I actually bought this game like a year and a half ago during my last super obsession with GameBoy stuff, but tried it only a little and bounced off of it pretty quick. Well this time, I ended up returning to it during this most recent obsession with Dragon Quest games I hadn’t gotten to yet, and after finishing DQ8 and having fun with its monster arena system, I decided to finally take another crack at this one. I played through this game’s sequel when I was much younger, in fact (probably late high school or early university), but couldn’t quite beat that one (and it’s soon on the hit list as well XD). I was determined not to let this one beat me again, and this time I was able to see it through to the end~. It took me a bit over 40 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (a real cart played mostly via my GameCube’s GB Player and my GBA SP).

The story for DQM is a pretty simple one. Terry, the very same from Dragon Quest VI but as a child, is playing with his older sister one night, when she suddenly tells him they need to go to bed quick, or monsters will come and take them away! Terry pretends to go to bed, and gets back out only to run into a montser, Warubo, coming out of his dresser and stealing his sister away! Stricken with panic, Terry is then met by another, nicer monster named Watabo, who is the good-version counterpart to the earlier sister stealer. He takes Terry through the dresser drawer to the kingdom of Taiju, located in a giant tree. The king is a bit of a goofball, and he has no idea where Terry’s sister is, but he can still help, well, sorta. The night of shooting stars is coming up soon, and whoever wins the monster arena tournament at that festival will be granted any wish they desire! Terry could wish for his sister to be saved, and so he sets out on a mission to compile the best and strongest monster team he can to win that tournament!

It’s a pretty simple story, as far as plot goes, but that’s not too unusual for Dragon Quest of the time (the time in particular here being 1998). What’s also normal for DQ of that era is a bunch of silly, colorful characters with funny dialogue, and it’s something this game has in spades. The story and world aren’t too deep, sure, but I think they succeed well at making an entertaining and engaging world to partake in the mechanics of the game.

Coming out over two years after the original Pokemon games, this is without question a Pokemon competitor, first and foremost, but it’s also one of the more ambitious ones I’ve seen of the handful I’ve run into on the GameBoy. The main gameplay loop consists of going through procedurally generated portal dungeons to find monsters, and then using the monsters you have in your party to go through successive ranks of the arena until you’re good enough to beat that final rank of the arena for the story. While you can directly order around monsters in dungeons, in arena matches, they’ll only act by general behavioral patterns (like “go all out!” or “focus on defense/ healing”, that sort of thing), so having a team that can handle both is paramount to a game-winning monster team (my personal team at the end was a Servant, DracoLord1, and an Akubar). The portal dungeons usually have bosses at the end you’ll need to fight to complete them, and you can even often recruit these powerful foes as party members themselves! Recruiting monsters just involves beating them, and if a hidden dice roll goes well enough, they’ll join you. But thankfully you can increase those odds by giving them better quality meat treats in battle, at least.

However, even the most powerful wild monster is still gonna be pretty pathetic. Not unlike how SMT handles this monster-catching rpg genre, where real power lies is in pairing your monsters off to make stronger offspring. But while SMT has demon fusion, DQM has monster breeding. But unlike something like Pokemon (which didn’t actually have a breeding mechanic yet in 1998), you don’t keep the parents. You’re just stuck with the baby, so it’s a lot more like SMT demon fusion. What is a lot less like SMT demon fusion, however, is that while SMT demons don’t level and are simply as powerful at “birth” as they’ll ever be, DQM monsters do level up. In fact, not only do monsters get stronger as they level and need to be at least level 10 to breed at all, but a child monster actually inherits the strength of its parent monsters. This isn’t like how Pokemon would eventually do it, where Pokemon have inherent stats upon birth that will be passed down genetically no matter what. DQM monsters will get better stat growths if their parents were stronger when they were born (i.e. a monster with level 10 parents will be far weaker than a monster whose parents were both level 20).

This is also combined with that monsters don’t simply give random offspring. The monsters you’re breeding, and even the order you give them to the monster breeder, have pre-set algorithms for what offspring they’ll give you. While later generation monsters will generally be much more powerful no matter what they are, different monsters have different stat growth biases, so there are plenty of monsters who are simply better and stronger and you’re gonna want those if you wanna win. Additionally, offspring can also learn their parents’ spells as well, but only if their parents already know those spells in the first place, so that’s one more incentive to just grind grind grind those levels up before you breed more monsters. Using a wiki to make the most optimal path to whatever big smashy powerful monster you want is very highly recommended unless you want to spend forever just grinding blindly only to end up with crappy monsters.

This is honestly my biggest complained with DQM as a game. Compared to something like SMT or Pokemon’s far more straightforward monster raising systems, DQM’s systems are incredibly arcane and difficult to parse. Especially for a younger kid, the very nature of needing to breed monsters to get stronger ones is so alien from something like Pokemon that I could never recommend DQM over Pokemon to them. Like 95% of DQM is just grinding, and it’s a gameplay loop that incentives assuming grinding is necessary over progress. DQM ain’t an easy game, and those arena tiers (not to mention the two or three mandatory portal dungeons) are no slouch, and you’re gonna need some real ass-beating monsters to beat them. I found myself falling into loops of just endlessly grinding up monsters to breed for more monsters to breed for more monsters, since why not just get better monsters now rather than throw myself at the arena and waste my time with that? The game even has a baffling mechanic where, if you’ve ever had a monster before (through either befriending it or breeding it), recruiting it again is 10s of times more difficult, and you’re going to need to expend some very valuable monster-befriending meat items to recruit a second of something to have an easier time breeding a strong family tree. I assume this is to encourage you to breed monster’s with your friends’ copies of the game, but all it amounted to for friendless me was an even further pressure to use the wiki to grind and breed my monsters in the most efficient way possible.

That lack of a world to explore and get engrossed in, and the combination of both monsters to get attached to like Pokemon (or family trees, in this case) who are yet also very disposable like in SMT makes DQM a very odd beast of a game. It feels like it was made for older folks, teenagers and people in their 20’s and 30’s, who were big DQ fans and big Pokemon fans. There is fun to be had here, sure, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s better executed or polished than what guys like the Pokemon Company or Atlus had been doing for years, and a lot of the biggest issues seem to be self-selected problems in the very conceit of the gameplay loop. I think, at the very least, Dragon Quest Monsters does a really good job of making a monster-raising rpg out of the existing mechanics in Dragon Quest, however I do not really mean that as a compliment so much as I mean it as a description of fact.

The presentation is quite nice, though a bit underwhelming for what is technically a GameBoy Color game. The graphics are pretty, and the visual effects on the attacks in particular look quite nice, but you’d be forgiven for mistaking it as just a quite nice looking GB game rather than a GBC game. Though, in the game’s defense, it’s a VERY early GBC game. It’s such an early game, in fact, that while it’s a black cartridge (indicating it works on both GBCs and normal GBs) in English, it’s a grey cartridge here in Japan! It’s a GBC game that actually predates the release of the GBC itself, so it’s hard to be too harsh on it. They do a really good job of using the 4 colors available per sprite on the GBC to make some really nice looking monsters, and the monsters are very recognizable from their console DQ origins, and there are a LOT of them, at over 200, and they even have overworld walking sprites as well for when they’re following you in your party! The music is also quite nice, GameBoy-ifying familiar DQ tracks in a very pleasant way.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I would hesitate to call DQM a bad game, I think it is a game that really commits to a pretty flawed formula. While being a flawed RPG on the GameBoy is something that basically every RPG on the platform can be described by, I think in DQM’s case, the sheer strength of its competitors and just how much of the gameplay loop is grinding is going to justifiably turn away a lot of people from trying it out. If you’re a big DQ fan and you enjoy monster-raising and you don’t mind grinding, there’s a good amount of fun to be had here. But if you’re just a more general monster-raising rpg fan, especially if you’re not someone who can put up with grinding easily, I’d say this is a game to stay away from, or at the very least approach with great caution.