7.7 KiB
| title | date | score | howlongtobeat_id | howlongtobeat_hrs | series | game_name | game_genre | game_release_year | game_developer | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dragon Warrior Monsters: Gotta Breed Em All | 2023-04-27T10:35:00+02:00 | 3 | 2840 | 32.5 | Dragon Quest | Dragon Warrior Monsters | jRPG | 2000 | Enix |
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When the Pokémon craze hit the West in 1998, it became clear that it couldn't be stopped. Two years later, Enix arrived with their own adaptation to the formula: what if you could collect (here called tame) monsters from the Dragon Quest universe? The answer is a black Game Boy Color-enabled cartridge labeled Dragon Warrior Monsters, or Dragon Quest Monsters as known in Japan. Just like the original Pokémon Game Boy games, it took two years to cross the ocean, but when it did, critics lauded its slightly altered approach to the monster collecting formula.
In Dragon Warrior Monsters, you do what it says on the box: tame monsters, train them in small randomly generated dungeons, and fight your way to the top in The Arena. That's it. There is little to no story involved, although if you look close enough, Enix did try to integrate it into the larger Dragon Quest universe: you play as children Terry and Milly from just before the events of Dragon Quest VI, which somehow get sucked in this magical monster-ridden world. To get out, you have to please the local king by beating the highest level in The Arena, which gradually gets tougher and gradually unlocks rarer monsters to tame and add to your collection.
Contrary to Pokémon, battles are fought out in a 3-vs-3 fashion, and based on their personality---which can be altered by breeding or the right but expensive items---will fight semi-autonomously. In a normal battle, you can choose to "Plan" your attacks, which means you get to decide which monster uses which skill, but in The Arena, you'll have to sit back and watch as either party gets decimated automatically. That means it can be rather important to breed a healer who can keep their cool, not a reckless one that chooses to fight instead of heal their buddies! It feels weird to be able to exert control over your monsters while in regular battles but not while in the ones that effectively matter, but you get used to that.
The most interesting aspect of Dragon Warrior Monsters is not merely the taming of wild new species you'll encounter (there are over 200!), but the effectively cross-breeding of them that hopefully yields the "ultimate" species. Based on the powers of mom and dad, the child inherits skills which can be re-unlocked and improved upon. You can choose to let a slime and a slime breed, which will result in a slime, and doing that 20 times has a slight chance to breed a special slime, or you can opt to cross-breed families. For instance, a Sky Dragon, of the dragon family, combined with a Healer, of the slime family, results in a slime with dragon wings called a DrakSlime that can spit fire, but also heal.
That's interesting, but we're not there yet. Combine a Beast with a DrakSlime and you'll get a Goategon. Combine that one with a SkyDragon and you'll get an Andreal, which together with a Medusa Eye can bread an Orochi, which together with another SkyDragon can breed a Divinegon, the most powerful dragon in the game. Yes, it's that kind of game.
When breeding monsters, the new monster will learn: any skills the two parents knew, any other inherited skills, and any skills of its own monster type, totaling to at most nine different skill slots. The problem is that skills have both a stat and a level requirement: are you going to let your DrakSlime breed with the SkyDragon now, or are you going to power-level them for a few more hours until their stats are boosted? If you choose to breed two monsters, they're "gone", sacrificed for the greater good to create an offspring you can train. Do this too soon and the offspring won't be able to unlock its potential, but do it too late and you'll have wasted hours grinding for nothing.
The breeding system is brilliant and addictive: I've jotted down pages of notes while scouring the internet looking for great combinations and reading through breeding strategies. This is the perfect game to buy a Prima Guide strategy booklet for, which contains pages upon pages of tabular information of all monsters and all possible breeding combinations. I love that kind of thing, and it's well-executed in Dragon Warrior Monsters, which kept me busy for a good ten hours, but has the potential to entertain for hundreds of hours.
The reason my interest gradually faded away is the monotony that sets in while scouring dungeon after dungeon. The dungeons, which provide opportunities to meet and tame new monsters, collect items (different forms of meat are used to up the chances of recruiting a monster) and gold to spent in shops, and occasionally defeat another monster tamer that nets a bigger reward. The problem with these dungeons is the ridiculous simplicity of them: they're nothing more but very limited randomly generated and mostly empty overworld maps with black holes in them to fall through and make it to the next level. Every odd tile, a random encounter projects you and your three monsters into a battle screen, but that's it. The lack of proper tile variation is painfully apparent after even half an hour of grinding. Since the first Dragon Warrior Monsters doesn't have a proper story either besides the "beat the Arena mode" thing, all there is left to do is marvel at the monsters, their skills, and breed away.
Even though the taming and especially the breeding aspects of the game are compelling, in the end, I lost interest because of the boring grindfest. Its 2001 sequel is said to have fixed this by adding a decent sized quest and more variety, so if you're interested in Dragon Quest collecting, I would highly recommend you to start there instead. Both games were released in a bundle for Playstation and in the 3DS Virtual Console store. In 2014, the second game got a 3DS remake in Japan.
I can't compare it to Pokémon because I never played it but game journalists seemed to agree that the "Gotta Catch Em All" mechanic in Dragon Warrior Monsters is better than the firs generation Pokémon games on Game Boy. I did love the big sprite work that clearly reflects Toriyama's iconic monsters, even though there was little animation going on. There's not a lot to be said about the music: it's passable but tends to keep itself to the background. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the game much more in the early 2000s when linked up together with a friend, a now near useless feature.
If you are the kind of person who doesn't mind endless hours of grinding to optimize their party and maximize skill levels, only to then breed with those party members and have them replaced by a level 1 child to repeat the whole process, then this is the game for you. If you're looking for a bit more meat, story, or even more monsters, check out the GBC-exclusive sequel instead. Just be prepared to pay extra: the Dragon Warrior Monsters cart is around $30, while its successor is nearly $50 and quite hard to find.
