up. I stuck with my same team of warrior, fighter, and priest (who became a fighter, warriors, and sage respectively later on, all at the advice of our resident Popo). This remake (as well as all successive versions of DQ3) also add in a personality system, where at the start you take a personality test to determine your personality (and you even get to pick your gender, in a neat change from the Famicom original), and then for all of your other party members, they get assigned one based on their stats & job when they’re created. If you don’t like your personalities, you can always find skill books in the world that’ll permanently change them, or almost every accessory in the game also comes with the added feature of changing your personality as long as you have it equipped if you want a more temporary change. Nowhere in the game does it tell you the stat biases for which personality you have, so it’s well worth looking up a guide for that. I don’t really love the personality system, myself. This game isn’t super hard, but it’s not terribly easy either, and it just adds a lot of weird new min/max-ing to something that honestly has enough of that already. I don’t think it ruins this game, and depending on how you like your DQ, you might even quite like it, but I certainly don’t think any other DQ game is worse for lacking it. Something else you’re likely going to want to use a guide for is actually completing your adventure as well. For the most part, the signposting is really good for a game of this era, but there are more than a few places where I was utterly stumped on how to progress, and the game really shows its age in just how arcane finding that path forward is. This game also adds in mini-medals for the first time, and the remake adds in even more of them. Between story-important items and all them mini-medals, investing in a thief early on so you can get their ability to help find treasure on the ground will likely be well worth it. Dungeon design is quite good and so is the encounter rate and design. It’s also an extra neat feature in just how few bosses this game has compared to a typical JRPG, which only adds to the charm of its simplicity in my eyes. Overall the difficulty curve was one I found just right, even if I had to put in a good 3 or 4 hours at least to grind to get tough enough to beat Baramos. Aesthetically, the game is pretty darn good, as you’d expect from not only a DQ game, but also a late ’96 SFC title. The graphics are very pretty and the game has gotten a really nice face lift in both theatrics and animations. The remake the gave it via the DQ6 engine has really paid off, that’s for sure. That also extends to the music, which is very nice and very Dragon Quest in a way you’re no doubt already intimately familiar with if you have any prior experience with the series. Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s one of my favorite RPGs ever, not even on the SFC, but it’s still a really fun time well worth playing. This SFC version has a fan translation, I believe, and the English-released Dragon Warrior III on GameBoy Color is this same game with little dashes of extra extra content here and there as well. If you’re curious on Dragon Quest, I’d much sooner recommend 4 or 5 if you wanted a retro one to start out on (or 8 or 11 if you wanted a newer one), but this game is still a very approachable and enjoyable entry if you’re looking for a JRPG experience that’s relatively short, simple, and still charming & fun~. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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