Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

"Shiny, but predictable."

Along the years, many games have tried to mime the simple gameplay of the Pokemon series. While many were unsuccessful at such task, this game also seems to feature a pretty common gameplay, that clearly resembles the one of the previously-stated series.

As soon as you start playing, you'll figure out that you'll be playing across a tournament-like storyline, where you basically have to visit a couple islands, and complete the tasks in the temples, available on each of them. The game is pretty straight forward, mostly predictable in terms of storyline, and you are even asked to choose between 3 different creatures, in the beginning of the game. Sounds familiar, hum? Well, if so, you won't even find it weird when an unusual monster joins your party, later on, and provides even more excuses for you to travel into the next temple, and yet another island.

Despite the interesting cameo relationship of the appearance of 3 and the "I must go to all these places before proceeding" storyline, that's as far as the comparison with other titles, such as Pokemon, can go. Here, the monsters are captured in the wild, by scanning their data, and such action depends not only on their level, but also on the stats of your current party, which can feature up to three monsters, alongside with your main character, who only acts in the battlefield when items are used. Also, they can't evolve, and the only way to get more powerful creatures is by fusion, which requires one monster of each sex (however, the species aren't important at all), and allow you to pick a possible result, from a set of several previewed monsters.

Battles are easy to play, presenting the players with the usual options for physically striking, using techniques, defending, allowing your characters to strike at their free will, setting certain A.I. conditions (to further your control of the party), scanning for monster data (which can only be used sometimes) and, at last, an option that allows you to run away from a battle.

As most of you may know, not only of battles lives a RPG, and the exploration in this title is nothing special, at all. You just hang around in the field, battling enemies (which are shown in the map, making it easy to dodge battles, when you want to do so), opening chests to collect items, and trying to figure out the path to your next target, which is usually easy. Each island also, usually, present the player with a special house, where you can save your game (however, you can quick save wherever you want), heal your characters, buy/sell all sort of items, fuse monsters and even check for the side quests, which work as some sort of tuned down Hunts, yes, the ones from "Final Fantasy XII".

The game isn't very big, you can complete it in a few hours, and most of that time will be spent on improving the stats of your monsters, in order to make it possible for them to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful monsters, the ones you'll find later in the game. The player can capture up to 210 different monsters, all of which seem to have been taken from previous "Dragon Quest" games, but that's perhaps an unrealistic task that most people may ignore, which would place this title into the category of games with lack of replay value. However, this is where a surprise comes into play: the game allows you to go online, via Wi-fi, and download other teams, which you can later fight against. The configuration for this feature is longer than in other games and, oddly, the mode is only available during a certain time of the day. Believe it or not, you're even given the address of a Japanese website, where you can check the availability times for the mode.

Graphically speaking, this is the top game seen in this console so far, with a quality even better than the one seen in "Final Fantasy III". There's not a single pixel out of their proper place, the special effects are well designed and the and the resolution has nothing to envy with theoretically more advanced games, such as "Dragon Quest VIII" (released for the mighty Playstation 2), without any slowdowns. Now that such product was made available for this console, it will be interesting to see how future games will be able to improve past this kind of quality.

Concerning the sound quality, there are some interesting tunes available in the game, but the general sound effects are disappointing, as they seem pretty generic and are usually re-used for several different moves.

In order to fully enjoy the Japanese version of this game, you will need to (at least) basic knowledge of the language. Besides that minor detail, it is a game fit for everyone who are into "gotta collect them all" RPGs.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/07