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Dragon Quest Monsters = most underrated games series ever
6 years ago
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PRICES & INFO | TERMS OF SERVICE | ADOPTS & YCHSIf you're a part of my Discord server, chances are you might have heard me shrieking about Dragon Quest Monsters, one of my favorite videogame series ever. I've squawked about it plenty, but I think it needs one big journal entry to drive the point home to the non-Discord fam. After this I'll try to keep my DQM squawking to a minimum :B but for now I should warn you all this journal has those dreaded OPINIONS in it, so prepare yourself for those *spooky music and lightning flashes*
Dragon Quest Monsters is a contender to Pokemon - you collect monsters and train them for battling. The key difference is that in DQM, you can fuse monsters together to make stronger ones, and certain combinations produce rarer, more powerful monsters, so the monsters you catch never just sit in your "PC Box" and rot - they all have at least a basic use. Most of the monsters in the games come directly from the main series Dragon Quest, another underrated batch of games that has had sparse success in the West, though it's big in Japan. All the monsters are designed in the iconic Akira Toriyama style, and given that I'm a big DBZ nerd, that's a huge nostalgia bomb in and of itself.
Unfortunately, out of ELEVEN Dragon Quest Monsters titles, only four have been released in English. Dragon Warrior Monsters (GBC, 1999), Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 (GBC, 2001), Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (NDS, 2007), and Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 (NDS, 2011). Note the first two are titled "Dragon Warrior" and not "Dragon Quest" because of some dumb copyright issue they had back in the 2000s. Anywho, there hasn't been a DQM game released in the west in about 8 years, which is tragic, because I firmly believe the series has strong mechanics that differentiate it from Pokemon, and they do certain things far better. One example is that they've always had 3 on 3 battles, and the battle mechanics have been designed around that from the beginning, so it's far more natural than Pokemon's 3v3 (I think Pokemon actually recently removed 3v3 lol). JRPG-style bosses are also a staple of Dragon Quest and DQM, so an Elite Four or Pokemon Champion fight with a team of 6 monsters going at it 1v1 is out of the question, and I think the DQM method works much better and has a more traditional RPG flavor. The games involve slightly less strategy, but is much more satisfying, and ends up being more difficult than the snoozefest that is Pokemon single-player. You also aren't stressing over natures and IVs and EVs and typing and switching out in DQM - the complexity of the game is relegated to more meaningful things, like monster combinations and skills and raw levels. I honestly think Pokemon would benefit from digging itself out of the aforementioned rabbit hole, and taking a few notes from DQM.
DQM isn't without its flaws, though. Ever since 2005, with the release of Dragon Quest 8 of the main series, the localization of all English Dragon Quest related media drastically changed, and instead of the semi-poorly-translated in-game names and terms that were rather basic but got the job done, they instead went with particularly cringey puns and overall goofy terminology to describe spells, locations, and monsters. The spell "Blaze" and "BlazeMore" became "Frizz" and "Frizzle", and expanded into the naming convention of Frizz, Frizzle, Kafrizz, and Kafrizzle (note the added "ka" and "le" that makes it unfortunately sound Harry Potter-esque), and that naming convention was applied to all major spells. Monsters were renamed as well - a green crab monster named Hell Scissors became "Crabber-dabber-doo", the multi-armed skeleton called Hell Knight became "Armful", the hooded spellcaster enemy Archmage became "Hocus-poker"... you get the picture. For what my opinion is worth, I will always be a harsh critic of the downright cringey names the English localization team went with, and I'll never fully understand why they did it to begin with. Being assaulted with such lazy puns is a chore at best and mentally painful at worst, and it very much takes away from the experience. Hell, you can't even take the story seriously when surrounded by glorified dad jokes for 50 hours. There are other minor issues with DQM games, but they pale in comparison to the gradeschool project the localization team made out of the series.
Putting the naming conventions aside, I was recently able to play a fan-translated version of the Japan-only DQM: Joker 3, and was blown away by how much it had evolved the series and ironed out previous gameplay kinks. I was completely engrossed in the game for a solid week. But it sure doesn't feel good knowing that Square-Enix has such low confidence in western markets that they'd skip out on translating Joker 3, because overall I feel it blows Pokemon Sun and Moon out of the water. But that's Squenix for you, I guess :/ a semi-buggy emulator version of DQM:J3 is all I'll ever get.
Going forward, I hope that Squenix stops neglecting the west with Dragon Quest in general (with Dragon Quest XI doing well compared to previous English releases, this could be a good sign) and they start releasing all major Dragon Quest games in some way, shape, or form. Also, I hope Squenix really takes a hard look at what they're doing with the translations, because they're making them out to be a children's cartoon (you could compare it to Halo renaming their weapons to something embarrassing like Bubbly Bouncy Blaster - it just doesn't work). Word is there's a new Monsters game on the horizon, were you play as Erik and his sister from DQXI, and IF it comes to the west, it'll likely be on Switch, and maybe PS4. I'm hoping Squenix redeems themselves with this new release, because the series has so much potential. And of course a new DQM game would finally give me a reason to buy a Switch.
Anywho, that's my spiel on the series. Due to Squenix, it's a story full of disappointment, but the future shows promise. So we'll see where the series goes from here.
Dragon Quest Monsters is a contender to Pokemon - you collect monsters and train them for battling. The key difference is that in DQM, you can fuse monsters together to make stronger ones, and certain combinations produce rarer, more powerful monsters, so the monsters you catch never just sit in your "PC Box" and rot - they all have at least a basic use. Most of the monsters in the games come directly from the main series Dragon Quest, another underrated batch of games that has had sparse success in the West, though it's big in Japan. All the monsters are designed in the iconic Akira Toriyama style, and given that I'm a big DBZ nerd, that's a huge nostalgia bomb in and of itself.
Unfortunately, out of ELEVEN Dragon Quest Monsters titles, only four have been released in English. Dragon Warrior Monsters (GBC, 1999), Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 (GBC, 2001), Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (NDS, 2007), and Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 (NDS, 2011). Note the first two are titled "Dragon Warrior" and not "Dragon Quest" because of some dumb copyright issue they had back in the 2000s. Anywho, there hasn't been a DQM game released in the west in about 8 years, which is tragic, because I firmly believe the series has strong mechanics that differentiate it from Pokemon, and they do certain things far better. One example is that they've always had 3 on 3 battles, and the battle mechanics have been designed around that from the beginning, so it's far more natural than Pokemon's 3v3 (I think Pokemon actually recently removed 3v3 lol). JRPG-style bosses are also a staple of Dragon Quest and DQM, so an Elite Four or Pokemon Champion fight with a team of 6 monsters going at it 1v1 is out of the question, and I think the DQM method works much better and has a more traditional RPG flavor. The games involve slightly less strategy, but is much more satisfying, and ends up being more difficult than the snoozefest that is Pokemon single-player. You also aren't stressing over natures and IVs and EVs and typing and switching out in DQM - the complexity of the game is relegated to more meaningful things, like monster combinations and skills and raw levels. I honestly think Pokemon would benefit from digging itself out of the aforementioned rabbit hole, and taking a few notes from DQM.
DQM isn't without its flaws, though. Ever since 2005, with the release of Dragon Quest 8 of the main series, the localization of all English Dragon Quest related media drastically changed, and instead of the semi-poorly-translated in-game names and terms that were rather basic but got the job done, they instead went with particularly cringey puns and overall goofy terminology to describe spells, locations, and monsters. The spell "Blaze" and "BlazeMore" became "Frizz" and "Frizzle", and expanded into the naming convention of Frizz, Frizzle, Kafrizz, and Kafrizzle (note the added "ka" and "le" that makes it unfortunately sound Harry Potter-esque), and that naming convention was applied to all major spells. Monsters were renamed as well - a green crab monster named Hell Scissors became "Crabber-dabber-doo", the multi-armed skeleton called Hell Knight became "Armful", the hooded spellcaster enemy Archmage became "Hocus-poker"... you get the picture. For what my opinion is worth, I will always be a harsh critic of the downright cringey names the English localization team went with, and I'll never fully understand why they did it to begin with. Being assaulted with such lazy puns is a chore at best and mentally painful at worst, and it very much takes away from the experience. Hell, you can't even take the story seriously when surrounded by glorified dad jokes for 50 hours. There are other minor issues with DQM games, but they pale in comparison to the gradeschool project the localization team made out of the series.
Putting the naming conventions aside, I was recently able to play a fan-translated version of the Japan-only DQM: Joker 3, and was blown away by how much it had evolved the series and ironed out previous gameplay kinks. I was completely engrossed in the game for a solid week. But it sure doesn't feel good knowing that Square-Enix has such low confidence in western markets that they'd skip out on translating Joker 3, because overall I feel it blows Pokemon Sun and Moon out of the water. But that's Squenix for you, I guess :/ a semi-buggy emulator version of DQM:J3 is all I'll ever get.
Going forward, I hope that Squenix stops neglecting the west with Dragon Quest in general (with Dragon Quest XI doing well compared to previous English releases, this could be a good sign) and they start releasing all major Dragon Quest games in some way, shape, or form. Also, I hope Squenix really takes a hard look at what they're doing with the translations, because they're making them out to be a children's cartoon (you could compare it to Halo renaming their weapons to something embarrassing like Bubbly Bouncy Blaster - it just doesn't work). Word is there's a new Monsters game on the horizon, were you play as Erik and his sister from DQXI, and IF it comes to the west, it'll likely be on Switch, and maybe PS4. I'm hoping Squenix redeems themselves with this new release, because the series has so much potential. And of course a new DQM game would finally give me a reason to buy a Switch.
Anywho, that's my spiel on the series. Due to Squenix, it's a story full of disappointment, but the future shows promise. So we'll see where the series goes from here.
COME @ ME
(I'm not kidding, I saw a Youtuber claim this in a top 5 Pokemon-clone list)
But most of them are in japanese