Welcome to our review of Dragon Quest Monster: The Dark Prince, the newest Monster game from my all time favorite RPG series, Dragon Quest.
Journey into a fantastical world on a quest for revenge in Dragon Quest Monster: The Dark Prince. Psaro is cursed and is unable to harm anything with monster blood. Now, he must become a Monster Wrangler to create an army for battle.
The hunt for high-ranked monsters takes Psaro through the ever-changing seasons of Nadiria and its unique environments, with rivers of bubbling lava, mysterious ancient ruins, and soaring towers of cake. Along the way, Psaro meets the kind-hearted elf, Rose, who joins his adventure to seek out ever-stronger monsters.
The key to Psaro’s success lies in synthesis: the ability to combine two monsters and create a stronger offspring. Each new creation brings Psaro one step closer to his goal of becoming the Master of Monsterkind. Unlike the mainline games, the monster game entries are surprisingly more laid back and well, in a way they are easier to play. Making them more accessible across a bigger variety of age ranges and quite often they are the perfect entry into the Yuji Hori franchise.
The main gist of the game is very similar to Pokemon, you are a monster trainer and they battle other monsters, either in tournaments or in the wild. Very familiar if you ever played a Pokemon game, but the atmosphere is very different, the real DQ sensation is all present and yes, that is a good thing, from persuading monsters to join your troops to actually creating more down the line.
At first, you will mostly face a rather lengthy tutorial, but trust me when I say, this is a well-needed part of the game. Sure, everyone can play a collecting monsters game, but there is a certain sense of ease but at the same time, you can not let your guard down, you just can not. I do feel that personally, being a more experienced gamer, most of the fighting was on the easier side, the automated mode does wonders and as long as you do the proper grind, you do get your levels up high enough to stay out of real danger in the bigger half of the game.
Now, Dragon Quest Monster: The Dark Prince is a fun game to play. I applaud the writing personally and the witty jokes using the monsters and their nature to have puns and other jokes. The general story is also fun to play, from meeting new friends to simply being introduced to new NPCs in the game.
But sadly, I also need to address the biggest elephant in the room, this game is at least a 9 in the fun department, but also a 4 out of 10 when it comes to graphics and it might take the spot of most frame drops I have seen this year. It is simply put borderline ugly, for a game series where we saw Dragon Quest 11 being perfectly ported to the Nintendo Switch, and yet, Dragon Quest Monster: The Dark Prince fails to give us proper graphics.
I don’t say this lightly, but it is truly a bummer to see the game on handheld mode, from skipping frames to just edgy graphics that look like a 3DS game was directly ported to the Switch.
In conclusion, if it had not been for the graphics, this would have been a true 9/10 game, but the graphics are so present throughout your entire gameplay, that it took the overall rating down by a full point.
