Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince Review

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Fast Facts

A Prince and a Throne

DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince is a monster-taming RPG featuring a wide host of creatures and abilities from the Dragon Quest series. The game follows a monster wrangler on his journey to regain his lost power. Does the game stand out from others in the genre? Find out in this Rapid Review. 

When I began DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince, I was introduced to a somewhat novel narrative. My main character is feuding with his father, and loses his ability to fight other monsters. Therefore, he must hone an army to fight for him. The premise is simple, but I enjoyed it in concept. However, the narrative did not leave an overly lasting impact on me. Many of the characters in the game had insignificant roles, and those who did often did not have deep or meaningful insights. Despite not being entranced, I appreciated the canonical justification of how fights are structured. 

While the overarching story was interesting, as time went on, new chapters failed to mesmerize me. As I progressed in the game, the story followed a very similar pattern. A new area opens with a brief blurb that explains how one person is tormenting someone else. To complete a section, I fight the mean person. There are some segments which relate to previous segments, but for the most part, these stories are contained and have little bearing on the overarching plot. The rigid structure of the narrative sections made these segments far less enjoyable, and the lack of recurring characters did not help either. As a result, I became somewhat disconnected with the overarching plot, and I cared a lot less about new narrative progress. The story did not resonate with me as much as I would have liked.

Friend or Foe? 

The lack of an engaging story is a significant disappointment for me, as I typically look for that in role-playing games. However, with interesting combat mechanics, I would certainly be more than happy to play. DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince has two core components of gameplay. One is the teambuilding aspect. By combining or encountering monsters in the wild, I curated a team of monsters. In leveling them up, I imbued them with new abilities to use in combat. Dynamically being able to alter the monster move sets was neat, and it gave me a lot of control over my team. Additionally, there was a lot of strategy possible when breeding. The moves available for a child are selected by parent monsters. Moreover, combining monsters gives the child monster an advantage in terms of base stats. It comes with some advanced moves or bonuses already.

As much as I enjoyed breeding conceptually, to get the best monsters, I needed to continually merge assets on my team, which disconnected me from getting attached. Child monsters do not necessarily share any likeness with the parent monster either, so I rarely felt as though the genetic values were transferred across generations. Additionally, the gameplay loop of continually leveling up monsters to feed them into other monsters is neat, but it forced me to spend more time than I would have liked leveling up new monsters. At the same time, most monsters caught in the wild were practically unusable since their base stats were not amped in the same way a carefully curated monster would be. All in all, the combination process is a very neat mechanic, which adds a lot of depth and strategy into teambuilding. However, designing the perfect monster requires a lot of work.

Hand to Hand

The extensive time commitment needed to design the ideal monster would not be a bad thing if the gameplay were riveting. However, a lot of the gameplay is tedious. Monster battles are the best way to obtain experience. However, many of these are easy. When exploring new areas, overworld monsters are rarely challenging. Even the big boss was rarely overly difficult. Yet, when the boss did beat me, the gameplay loop to improve my characters was mundane. In these scenarios, I rarely used the combination feature, as my monsters need to be a high level to take out the boss. Instead, when stuck on a tricky boss, I had to spend time fighting overworld monsters to level up my team. I suppose this is a blessing of the genre, but this felt significant in this game due since replacing team members is an ordeal.

I will note that the game does a solid job with quality of life features. Battles can be fast-forwarded, fights can run by themselves, and there are a plethora of fast travel options available. Nearly everything outside of team customization can be done quickly and efficiently. However, the bulk of my time was spent in battles, which felt like busy work, especially since the auto battle could handle most fights. 

Rounding out the Package

DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince also features a solid art style. I enjoyed wandering throughout different worlds. There were more traditional themes, such as caves or plains, but there were also more stylized areas such as a dessert themed area and a militarized zone. The monsters, for the most part, were also enjoyable to look at. Some of the monsters share a lot of detail with another monster, but I continually saw novel monsters with unique traits. Additionally, the soundtrack helped keep me interested throughout fights. I thought the music was catchy, but it was also well produced and fit the theme of the game. Neither of these elements had a significant impact on my experience of the game, for better or worse.

As a whole, while I enjoyed some elements of DRAGON QUEST MONSTERS: The Dark Prince, it is not a game I resonated with as much as I would have liked. The monster collecting and designing is neat, but the time commitment required to design a perfect monster is high, and the act of levelling up a monster was not significantly stimulating. The story had some interesting pieces, but quickly became stale and repetitive too. I could see someone getting a lot of value out of monster breeding, with the caveat that this comes with a bit of a grind. For others, however, I would hold out.

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