Dragon Quest Heroes is part of the Musou (aka Warriors) series spin-off family of games with things like Hyrule Warriors and Dynasty Warriors Gundam, two games I very much enjoyed. I also quite like me some Dragon Quest, so I thought that this would be a perfect fit for me. While I wasn't exactly wrong, I will preface this review by saying that this is certainly nothing terribly special. If you aren't already a fan of the Musou games, this isn't gonna make you a believer.

On the good side, you have a level of presentation up there with its sister spin-off game of around the same time: Hyrule Warriors. You have an original cast of 4 fighters backed up by a collection of 9 fan favorites(?) from across Dragon Quests 4, 5, 6, and 8:
Four from DQ4: Alena, Kyril, Maya, and Psaro (the final boss of that game)
Two from DQ5: Nera and Bianca
One from DQ6: Terry
Two from DQ8: Yangus and Jessica

While most of the selection is very understandable, I put the '?' there because I genuinely had to look up who the guy they had from DQ6 was, and that's a game in the series I've beaten, while I knew immediately who the members from DQ8 were, and that's a game I've played maybe two hours of total. They're beautifully rendered in 3D though, and while the voice acting on them ranges from pretty good to noticeably bad, the English dub is totally serviceable. The sound track is also excellent, with many tracks from older games, although with how much DQ reuses music, that's more or less to be expected. The game also runs fantastically, and I never encountered a single bug otherwise.

On the bad side are how the characters actually play compared to something like Hyrule Warriors. Compared to Hyrule Warriors that came out four months prior to this, the move trees are seriously lacking in any kind of depth. Where HW has you constantly unlocking new combos and weapons for each character and their different weapons, every character in DQH has a combo tree that is mostly static the entire game. There are some extra bits and bobs you can get through the level-up skill tree, but it's nothing compared to HW's progression system. While they do try and make up for it with a little equipment system and a little crafting, if you look at the comparatively small, unbalanced character pool along with no option for co-op, and it ends up feeling like a noticeably lesser experience.

This is also probably one of the longer Musou games out there. Perhaps it's because I did almost all the side-quests, but those don't really add up to too much outside of the normal gameplay until right before the last chapter (where I spent like 8 hours doing them), as most of them are just collecting a certain amount of ingredients or killing a certain number of monsters. However, most of the "kill X number of monsters" quests ARE given after those monsters have more or less disappeared from your main-story quests, so those do add up to a fair bit of time wasting. On top of that, all of the non-story mission quests take place in the story-mode maps, so it really doesn't feel like anything that different anyways. I racked up a little over 30 hours on this game, but I certainly can't say that I was absolutely enjoying all of it.

Even for Dragon Quest, the story is really nothing special. Even just doing story missions, the game is going to take you at least 20 hours to beat (judging from HLTB), and the story is just so trite and predictable that it never grabbed me at all. You may say this is to be expected of a cross-over game, but I quite enjoyed the Hyrule Warriors and Gundam Warriors plots in comparison to this, if for any reason just because they were so much shorter. Omega Force has just not come up with the mission variety to make this series that compelling for so long, and no amount of new spell-casting or equipment systems can hide that. They really should have done something like Dynasty Warriors 8 (which came out 2 years earlier) where certain characters are required for certain missions to freshen up the combat a little bit, because with how few characters there are, combat starts to feel old REALLY fast. Even Hyrule Warriors acknowledged that staleness and drip-fed the new characters to you far better as well as encouraging you to play certain missions as different characters to earn them heart containers.

This is all on top of how DQH also has the very modern Omega-Force problem of a really inconsistent difficulty curve. Due to the certain enemy make-up and/or contours of a particular level, it may be vastly harder compared to ones around the same time, and this is especially true for side-quest missions. The other common Omega-Force problem this game has is fucking god-awful menu systems and UI. For all the hand-holding the tutorial does, it NEVER tells you how to level up, which is buried in the "Misc." part of your pause menu as "Allocate Skill Points". I went for like 8 or 10 hours at effectively level 1 just because I figured I hadn't unlocked the ability to level up yet, as I was so sure the game would tell me how given the precedent of instruction it had set so far.

Verdict: Not Recommended. As much as it pains me to say, this game just really not worth the price. With a sequel that, from what I hear, is much better (despite not having co-op) also on PS4 for a similar price, the far superior Hyrule Warriors in the same console era across (almost) three systems in counting, not to mention Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Complete Edition which is also on PS4 (and has co-op), there is no shortage of far better Musou games or even Dragon Quest Musou games to occupy your time with. This probably isn't a game you'll hate, but it's probably one you won't end up finishing (even for a Musou game).