Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart
released on Mar 29, 2003
Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart acts as a prequel to Dragon Quest 7 and was never released outside of Japan but there is a fan-translation patch. You play Kiefer from Dragon Quest VII who ends up in the world of Dragon Quest II. You can use a group of 3 people or monsters to fight but enemies can show up in larger numbers. There is a job system for human characters with 20 classes.
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It's a pretty good spin-off, but that ration mechanic is so punishing at the beginning it makes the experience slightly more frustrating that it actually really isn't.
This game is very slow, you wouldn’t notice it at first and probably thought it’s just a normal DQ game, until you have to grind a bunch of levels. If I play this on a real hardware, I will drop it on the 3rd chapter. Thankfully this game is relatively short compared to other DQ games. I haven’t played the other DQM game though.
This being a Dragon Quest Monster game means that you will be collecting monster… their heart at least. That heart can then be fused with your current monsters and create new monster, increasing their rank and lowering their level back to 1, that’s the worst part of this game. Also you won’t know what skill your new monster will have, so it’s a gamble if you get a monster with good skill or not.
You also can’t do rapid ranking up by fusing a bunch of time because you can only fuse monster that’s more than level 10. Even then, you might be making a wrong decision because not all skills are learned at level 10, some of the useful ones are available at 20 or 30. And once you get the useful skill, you have to fuse the monster to get a better rank, and… it’s level 1 again. Back to grinding.
Another mechanic that differs from normal DQ is that your party member is made of wagons, each wagon has a guardian monster and 1-4 caravan members. In battle you can only control your guardian monster, your caravan members will use their respective skills. Caravan members can be recruited by talking to various people throughout your journey, sadly, there's a maximum amount of members you can have, so you can't get all members all at once.
Another thing is the ration system, if you walk on a place with random encounters, your ration will decrease. You can buy rations in your camp or town. At first this is annoying because you really have to plan your pathing and refilling rations can be expensive in the early game. But after chapter 3, I barely notice that it exists, so long as you keep refilling whenever you're back to your camp or town, because the game gives you a lot of money later on.
The story is meh… you're traveling to find 4 orbs, and once gathered, the orb can grant you any wish. And the wish is to cure one of your caravan member's father. That's it. It also has a predictable twist by the end.
There's a second quest kind of thing, after you get the first credit, you can load back your save file and there will be a new story. Your objective is now to collect colored orbs, but now the whole world is open to you. The new story progression (if you can even call it a story) is very repetitive and it made me hate this game more, honestly you don't lose anything if you stop playing at the first credit.
Overall, the game is just okay, but some of the mechanics are just hindering my fun, and the story doesn't help at all. Also the post game story and mechanic is just bad.
This being a Dragon Quest Monster game means that you will be collecting monster… their heart at least. That heart can then be fused with your current monsters and create new monster, increasing their rank and lowering their level back to 1, that’s the worst part of this game. Also you won’t know what skill your new monster will have, so it’s a gamble if you get a monster with good skill or not.
You also can’t do rapid ranking up by fusing a bunch of time because you can only fuse monster that’s more than level 10. Even then, you might be making a wrong decision because not all skills are learned at level 10, some of the useful ones are available at 20 or 30. And once you get the useful skill, you have to fuse the monster to get a better rank, and… it’s level 1 again. Back to grinding.
Another mechanic that differs from normal DQ is that your party member is made of wagons, each wagon has a guardian monster and 1-4 caravan members. In battle you can only control your guardian monster, your caravan members will use their respective skills. Caravan members can be recruited by talking to various people throughout your journey, sadly, there's a maximum amount of members you can have, so you can't get all members all at once.
Another thing is the ration system, if you walk on a place with random encounters, your ration will decrease. You can buy rations in your camp or town. At first this is annoying because you really have to plan your pathing and refilling rations can be expensive in the early game. But after chapter 3, I barely notice that it exists, so long as you keep refilling whenever you're back to your camp or town, because the game gives you a lot of money later on.
The story is meh… you're traveling to find 4 orbs, and once gathered, the orb can grant you any wish. And the wish is to cure one of your caravan member's father. That's it. It also has a predictable twist by the end.
There's a second quest kind of thing, after you get the first credit, you can load back your save file and there will be a new story. Your objective is now to collect colored orbs, but now the whole world is open to you. The new story progression (if you can even call it a story) is very repetitive and it made me hate this game more, honestly you don't lose anything if you stop playing at the first credit.
Overall, the game is just okay, but some of the mechanics are just hindering my fun, and the story doesn't help at all. Also the post game story and mechanic is just bad.
seems like they made some things less fun on purpose
[RESEÑA SERIA]
La otra reseña que hay en inglés explica bien lo que pasa con este juego, pero quiero hacer especial hincapié en el tema del grindeo
Muchas veces me he visto forzado a reformar un monstruo y volver a subirlo al nivel al que estaba antes porque muchas mazmorras son picos de dificultad horribles, por una razón u otra. Otra cosa que dicha reseña no menciona es que estás a merced de que el juego te suelte un corazón de un monstruo que aprenda hechizos de cura. O eso, o te encuentras de casualidad un cofre con un corazón de Medulimo o de Rey Limo que, y repito, quizás o quizás no encuentres porque posiblemente no quieras explorar por el sistema de víveres
En general, el juego tiene ideas muy buenas, pero la mayoría están ejecutadas como el culo y hacen que este juego sea una experiencia menos divertida de la que es. Si a alguien le gusta este juego, enhorabuena, pero para mí este es el peor Dragon Quest que he jugado. Y eso es triste
La otra reseña que hay en inglés explica bien lo que pasa con este juego, pero quiero hacer especial hincapié en el tema del grindeo
Muchas veces me he visto forzado a reformar un monstruo y volver a subirlo al nivel al que estaba antes porque muchas mazmorras son picos de dificultad horribles, por una razón u otra. Otra cosa que dicha reseña no menciona es que estás a merced de que el juego te suelte un corazón de un monstruo que aprenda hechizos de cura. O eso, o te encuentras de casualidad un cofre con un corazón de Medulimo o de Rey Limo que, y repito, quizás o quizás no encuentres porque posiblemente no quieras explorar por el sistema de víveres
En general, el juego tiene ideas muy buenas, pero la mayoría están ejecutadas como el culo y hacen que este juego sea una experiencia menos divertida de la que es. Si a alguien le gusta este juego, enhorabuena, pero para mí este es el peor Dragon Quest que he jugado. Y eso es triste
I have a complicated history with this game. This game was the first time I ever installed an emulator and a translation patch, because the very existence of this game was kinda mythical to me as a younger kid and I finally had the means to actually try it out. I would look at screenshots of this game on RPG websites and think to myself "oh man, there's a special GBA Dragon Quest Monsters game I can't play because they never released it outside of Japan!", and I love so many of the Dragon Quest games! Dragon Quest Monsters is one of my favorite Game Boy titles!
Then I actually played it.
Honestly, I gotta say...this is probably the worst Dragon Quest Monsters game I have ever played, and possibly one of the worst RPGs I've ever played. And I've played a lot.
I had to force myself to play this game all the way to the end and I don't think I would've been able to finish this game without save states and the ability to speed up the ROM. I can't imagine what this game is like on its original hardware without any game guides but it sounds like a miserable, drawn-out experience.
This game is the epitome of "great ideas, poor execution" because a lot of the ideas do sound kinda cool before you play the game. You have caravan management! Monsters treated more like characters than like disposable weapons you swap out as soon as you befriend a stronger one! A customizable party of caravan friends to help you! A game that's a prequel to Dragon Quest 7 but takes place in the world of Dragon Quest 2! You can really tell that they wanted to make a game that shook up the formula of the previous two games.
Then the actual gameplay happens and perhaps changing up the formula was a bad thing.
- The caravan system means that you are constantly depleting rations that have to be refilled with items and gold, which means the early portion of this game is absolutely grueling and it feels like the player is being actively punished for trying to explore.
- Since your monsters are just set characters that you constantly change into different forms using monster hearts and a process called Reformation, this game is a monster collection game without any monster collecting. Sure, you collect hearts, but something about that felt more hollow than just befriending the monster like in the other games.
It really doesn't help that your caravan monsters don't really have much of a personality to speak of. Most of your monsters' dialogue is like "I wanna help the caravan!". The most basic "Yay helping!" personalities. The third one, Carol, is basically a baby monster that roars at you whenever you talk to her, and it honestly feels kinda weird to be physically altering this baby monster into different creatures all the time.
- Your caravan members all act in battle along with your monsters, which means random battles are an absolute chore of scrolling through a bunch of different actions from your caravan members. Every time you hit that "Fight" command on each turn, you have to wait for like ten people to finish attacking so a lot of the gameplay is just sitting there and waiting for the text to stop scrolling.
- This being a game that takes place several hundred years after the end of Dragon Quest 2 is a bit of a fun oddity but ultimately the story itself is "you are transported into another world and help some kid find four glowing orbs to heal his sick parents". I literally forgot the first half of the game because none of the story-related dialogue is that interesting or exciting. This game does a whole "here's all the exciting places you visited in sepia tone!" thing during the credits and I was just sitting there, unable to remember who any of these people were.
And if you think the whole "taking place in the world of Dragon Quest 2" thing would make it interesting....it doesn't. I think they did it mostly to reuse maps.
Add random events on the world map that hinder process into the pile (boy I sure love a grind-heavy game that sometimes gives me a random event that turns random events off!), a boring, meandering story that often leaves you without any clue of where to go (at one point you have to go to a specific boat port to reach a new continent, but of course the game doesn't tell you this), poor level scaling which means that the late-game section of the game requires hours of grinding, and an honestly kinda boring overworld that's just bumbling into places and hoping it has the next glowing item or event flag you need to collect, and you have yourself a really mediocre game that I think was never translated because everyone just kinda collectively looked at it and went "yeah okay, we don't need to inflict this on other countries".
On the bright side, at least the sprites are cute and I think the people who made the English translation patch did a very good job. It's just that sadly, what was translated is quite the turd.
For completionist's only. Spare yourselves the fate that I subjected myself to.
Then I actually played it.
Honestly, I gotta say...this is probably the worst Dragon Quest Monsters game I have ever played, and possibly one of the worst RPGs I've ever played. And I've played a lot.
I had to force myself to play this game all the way to the end and I don't think I would've been able to finish this game without save states and the ability to speed up the ROM. I can't imagine what this game is like on its original hardware without any game guides but it sounds like a miserable, drawn-out experience.
This game is the epitome of "great ideas, poor execution" because a lot of the ideas do sound kinda cool before you play the game. You have caravan management! Monsters treated more like characters than like disposable weapons you swap out as soon as you befriend a stronger one! A customizable party of caravan friends to help you! A game that's a prequel to Dragon Quest 7 but takes place in the world of Dragon Quest 2! You can really tell that they wanted to make a game that shook up the formula of the previous two games.
Then the actual gameplay happens and perhaps changing up the formula was a bad thing.
- The caravan system means that you are constantly depleting rations that have to be refilled with items and gold, which means the early portion of this game is absolutely grueling and it feels like the player is being actively punished for trying to explore.
- Since your monsters are just set characters that you constantly change into different forms using monster hearts and a process called Reformation, this game is a monster collection game without any monster collecting. Sure, you collect hearts, but something about that felt more hollow than just befriending the monster like in the other games.
It really doesn't help that your caravan monsters don't really have much of a personality to speak of. Most of your monsters' dialogue is like "I wanna help the caravan!". The most basic "Yay helping!" personalities. The third one, Carol, is basically a baby monster that roars at you whenever you talk to her, and it honestly feels kinda weird to be physically altering this baby monster into different creatures all the time.
- Your caravan members all act in battle along with your monsters, which means random battles are an absolute chore of scrolling through a bunch of different actions from your caravan members. Every time you hit that "Fight" command on each turn, you have to wait for like ten people to finish attacking so a lot of the gameplay is just sitting there and waiting for the text to stop scrolling.
- This being a game that takes place several hundred years after the end of Dragon Quest 2 is a bit of a fun oddity but ultimately the story itself is "you are transported into another world and help some kid find four glowing orbs to heal his sick parents". I literally forgot the first half of the game because none of the story-related dialogue is that interesting or exciting. This game does a whole "here's all the exciting places you visited in sepia tone!" thing during the credits and I was just sitting there, unable to remember who any of these people were.
And if you think the whole "taking place in the world of Dragon Quest 2" thing would make it interesting....it doesn't. I think they did it mostly to reuse maps.
Add random events on the world map that hinder process into the pile (boy I sure love a grind-heavy game that sometimes gives me a random event that turns random events off!), a boring, meandering story that often leaves you without any clue of where to go (at one point you have to go to a specific boat port to reach a new continent, but of course the game doesn't tell you this), poor level scaling which means that the late-game section of the game requires hours of grinding, and an honestly kinda boring overworld that's just bumbling into places and hoping it has the next glowing item or event flag you need to collect, and you have yourself a really mediocre game that I think was never translated because everyone just kinda collectively looked at it and went "yeah okay, we don't need to inflict this on other countries".
On the bright side, at least the sprites are cute and I think the people who made the English translation patch did a very good job. It's just that sadly, what was translated is quite the turd.
For completionist's only. Spare yourselves the fate that I subjected myself to.