Jamirus was always my favourite, so I was delighted to find a new version.
So I spent a whole week playing through the remake of one of my favourite games from my childhood and I loved it. If you haven’t heard of the game or the series then let me briefly tell you about it. The Dragon Quest Monsters games are a spinoff of Dragon Quest (originally Dragon Warrior years ago). The main series has a lot of recurring monsters who you fight and in the monsters spin offs you can recruit/scout them and then train them, battle them and breed them. This particular game is a remake of the original which was released for the Gameboy. For fans of the series there are a lot of homages to the main series, which you don’t need to play as I had never played any Dragon Quest game before it. As an example you routinely fight against bosses from the older Dragon Quest games and usually their boss room are made to match their original ones. Also to breed some of the boss monsters you could get hints from what you knew about them and the relationships between them e.g. to make the third game’s final boss you breed the final bosses of the first two games. To make the final boss of Dragon Quest VI’s second form you have to breed the first form with one of it’s underlings. However my enjoyment was never happened without knowing any of this at the time.
Breeding was a bit easier this time, Zoma was as far as I got to Dark Drium in the original.
So onto the remake, for the main section of the game the plot remains unchanged, one night your sister is kidnapped by a monster named Rottney (Warabou in the original) and then you go with another monster called Cottney (Watabou in the original) to a Kingdom called Great Tree which as you can guess is built into a giant tree where you learn that if you win a legendary tournament you can make a wish to get your sister back. From there you compete in the arena to unlock travellers’ gates which take you through randomised dungeons filled with monsters to fight and recruit. After enough of them you finally get to the final gate before the tournament which is meant to show you your future. Spoilers but you meet your future self who is in Dragon Quest 6 and I’m not quite sure how it all links up yet (I am currently playing through Dragon Quest 6) but you get a nice pep talk and then it’s on to save your sister. After the main game the remake diverges from the original. In the original you had a new set of travellers’ gates which specialise in one particular monster family and ends with usually a final boss (or someone closely related to) of the main series. In the remake other than the dragon gate the others have been reworked a bit, also there is a whole second tournament with as far as I could tell featured original monsters. It did make the second half of the game more interesting than just grinding out the new gates. One especially cool new feature was a gate you could spend gold to enter which would only contain monsters you had already scouted/bred, including eventually the highest rank monsters which makes the very last bit of the end game breeding much more managable.
Rainhawk is a much better name than Prismatic Peacock.
There were a few moments that threw me as I played which were all where they had made changes e.g. boss order, which bosses join you and the breeding combinations but there had been three dragon quest monsters games in the interim that had evolved the series. One of the big changes is that you can now have upto four monsters (up from three) and that monsters come in various sizes allowing for more varied team compositions, naturally the monsters that take up the space of two or three monsters are stronger, though it’s generally comparable. Party hitting attacks will hit the bigger monsters multiple times, the bigger monsters additionally have more HP and can undertake more actions per turn than the smaller numbers. On the whole it works well. Other changes include skills now belonging to skillsets rather than being standalone, this does mean that you have to make meaningful choices and not do what I did as a child and give every monster HealUsAll and Revive. Additionally when breeding you are given a list of possible offspring to choose from and can clearly see the outcome allowing for more informed choices.
What’s weird is he’s never that blue in any version.
So it’s an amazing remake but is it a good game otherwise? I would like to believe so, I still think it’s accessible if it’s your first game in the series and the gameplay is very solid albeit slightly grindy. Who would enjoy it? Well if you like Pokemon but wished they would talk less then I think you might enjoy this a lot. Otherwise RPG fans, it’s a solid RPG with quite a bit of depth. Now onto the downside, it was never officially released outside of Japan but thankfully there is now a translation, hence why I’m only playing it now almost six years later. It was quite a bit of effort to get to play it but I’m really glad I did, it’s probably the game I have enjoyed most so far this year.
Fomar0153 