I’ve been playing the Dragon Quest Monsters remake (fan translation) on 3DS. I have words. I’m sorry.
Dragon Quest Monsters (The original one on the GB) takes a few important ideas from roguelikes and implements them into a very basic Dragon Quest game. The major thing is randomized dungeons - the most important parts of randomization being “How far am I from the stairs” and “what items am I going to find along the way.” There’s also a harsher penalty for death than usual: All your items and half your gold.
A couple of other important things:
- You can only carry (I think) 10 items at a time.
- Healing opportunities are few and far between.
- You can’t warp home without a, uh…warp wing I guess.
- The encounter rate is fairly high
- You can only bring 3 monsters.
So, all of this combined makes the game feel like they took the dungeon crawling from DQ1, smashed it together with Pokemon, and added some randomness to make a fairly barebones dungeon crawler. It’s not brutally difficult, but item management and health management are extremely important. Each dungeon is constantly draining your resources through random encounters, harmful floor tiles, and just straight up bad luck. At the end of the day, it feels like pushing on a boundary little by little, and constantly assessing risk versus reward. That is the key DQ experience to me, and probably why I didn’t really connect with DQXI.
The other key feature is breeding, which is much more complex than Pokemon in certain ways, and also absolutely necessary to succeed. This is improved upon and there are more monsters so…nothing to say here.
They fucked up everything else.
So, in the remake:
- You have seemingly unlimited inventory space and you don’t lose items even if you do die (just gold)
- At the last floor you always have the opportunity to heal completely.
- You can warp home whenever you want for free
- The encounters aren’t random (you see them on the map and can avoid them)
- You can take eight monsters with you! Four in battle, and four as backup that can be switched out in the middle of a battle with no turns lost.
But here’s what they kept: randomized dungeons. Except now the environments are 3D and occasionally deeply annoying to navigate.
DQM was already an extremely barebones game. There’s one town, no overworld, and mostly just dungeon diving. In the remake, they took out the dungeons and replaced them with fields you can leave at any time. The whole structure collapses. There’s no real difficulty curve to support the breeding side of things, so getting new monsters is, while necessary, extremely unexciting to me.
On the flipside, they didn’t do anything that modern DQ does, like beautiful environments, funny characters…charm. So it’s just this lifeless husk of a game that, two hours in, has already shown me the entire path to the end of the game.
I’m all about easy games, but you have to have something to support the player actually caring about the game.
And yes I know this is a 7 year old game for children but god damnit DQM is one of my favorite games and I’ve been excited about it for like 3 years, and what they made is an insult to the children who play it.
EDIT: okay 60 seconds after posting this i feel weird dunking on a kid’s game for kids. i’m just a very sad child right now.