Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker
Apr. 2nd, 2010 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDragon Quest Monsters: Joker is a mon-battle game with a tournament-related excuse plot. Well, okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but it’s not a game that you really play for the plot, it’s a game you play for building the perfect monster team.
They tried to use a simplified version of the DQ8 graphics engine, but the conversion was shoddy, so it comes off as badly pixellated versions of beautiful cel-shaded graphics. With the mini-map’s help, it’s never really difficult to tell where you’re going, and the in-battle graphics are better, but I actually prefer the less-adventurous style used for the DQ 4 and 5 remakes better. The music is standard Dragon Quest fare, mostly familiar if you’ve ever played the games before.
At pretty much every step, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this game—I really wasn’t expecting much, but I found the catching and melding monsters to be very amusing, and the low-level monsters gain levels fast enough that you feel you’re getting somewhere when you’re grinding. I very much prefer the capturing system to Pokemon-style. Rather than having to wear a monster down to 1/8th health or whatever, you use the "scout" command as a full-round action and your current team all attack, but rather than doing damage they fill a percent-based meter. That's your chance of successfully recruiting the monster. If it comes to only 10%, you know the monster is currently out of your league. If it fills to 60% and you fail, you know it's just bad luck and worth trying again. The other big strength is the monster synthesis system, which lets you combine two monsters into a new one, and is the best way to get more powerful monsters early. The one hurdle is that you can’t synthesize monsters until they’re at level 10, which means you really need to wait until the second island to take advantage of that system and building up the monsters is frustrating for a little while. (By the last island, you can hit level 10 in four battles.)
And you can synthesize ANY monster. The monsters are ranked from F (lowest) to A (highest you can scout, that I can tell), and then final bosses of all of the other Dragon Quest games are available as Rank S and X monsters. The final boss of this game, and the bonus bosses, can all be synthesized and added to your team. You just need to be really patient with catching and grinding, is all. I got a particular thrill out of adding a Grand Dragon to my team right after facing one as a boss, and already having a Demon-At-Arms on my team when the boss version of it showed up.
The critical tip you need to know if you play this game: How much the scout gauge fills when each monster attacks is dependant on that monster’s attack power. Which means that if you increase their attack power (by using the Oomph spell, psyching up, casting a defense-down spell on the enemy, or equipping a weapon that is particularly effective against that enemy) you’ll fill the gauge more. Early on, you can recruit much more powerful monsters to your team if you have a monster with the Psycho trait use “Psych up” four times before you scout. I’ve seen it make the difference between filling the gauge 5% and 30%.
There’s apparently a pretty busy wifi-battle scene, which is not surprising given the addictive nature of the game and the variations you can create for your teams. I’ve decided I’m finished without doing any of the post-game content (28 hours of play-time is a perfectly acceptable return on a $7 used game, and I was starting to wear down as I prepared for the final boss), but if you really got into this game, you could easily spend 100 hours scouting and synthesizing the perfect skill set and growth rates onto a team for online play.
Bottom line: It caught me off-guard with how addictive it was, especially for a grind-heavy mon-battle game I got really cheap.
They tried to use a simplified version of the DQ8 graphics engine, but the conversion was shoddy, so it comes off as badly pixellated versions of beautiful cel-shaded graphics. With the mini-map’s help, it’s never really difficult to tell where you’re going, and the in-battle graphics are better, but I actually prefer the less-adventurous style used for the DQ 4 and 5 remakes better. The music is standard Dragon Quest fare, mostly familiar if you’ve ever played the games before.
At pretty much every step, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this game—I really wasn’t expecting much, but I found the catching and melding monsters to be very amusing, and the low-level monsters gain levels fast enough that you feel you’re getting somewhere when you’re grinding. I very much prefer the capturing system to Pokemon-style. Rather than having to wear a monster down to 1/8th health or whatever, you use the "scout" command as a full-round action and your current team all attack, but rather than doing damage they fill a percent-based meter. That's your chance of successfully recruiting the monster. If it comes to only 10%, you know the monster is currently out of your league. If it fills to 60% and you fail, you know it's just bad luck and worth trying again. The other big strength is the monster synthesis system, which lets you combine two monsters into a new one, and is the best way to get more powerful monsters early. The one hurdle is that you can’t synthesize monsters until they’re at level 10, which means you really need to wait until the second island to take advantage of that system and building up the monsters is frustrating for a little while. (By the last island, you can hit level 10 in four battles.)
And you can synthesize ANY monster. The monsters are ranked from F (lowest) to A (highest you can scout, that I can tell), and then final bosses of all of the other Dragon Quest games are available as Rank S and X monsters. The final boss of this game, and the bonus bosses, can all be synthesized and added to your team. You just need to be really patient with catching and grinding, is all. I got a particular thrill out of adding a Grand Dragon to my team right after facing one as a boss, and already having a Demon-At-Arms on my team when the boss version of it showed up.
The critical tip you need to know if you play this game: How much the scout gauge fills when each monster attacks is dependant on that monster’s attack power. Which means that if you increase their attack power (by using the Oomph spell, psyching up, casting a defense-down spell on the enemy, or equipping a weapon that is particularly effective against that enemy) you’ll fill the gauge more. Early on, you can recruit much more powerful monsters to your team if you have a monster with the Psycho trait use “Psych up” four times before you scout. I’ve seen it make the difference between filling the gauge 5% and 30%.
There’s apparently a pretty busy wifi-battle scene, which is not surprising given the addictive nature of the game and the variations you can create for your teams. I’ve decided I’m finished without doing any of the post-game content (28 hours of play-time is a perfectly acceptable return on a $7 used game, and I was starting to wear down as I prepared for the final boss), but if you really got into this game, you could easily spend 100 hours scouting and synthesizing the perfect skill set and growth rates onto a team for online play.
Bottom line: It caught me off-guard with how addictive it was, especially for a grind-heavy mon-battle game I got really cheap.
