While Pokémon has long been the undisputed king of the monster-catching RPG niche, there have always been other releases that have offered up their own distinct take on that unique brand of recruitment gameplay. Megami Tensei, for example, pioneered the concept with ‘Demon Negotiation’ in 1987 and Dragon Quest took a crack at it with monster recruitment in Dragon Quest V in 1992, before expanding it into a sub-series with Dragon Quest Monsters in 1998.
Though it always had its fans, Dragon Quest Monsters never quite found its feet in the West, and its popularity started to peter out even across its small handful of Japan-only releases in the last decade. After several years of letting the franchise cool, Square has now decided to bring the series back with Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. While it may not quite be the roaring revival that longtime fans hoped it would be, this new release is nonetheless a fun and engaging new entry that we’d suggest you consider picking up.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is set before the events of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, and follows the origin of a young Psaro before he became the menacing Manslayer that terrorized the party in the mainline entry. In a rather drawn-out opening sequence, we’re introduced to the monster-human hybrid when he was just a child and witness several traumatizing and tragic events across his young life that lay the groundwork for his hatred of humans.
His human mother, however, implores that he use his power for good, and his love for her drives him to attempt to exact revenge on his wicked father, the king of the underworld, Nadiria. Psaro fights his way to his father’s throne room but is defeated and cursed with a hex that prevents him from being able to harm other monsters. Not one to have his resolve broken, Psaro takes up monster training upon returning to the world of humans, commanding his cronies to do his dirty work for him as he builds his reputation and powers up his team for a final confrontation with his father.
Though narrative doesn’t take center stage in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, we appreciated the effort that went into making a surprisingly dark and layered plot, particularly for a Dragon Quest game. Beneath all the goofy character designs and cheesy wordplay, this is ultimately a bitter story about a man out for revenge after being a victim of circumstance one too many times. It’s still a Dragon Quest game, so it’s not like things get too angsty, but having an anti-hero as the lead gives the game a distinct tone within the broader series. Fans of Dragon Quest IV will appreciate the context this adds to that story, as plenty of familiar faces and locales make an appearance, though newcomers can rest assured that the story is still completely enjoyable even without knowledge of the NES game.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince sticks to the sub-series’ traditional gameplay, which feels like a more evolved take on the monster-catching formula Pokémon made famous. The basic gameplay loop consists of exploring an open area where you recruit and train a team of monsters, taking on a gauntlet of foes in a tournament or conquering the boss at the end of a tough dungeon, and then moving on to the next area to do it all over again with new monsters and stronger opponents. There are over 500 monsters to add to your Monsterpedia, and it’s a lot of fun to discover new types and experiment with how they could slot into your team.
Every monster has a rank which determines its species’ relative strength, while distinct stats and skills give each monster a unique edge. New monsters are ‘caught’ by scouting them in battle, but success is far from guaranteed. When you scout, each of your active monsters will attack simultaneously in a ‘show of force’ that raises the chances of the chosen monster joining you, with weaker monsters generally having higher percentages. There are some items you can use to give yourself an advantage, but waiting for the monster to make up its mind is always tense, particularly given that you only get two or three tries before it becomes angered and uncatchable.
In addition to scouting, new monsters can also be added to your team by fusing any two monsters who have reached level 10. Not only is this the quickest path to getting some of the most powerful monsters onto your team, but several monsters can only be gained through this method. The resulting monster of fusion will always inherit a few skill trees you select from the two parents which can lead to some truly broken effects if you plan ahead and get certain skill trees on monsters that otherwise wouldn’t have them. We wish it were easier to reacquire monsters you delete through fusion—there’s no SMT-style demon compendium you can use to buy them back—but the system nonetheless adds a lot of fun to team-building through the constant renewal of your lineup.
Combat unfolds in a standard turn-based style wherein your four active monsters battle either autonomously or according to your orders. Each monster can be set to prioritize certain actions, such as attacking or healing, and we found that the auto-battling AI does a great job in most trash mob encounters. When you’re coming up against tougher enemies and teams it’s usually best to order your units around individually, much akin to standard Dragon Quest combat. Sure, the system here is about as simplistic as turn-based combat gets, but the fundamentals are well-executed, and it’s made much more interesting through the usage of skills.
After a monster levels up a couple of times, it’ll gain a handful of skill points you can distribute among its skill trees. These will either offer flat stat boosts or unlock new actions that the monster can use, with new unlocks coming at set thresholds for each tree. This means that even two monsters that belong to the same species can have radically different roles in the party based on which trees you’ve chosen to build up, giving you lots of approaches for building your team. Plus, there’s something carnally satisfying about the sense of progress this skill system offers the player; nearly every completed battle will result in at least one of your monsters leveling up and gaining more stat boosts or skill points, so it always feels like you’re progressing at a good pace.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the gameplay loop in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, but there’s something about how all its elements come together that proves to be thrillingly addictive. Exploring new areas for new monsters, building out your skill trees, agonizing over who to throw away for fusion fodder, it all feeds into a very gameplay-first experience that feels like it just keeps getting better as the scope slowly widens. Add in the option to play online to test your teams against other players, and there’s an awful lot of content to discover and just plain fun to be had.
That said, the gameplay loop sometimes feels a little too safe. It’s been seven years since the last Monsters game (which didn’t even release outside Japan), yet the formula feels completely unchanged despite this new entry being on substantially more advanced hardware. Granted, it would be unreasonable to expect the series to stray too far from its roots, but even Pokémon—the poster child series of safe, unimaginative sequels—eventually gave us an interesting evolution with Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Make no mistake, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is still a thoroughly enjoyable monster-catching RPG, we just wish that it dared a little more—the potential that it had feels a bit squandered.
Unfortunately, this release also struggles noticeably in the performance department, which is especially discouraging considering that it was built from the ground up for the Switch. Huge intermittent FPS drops happen all the time when you’re out exploring the field, there’s a ton of pop-in for assets that aren’t that far in the distance, the handheld resolution is quite blurry, and we even had a few instances where the game crashed when a battle was triggered with an enemy on the field. It feels an awful lot like Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a poor port of a game released for much stronger hardware. Eventually, you kind of adjust to the quirks and it’s a testament to the strong game design that it’s still so much fun to play, but this is a release that we feel deserves just as much criticism as Pokémon Scarlet & Violet did for their subpar performance problems.
From a visual perspective, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince adheres strictly to the series’ signature look from Akira Toriyama. Though environments are a little ho-hum, the monster designs are truly the star of the show here with all kinds of quirky and silly features, with new monsters such as the Vegandragora fitting in nicely alongside classics such as the iconic Slime. We would’ve liked to have seen a little more effort put into visual spectacle, as this release can look a bit too plain, but overall it feels like it meets the bar set by the most recent Dragon Quest releases.
Conclusion
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is an enjoyable monster-catching RPG that combines charming visuals with addictive gameplay to make for a genuinely gripping experience, making it feel like the long wait since the last entry to leave Japan has been worth it. Even so, its general lack of ambition and struggles with performance issues hold it back from greatness—it’s very good, but it’s also definitely got its issues. If you’re at all a fan of Dragon Quest or monster-catching RPGs, we’d suggest you pick this one up, though perhaps wait a few months to see if Square can sort out the worst of its performance issues.
While Pokémon has long been the undisputed king of the monster-catching RPG niche, there have always been other releases that have offered up their own distinct take on that unique brand of recruitment gameplay. Megami Tensei, for example, pioneered the concept with ‘Demon Negotiation’ in 1987 and Dragon Quest took a crack at it with monster recruitment in Dragon Quest V in 1992, before expanding it into a sub-series with Dragon Quest Monsters in 1998.
Though it always had its fans, Dragon Quest Monsters never quite found its feet in the West, and its popularity started to peter out even across its small handful of Japan-only releases in the last decade. After several years of letting the franchise cool, Square has now decided to bring the series back with Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. While it may not quite be the roaring revival that longtime fans hoped it would be, this new release is nonetheless a fun and engaging new entry that we’d suggest you consider picking up.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is set before the events of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, and follows the origin of a young Psaro before he became the menacing Manslayer that terrorized the party in the mainline entry. In a rather drawn-out opening sequence, we’re introduced to the monster-human hybrid when he was just a child and witness several traumatizing and tragic events across his young life that lay the groundwork for his hatred of humans.
His human mother, however, implores that he use his power for good, and his love for her drives him to attempt to exact revenge on his wicked father, the king of the underworld, Nadiria. Psaro fights his way to his father’s throne room but is defeated and cursed with a hex that prevents him from being able to harm other monsters. Not one to have his resolve broken, Psaro takes up monster training upon returning to the world of humans, commanding his cronies to do his dirty work for him as he builds his reputation and powers up his team for a final confrontation with his father.
Though narrative doesn’t take center stage in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, we appreciated the effort that went into making a surprisingly dark and layered plot, particularly for a Dragon Quest game. Beneath all the goofy character designs and cheesy wordplay, this is ultimately a bitter story about a man out for revenge after being a victim of circumstance one too many times. It’s still a Dragon Quest game, so it’s not like things get too angsty, but having an anti-hero as the lead gives the game a distinct tone within the broader series. Fans of Dragon Quest IV will appreciate the context this adds to that story, as plenty of familiar faces and locales make an appearance, though newcomers can rest assured that the story is still completely enjoyable even without knowledge of the NES game.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince sticks to the sub-series’ traditional gameplay, which feels like a more evolved take on the monster-catching formula Pokémon made famous. The basic gameplay loop consists of exploring an open area where you recruit and train a team of monsters, taking on a gauntlet of foes in a tournament or conquering the boss at the end of a tough dungeon, and then moving on to the next area to do it all over again with new monsters and stronger opponents. There are over 500 monsters to add to your Monsterpedia, and it’s a lot of fun to discover new types and experiment with how they could slot into your team.
Every monster has a rank which determines its species’ relative strength, while distinct stats and skills give each monster a unique edge. New monsters are ‘caught’ by scouting them in battle, but success is far from guaranteed. When you scout, each of your active monsters will attack simultaneously in a ‘show of force’ that raises the chances of the chosen monster joining you, with weaker monsters generally having higher percentages. There are some items you can use to give yourself an advantage, but waiting for the monster to make up its mind is always tense, particularly given that you only get two or three tries before it becomes angered and uncatchable.
In addition to scouting, new monsters can also be added to your team by fusing any two monsters who have reached level 10. Not only is this the quickest path to getting some of the most powerful monsters onto your team, but several monsters can only be gained through this method. The resulting monster of fusion will always inherit a few skill trees you select from the two parents which can lead to some truly broken effects if you plan ahead and get certain skill trees on monsters that otherwise wouldn’t have them. We wish it were easier to reacquire monsters you delete through fusion—there’s no SMT-style demon compendium you can use to buy them back—but the system nonetheless adds a lot of fun to team-building through the constant renewal of your lineup.
Combat unfolds in a standard turn-based style wherein your four active monsters battle either autonomously or according to your orders. Each monster can be set to prioritize certain actions, such as attacking or healing, and we found that the auto-battling AI does a great job in most trash mob encounters. When you’re coming up against tougher enemies and teams it’s usually best to order your units around individually, much akin to standard Dragon Quest combat. Sure, the system here is about as simplistic as turn-based combat gets, but the fundamentals are well-executed, and it’s made much more interesting through the usage of skills.
After a monster levels up a couple of times, it’ll gain a handful of skill points you can distribute among its skill trees. These will either offer flat stat boosts or unlock new actions that the monster can use, with new unlocks coming at set thresholds for each tree. This means that even two monsters that belong to the same species can have radically different roles in the party based on which trees you’ve chosen to build up, giving you lots of approaches for building your team. Plus, there’s something carnally satisfying about the sense of progress this skill system offers the player; nearly every completed battle will result in at least one of your monsters leveling up and gaining more stat boosts or skill points, so it always feels like you’re progressing at a good pace.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about the gameplay loop in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, but there’s something about how all its elements come together that proves to be thrillingly addictive. Exploring new areas for new monsters, building out your skill trees, agonizing over who to throw away for fusion fodder, it all feeds into a very gameplay-first experience that feels like it just keeps getting better as the scope slowly widens. Add in the option to play online to test your teams against other players, and there’s an awful lot of content to discover and just plain fun to be had.
That said, the gameplay loop sometimes feels a little too safe. It’s been seven years since the last Monsters game (which didn’t even release outside Japan), yet the formula feels completely unchanged despite this new entry being on substantially more advanced hardware. Granted, it would be unreasonable to expect the series to stray too far from its roots, but even Pokémon—the poster child series of safe, unimaginative sequels—eventually gave us an interesting evolution with Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Make no mistake, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is still a thoroughly enjoyable monster-catching RPG, we just wish that it dared a little more—the potential that it had feels a bit squandered.
Unfortunately, this release also struggles noticeably in the performance department, which is especially discouraging considering that it was built from the ground up for the Switch. Huge intermittent FPS drops happen all the time when you’re out exploring the field, there’s a ton of pop-in for assets that aren’t that far in the distance, the handheld resolution is quite blurry, and we even had a few instances where the game crashed when a battle was triggered with an enemy on the field. It feels an awful lot like Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a poor port of a game released for much stronger hardware. Eventually, you kind of adjust to the quirks and it’s a testament to the strong game design that it’s still so much fun to play, but this is a release that we feel deserves just as much criticism as Pokémon Scarlet & Violet did for their subpar performance problems.
From a visual perspective, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince adheres strictly to the series’ signature look from Akira Toriyama. Though environments are a little ho-hum, the monster designs are truly the star of the show here with all kinds of quirky and silly features, with new monsters such as the Vegandragora fitting in nicely alongside classics such as the iconic Slime. We would’ve liked to have seen a little more effort put into visual spectacle, as this release can look a bit too plain, but overall it feels like it meets the bar set by the most recent Dragon Quest releases.
Conclusion
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is an enjoyable monster-catching RPG that combines charming visuals with addictive gameplay to make for a genuinely gripping experience, making it feel like the long wait since the last entry to leave Japan has been worth it. Even so, its general lack of ambition and struggles with performance issues hold it back from greatness—it’s very good, but it’s also definitely got its issues. If you’re at all a fan of Dragon Quest or monster-catching RPGs, we’d suggest you pick this one up, though perhaps wait a few months to see if Square can sort out the worst of its performance issues.
