Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (2023)

Evaluating a new entry in a series your a big fan of can be tricky. It can be difficult to rein in high expectations and all of your thoughts on what would be ideal for making the best game possible based on your preferences. I'll give a quick, somewhat grounded, view of my experience with DQM3: The Dark Prince and save my ramblings on what I'd like to see for the series for the end.

Overall The Dark Prince is a pretty by the numbers entry in the series with the highlight being a focus on a more dynamic storyline and characters than in the previous entries, Joker series included. The new features like seasons and finding eggs helps to change up gameplay just enough while progressing the story. There are still some issues, but the core gameplay loop manages to still be fun and compelling enough to make for a good time. For better or worse, the overall game design philosophy here appears to be an attempt to simplify and streamline some aspects of the series by keeping the number of monster families restricted, keeping monster sizes limited to large/small when previously it was possible to have 3 slot and 4 slot size monsters, and tweaking what monster traits are possible.

Pros:

+Core gameplay of scouting, battling, and synthesis is still in tact with a solid difficulty curve

+Seasons, weather, and egg hunting adds some more exploration depth to the otherwise limited areas

+Story does offer some fun scenes, characters, and moments that is a general step up from previous entries and their simplistic stories.

Cons:

-Monster cuts from previous games, and the dramatic number of recolors being counted as individual monsters is very frustrating. The thrill of finding or creating new monsters is soured a bit by the new monster just being a previously seen monster but now in red or blue or green. It also stings older fans who looked forward to recruiting their old favorites just to find them completely missing for the first time in the series.

-The story has some big moments with diminished impact due to confusing transitions, dialogue, and/or were just executed poorly.

-Performance issues on release like framerate drops, pop-in, and some generic, flat or barren looking places all create a cheap feel that make the game seem rushed or completed under a very limited budget.

-Day one DLC besides being a gross practice in general, includes content that would have been fun additions if well implemented into the core game. Content like extra dungeons with party restrictions like only allowing monsters of a certain family to be used, etc.

-Making specific monsters be egg exclusive finds necessary to make some other monsters is a frustrating design choice.

Some ramblings about the DQM series: As a fan of the series from the start, I appreciated the addictive loop of exploring, recruiting, and synthesizing new monsters. I also grew to enjoy the subsystems such as the monster personalities impacting their battle AI in the first game, and the monster family system. These systems helped make DQM feel unique among other monster taming games.

I was naturally excited when DQM2 added a new family with the water based monster family and then disappointed when later entries would combine several families together into one: Bird, Plant, Bug, and Water Family Monsters all got reassigned, with most of them going into a nebulous Nature Family. I'd love to see new entries expanding this system again. It was a neat and distinct way to categorize monsters. Mechanics-wise, it helped group monsters by shared attributes such as general stats, weaknesses, resistances, and traits. It also gave more depth and possibilities to the synthesis recipes. I think it's also easy to enforce understanding of these families and their differences with in game flavor and lore. Stuff like the library on monster families in the first game, monster scholar NPCs, and having primary habitats and settings where you'd be most likely to find monsters of a specific family. You could even have specific monster family themed dungeons, and themed NPC teams to challenge. The series does have specific attack skills that do extra damage to monsters of a corresponding family but it could be taken further and both add unique flavor to the world building but also to combat and strategy.

Besides expanding families and experimenting with systems, I'd like to see more randomized dungeons and challenges incorporated in the main game, especially something like the key system in DQM2. The number of unique areas in DQM3 and the changing seasons is great, and I think consistent areas like that should stay to a degree, but I think the series does well with the randomized places to explore as well assuming they are well varied enough.

I also just tried DQM Tact on mobile, which looks a lot like DQM but with tactical grid based combat, and I really hope they consider a full spin off non-mobile exclusive game with that kind of battle system. Movement and spacing your monsters in battle would add just the perfect next dimension of depth and strategy to that addictive loop of team building already present in the core series. There continues to be a lot of potential for this series that I hope gets better utilized in future entries.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a game I checked out on a bit of a whim. I have a love/hate relationship with the Dragon Quest series, which I check out occasionally. I love a lot of things about the series, but I find the games to often be so bloated and grindy that I have never actually finished any one title in the series. This is despite getting pretty deep into IX, VII and XI.

I liked the idea of merging the things I like about Dragon Quest--Akira Toriyama's designs, the old school JRPG mechanics and brilliantly written dialogue--with the monster collecting mechanics of Pokémon, so I finally decided to give this spinoff series a try over the holidays. The Dark Prince is an interesting title in that it retells the story of Dragon Quest IV from the perspective of Psaro, an antagonist in that game. Psaro is a half-human, half-monster hybrid who harbors some resentment against humans. After a confrontation with his father, he is beset with a curse that leaves him unable to harm monsters, so he takes up the role of a Monster Wrangler to train monsters to do the fighting on his behalf.

While a Dragon Quest story told from the perspective of a character with a more antagonistic role is a very interesting idea, the story feels awkward at best. Aside from the monster designs, the visuals can be quite ugly too, especially if you put it next to Dragon Quest XI. What actually hooked me was the tightly structured gameplay loop, which has an addictive cycle of recruiting monsters, leveling them up to take on the fearsome boss at the end of each level, and then using the Synthesis mechanic to fuse them into newer, more powerful minions that you can level up again.

As you get further and further from the beginning of the game, though, leveling up newly synthesized monsters becomes a bigger and bigger time sink. Bosses become much more difficult, necessitating more thorough planning and more deliberate and time consuming grinds. This is where the game lost me. I don't mind a bit of a grind, but by the time I got to the Upper Echelon levels, the requirements were getting to be too much for what was initially a casual playthrough.

I had hopes that The Dark Prince would be the first Dragon Quest game in my Completed shelf, but it was not meant to be. After getting to the first few Upper Echelon levels, I started to be presented with two bosses back-to-back, with the latter being incredibly difficult. It doesn't help that the game's later levels begin to recycle a lot of the same tired environmental themes, and palette swaps begin to be introduced as "new" monsters with more frequency. After 20 hours, I just don't feel like putting more time into a grind that I'm not enjoying very much.

For what it's worth, I did like a lot about this game. This is a Dragon Quest game first and foremost, and there is something about its vibe that never failed to put a smile on my face while playing. It may have a low budget B-tier feel to it that it never escapes, but it regardless captures all of the things that the series typically does well. If you like the series, this is not a game to miss. If not, then maybe try one of the mainline games instead.