Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

"RPG Fans Proceed WIth Caution"

Before I start this review, I'd like to say that I'm not really a fan of monster breeding games. In fact I've never played one prior to Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. I've also never played a Dragon Quest game either. This was my first Dragon Quest game. So this review is not going to contain comparative analysis to other monster breeding games or other Dragon Quest games since I'm not familiar with either. However, I am a big fan of RPGs in general, so this review is based on the opinion of someone who is entirely new to the monster breeding and Dragon Quest themes, but is a core RPG fan. If this describes you and you're deciding whether or not to pick up Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, read on and hopefully I'll be able to shed some light on the game.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker is a contextualized Dragon Quest game set up as a monster breeding RPG. Don't let the Dragon Quest name fool you, this is a monster breeding game at heart, and not a standard RPG. You will be spending most of the time breeding and fighting with your monsters, and little time will be spent exploring or listening to a deep story. If you are fervently against hardcore leveling in RPGs, I'd suggest staying away from this game since it has it in boatloads.

You will start the game as a standard generic RPG Dragon Quest character, who you will get to name whatever you want to. You will soon be given your orders for the game from your father, Warden Trump. You will be an undercover agent participating in the prominent Monster Scout Challenge. In order to do this, you will need to find and breed an army of monsters, locate 10 Darkonium crystals, and conclusively battle out the final five contestants in the Monster Scout Challenge in one on one matches. Even though it sounds like a standard RPG, don't let the conceptualized plot fool you. For most of the game you will be grinding with your monsters and backtracking through previous area to scout an assortment of monsters.

In order to scout the monsters, you will need to “convince” them to join your team. You will do this by selecting the “Scout” option from your menu during battles. Basically your team will attempt a show of force to the monster, and if he is impressed, he will join your squad. It's actually a neat little system that is based off of a percentage value. Higher ranking monsters will be harder to convince while lower ranking monsters will be simple to convince. Once you have acquired a new monster, you can incorporate them into your party or leave them as reserves. You can have up to three active monsters in your party, three as substitutes that can be swapped into your party before and after battles, and up to 100 monsters in storage.

The battles are standard turn based battles with a few differences. Your monsters will level up (very slowly) and when they do, you can allocate some skill points to either boost their stats or make them learn magic spells.

Once your monsters reach level 10, they can then be synthesized with other monsters. Each monster has either a + or – attribute, and monsters can only be bred together if they have the opposite attribute. Once you breed them, you will derive a new monster that is a lower level, but will have higher stats and can inherit stats and spells from their parent monsters. You get to choose which stats and abilities to inherit, so there is quite a bit of customization in each new monster creation. Once you have the new monster, you can commence with the grinding and level them up. It's interesting at first, but once you take into consideration the amount of grinding that it takes to level up your monsters to a substantial level, things begin to get stale and end up on the boring side. I actually played most of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker in front of a computer, and ran around grinding while browsing the internet at the same time. Yes, the grinding is that mindless. While the game had its ups and downs, I ending up thinking that I would have enjoyed the game more if it would have been a standard RPG with a few characters to level, instead of a grindfest with tons of monsters to take into consideration.

Graphics 9/10

If there is one area of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker that blew me away, it was the graphics. I've seen some pretty crappy and fairly decent DS graphics so far, but nothing could have prepared me for the ethereal graphical presentation of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. The entire game is cell shaded and it really stretches the boundaries of the DS's graphical capabilities.

Not only are the graphics breathtaking for a DS game, but the animations are solid, and there are dynamic camera angles during the battles which keep things interesting. The camera usually zooms in on the monster doing the attacking.

The areas that you will hunt monsters in are expansive and the draw distances are by far the best I've ever seen on the DS.

On the downside of the graphics, the game seems to have unnecessary pop-in. Some of the NPCs and monsters on the field will often just disappear and then reappear for no apparent reason. It's forgivable though, given the graphical scope of the game.

Sounds and Music 5/10

The few tunes that Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker has are well done and keep the light hearted nature of the game going strong, but the problem is that you will be in the same areas for long periods of time, so the music will kind of get old after a while.

The sound effects sound good but are nothing special. The game has no character voices either.

Story 5/10

A game that is this heavy on monster hunting and grinding would have to work really hard to have a decent story, and Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker doesn't make much effort. Aside from the jested conversations that you have with NPCs and main characters, there is little story in the game aside from the initial quest that is thrown upon you. Not that it matters much, since every story element is sandwiched by 5-6 hours of grinding.

Gameplay 5/10

The land that you can explore in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker consists of seven islands. The central island is the only safe area and the rest of them contain hostiles which you can scout or battle against. You will travel to each island via jet-ski and each island has a Scoutpost that will allow you to rest, organize your monsters, buy them new equipment, and synthesize monsters. You also have the option of tackling each island during the day or at night. Different monster prowl around during the day and night. So it's important to go through each area both ways if you want to scout as many monsters as possible.

All of the enemies can be seen in the areas so there are no surprise encounters. The enemies are all drawn well and often look much more intimidating prior to engaging them in battle.

While there are plenty of monsters and areas to scout monsters in, none of the monsters give very good exp. or money drops, so you will be forced to grind for long periods of time to level your monsters or buy new equipment for them. This is bothersome since it's the core aspect of the game. Grinding turns into a huge chore and turns the game into a boring fiasco.

Synthesizing monsters is interesting enough, but I had one major problem with it. You will spend a good bit of time grinding to get your monsters to a level where they can be synthesized, then, once you synthesize them and move onto the next area, the exact same monsters that you just synthesized will be available to scout. This totally ruins your feeling of accomplishment since you could have scouted the monster in about a minute instead of grinding for 2 or 3 hours and then synthesizing the monster.

I could see the game being fun for monster hunting freaks, but the whole process gets old since its pretty much all you will be doing.

Longevity and Re-Playability 7/10

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker has over 200 monsters to obtain through scouting and synthesis, but getting them all will take a long time. Much more time than most people will be willing to put into the game. The short, 20 hour main quest is not very enthralling and the meat of the game, the monster hunting, is all the game has to fall back on. It may be interesting to some people, but I found it repetitive and bland.

Conclusion

There may be some people out there that love what Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker does, but I ended up not being one of them. If you are into the whole monster breeding thing and really like Dragon Quest, then this would be a great game for you, but keep in mind that an immense amount of grinding is needed in this game and it will ruin the experience for a lot of people.

I'm glad I got a chance to play Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick to standard RPGs from now on.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/18/09

Game Release: Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (US, 11/06/07)