The game is kind of ugly, performs bad, and crashed a half dozen times for me. A REAL monster collecting RPG would be twice as bad on all counts like Pokémon Scarlet/Violet! Kidding about that of course, but really this game also has those kinds of issues even if not as bad. It'd be a lie to say those issues don't also bring this game down. That said, really fun game though with more then enough monsters to collect to satisfy me and the synthesis mechanics make team building quite addicting.

The game has all the charm one should expect from a dragon quest game. There's also more to love here if you're a fan of IV specifically as seen by the main character being the main villain of that game. Even if you never played a Monsters game, if you like the main series at all this is worth checking out.

Making stronger monsters through synthesis is fun since you can make some stupidly strong ones once you understand it. However I do have to knock it a little for some of its mechanics being unclear like, what exactly does the sparkle you sometimes get mean, how would one ever figure out shit that require 2 monsters fusing that are fused from two very specific monsters, etc. Some great quality of life things however do deserve praise, such as the ability to reverse search as well as narrow down the monsters to ones you've never gotten before or ones you can't synthesize at the moment so you can see things you need to make them.

Did I unnecessarily grind to get broken monsters making the game trivial until the post game fights? Yes. Was this super satisfying so I don't care about it being easy as a result? Very much so. If that sounds appealing I'd suggest giving this a try.