Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is set to be released for the Nintendo Switch on December 1. This marks the first new entry in the Dragon Quest Monsters spin-off series since 2016 and the first one to be released outside of Japan since 2010. I’ve never played any of the past Dragon Quest Monsters games, but I enjoy a good monster-collecting RPG from time to time, so I was excited to give this a chance when I saw a demo was available.
You play as Psaro from Dragon Quest IV, who has been cursed so that he can’t harm any monsters. While searching for a way to break his curse, he becomes a monster wrangler, someone who captures and tames a team of monsters so they can fight for him. The game starts off by asking you a couple of questions, after which it selects a starting monster to pair you with. From there, you head out into the first large gameplay zone to fight and recruit other monsters while being introduced to the game’s systems.
Monsters appear on the field, and you run into them to start a battle. In combat, you have several options to pick from. Simply picking “Fight” will cause your monsters to act on their own, although you can set tactics for them to follow, such as focusing on healing or inflicting debuffs. If you choose “Orders” first, you can instead set individual commands for your monsters like in a traditional RPG. During tournaments, you can’t issue orders personally, which adds a layer of tension to those fights. Of course, since this is a monster-collecting game, you won’t just want to defeat everything you see. Besides attacking, you can choose “Scout,” which gives you a percentage chance to recruit the monster based on whether or not it is impressed by your team. There are also items you can use to make a monster more likely to join you. According to the tutorial, there’s a chance a defeated monster will want to join your team as well, but I never saw it happen.
You can have four regular monsters in your active battle party at a time, along with four additional monsters in reserve. All other captured monsters will be stored at your base. You can switch in monsters from your reserve party at any point, even during combat, and the whole reserve party automatically swaps in if your active party is wiped out. There are also large monsters, which are stronger than regular monsters at the cost of taking up more than one party slot. As you fight, your monsters will level up and earn Talent Points to learn new skills. Each monster has a couple of Talents with an associated list of skills you’ll unlock by putting points into that Talent.
After a certain point in the demo, you unlock the ability to perform synthesis at your home base. Synthesis lets you fuse any two monsters together once they reach level 10 to get a new monster. When you choose two monsters to fuse, the game gives you a short list of resulting monsters to pick from. You then can pass along three Talents to the new monster, with half of the parents’ Talent Points being inherited. This is a good way to get monsters not encountered naturally, at least in the demo, as well as stronger ones.
The Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince demo features a few large environments to explore to find items and new monsters, and these environments change depending on the season. For example, an impassable river will freeze into a walkable surface during winter, while summertime ivy allows you to climb to higher areas. This adds so much to the exploration. As someone who likes to explore everything, each new area had me eyeing spots I couldn’t reach yet, knowing I’d have to return in a different season to see what it held. Seasons naturally change with the passing of time, although the full game will also have items you can use to instantly change them. Through my exploration, I also encountered a monster I wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to face yet, so it seems there will be benefits to returning to areas later in the game. You can fast travel to locations you’ve already discovered by using the Zoom command.
I spent 5 hours playing the demo and generally enjoyed my time with it. Performance struggles out in the field, despite it not appearing to be a visually demanding game, but not enough to bother me. What did put me off was its presentation of the story, with abrupt developments that left me puzzled about what just happened. However, since it appears you can only transfer your monsters to the full game, not overall progress, it’s possible that story events will play out differently in the full game. Overall, while it hasn’t jumped to the top of my list as a must-play, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a game I’ll definitely want to check out eventually.
