I had no idea what I was getting into when I volunteered for a tribute for this one. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a familiar slow burn that takes the structure of hunting Pokémon and applies it to the DQ world. While you might scoff at that notion and ask why it’s necessary for the series to go this Nintendo route, I present a counterargument – why not? Yeah, that was it.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince has a simple concept driving it all where you battle monsters on your way to collecting them and adding them as fellow fighters in an old-school turn-based construct. While Pokémon provides you with a one-creature fighting process, DQ ups the ante, and it somewhat pays off with fun strategy and the ability to mix and match monsters. While not all of it works, especially in story and visuals, the gameplay content is king of this release.
So, gather your monsters together, go hunting for some more, if need be, and let’s get adventuring into this review.
Simple concept, simple execution
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince’s gameplay fascinates me. It brings the adventure promised while forcing you to explore and conquer its season-changing world one monster at a time. Your quest, outside of becoming the strongest monster wrangler in the land, is to build/name your army of nasties that conquer the DQ fighting world one colosseum at a time. And that’s the main crux of the game, as you build up your monster army, you mix/match them together, and try to progress the story by conquering these moments of competition.
I like the concept of grinding out for monsters and building up a unique army to conquer the game. This has an old-school ninety’s theme about it where the adventure is slowly built as your team slowly builds up. It’s an easy and familiar concept that has been around for decades, and it has proven to work. Hell, that is what made RPGs so addictive in the late 80s and early 90s. You knew it was going to start slow but eventually, the game would push for more characters and then push for tougher gameplay. It’s a wonderful way of snagging your players and trying to keep them there. It’s presenting a challenge and then presenting a more challenging challenge. Again, an easy concept that is familiar.
The challenge and good motivation of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is to have the best and most powerful army that takes out other competitive armies across various lands. If you’re a fan of Pokémon, then you understand what you’re in for, though on a greater scale. Or at least on a perceived greater scale. As you collect your army and move forward, your primary quest is to level monsters up and keep competing in colosseum battles against other monsters. The level of competition starts easy enough and is lettered alphabetically by difficulty. For example, competition A is easy, while competition D is far more challenging. It’s easy to pick up and understand.
As the competition gets bigger and better, you’re all but literally requested to go back into the grind of capturing (called Scouting) or killing monsters to level up your monster army or add to them. As you grind it out, you can add new powers to your army of baddies, either manually or automatically, and start changing fighting tactics to when out strategy during fights. As motivation goes with building and fighting, this is the best in the world. The game tends to hide its faults through this method and has just enough interesting content with leveling to keep the process from feeling like a slow sludge of progression. For this, I commend it.
I also commend the depth that this game features. The strategy of gathering monsters combined with the strategy of mixing/matching them to build better monster loadouts, and then leveling them up by fighting other monsters with specific tactics makes this a deep game. That should not be understated when you’re deciding to jump at this game or not. There are plenty of little pieces within this experience to put together great gameplay. You want that with this type of game, and you get that with it.
All this said, there are some faults in the overall game.
Grinding out the narrative, visuals
While the grind of actual gameplay is understandable and somewhat entertaining at times, this game falls short in other areas to help keep the player squarely focused on their adventurous purpose – mainly the narrative. For a game like this, there was too much opportunity for a deep narrative experience, yet it falls short in this category. That’s disappointing considering the main character, Psaro, is so darn interesting.
The narrative doesn’t do much to motivate the player to keep pushing forward. The story goes like this — our main character, Psaro, someone you might be familiar with from other DQ adventures, is cursed from harming anything with monster blood, so he becomes their wrangler instead. I mean, it’s a weird 90-degree turn, but hey, it works. His loss of memory helps the situation. Anyway, he needs to build his monster army up to become the master of monsterkind. That may sound like motivation, but it’s a very slow grind when it comes to narrative progression. You get breadcrumbs for Psaro here and there while most of the time will be spent grinding out the monster army. While the latter, as explained above, is motivation and keeps your attention in the game, it’s just a darn shame that the narrative couldn’t have been as well-thought-through and more spaced out with that grind as the gameplay flourishes. It just seems like the story was just ‘enough’ to keep the game moving forward. In comparison to other DQ games, which I understand are different in structure, this one feels underwhelming. Again, I would have loved to see Psaro more involved and part of the gameplay narratively, but the game just doesn’t get there as hard or as fast as it should. It almost seems like an afterthought at times.
Another knock on this game is the visuals, which simply feel like they’re from GameCube design. Most lands you explore in the game are unremarkable visually and there are so many empty spaces or spaces filled with repetitive creatures that it just isn’t up to Nintendo Switch quality. The game is visually very flat, and I know it could have looked better, but maybe the hardware kept the scope of it from allowing that to happen. I’m not on the development side of things, I’m on the judging side of things, so I’m just speculating at best. Regardless, the game looks like it could have been spruced up a bit to make it at least low-tier Switch quality. Compared to other DQ games in the series, this just doesn’t look up to date.
If I had to pull a positive from the visuals, though, it would be the characters. They meet DQ standards. From main characters to monsters, you’re getting some well-animated characters that carry personalities with them. I’m glad that it nails it in that area, as you never want to skimp on character quality for a Dragon Quest game.
On that note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince from developer Armor Project brings an enjoyable monster collecting and fighting gameplay blueprint to the Dragon Quest world, but falls short in its shallow narrative and humdrum visuals.
