I'll fully admit BattleBlock Theater isn't the most...sophisticated of 2D platformers, in more ways than one. A lot of my fondness for it is due to childhood nostalgia. Even so, it holds up incredibly well in 2024.

The aesthetics are very charming, capturing that Newgrounds artstyle very well while also sporting some wonderful details. The music absolutely slaps too, with the time trial and final level themes being personal favorites of mine. And the narrator is actually pretty funny! A large part of it is due to the performance, but there's some really good dialogue for him, the "pathological liar" bit being one of my favorites.

The gameplay is also fantastic. Your character is very responsive, easy to understand, and even has some nuance to their movement, like how you can double jump in midair with good timing or use the different weapons to sequence-break. The level design, while pretty simplistic, does a very good job consistently introducing new gimmicks and switching things up in a way that feels both fresh and fun. And that's not even mentioning the co-op, versus, and level editor modes, which add tons of really fun content.

And I really love the horses in this game. They're just these strange, cubic creatures and they're beautiful.

this game gets really sold short just for not being as self serious as ff4 and not as grand as the series gets from 6 onward but it's a really spectacular game even outside of its stellar mechanics and practically outdoes ff4 in every way. definitely leans a bit more on comic relief than some people might like but there's some really great moments here and the cast is really strong, especially with galuf and bartz, and exdeath is undercut by fans for how interesting of an antagonist he is. neo exdeath is by far the coolest final boss design in this series to me other than safer sephiroth, and even if he's pretty stock standard on a surface level i think he deserves more credit as a villain. easily my favorite of the snes trilogy of final fantasy games and a game i can't recommend enough to fans of jrpgs

IF YOU'RE NOT A FAN OF THE WORDS
PEAK FICTION
GOAT
RAW
FIRE
Click off the review rn!

About a month ago, I challenged myself to give an approximate ranking of my fifteen favorite video games. By the end of this personal challenge, one third of the titles were those of the mainline Dragon Quest series- and I felt remorse for the ones I left off of the list. If it was not alluded to enough, Dragon Quest is my favorite video game franchise of all time, and as much as I love Final Fantasy and Castlevania- it really isn’t a close contest. Despite my immense infatuation with this franchise, the Monsters subseries is one that I have remarkably little experience with comparably. I have played through Terry’s Wonderland 3D, but no GBC original, DQM2, Caravan Heart, or Joker trilogy quite yet. However, Dragon Quest tickles my brain unlike anything else- so when this title was announced a few months back I was immediately sold.

In the time since its announcement, I have not had the best streak of luck with my personal life, and I have been immensely sick, tired, and in need of an escape. This game also released right at the end of my quarter in college, and between that and my love of the series I used it as an excuse to unwind with a title for a bit, and because of such I have thoroughly sank my teeth into this title. I may lack context of the series as a whole, and certainly lacking enough to tell the nuances and innovations apart from something that has been potentially introduced in the unplayed titles, but I do consider myself an expert on this specific title and have a lot to say about it. If you are a Dragon Quest, monster collector, PS2 or 3DS era JRPG, or cozy game fan- I say just take the plunge on the demo and I am sure you will enjoy it, but if you want to hear the reasoning behind those specific reasons keep reading. Regardless of such, immediately note that I loved this game.

Let me open with an anecdote here. Because of the previously mentioned run-in with illness, one of the effects of such as being a legal inability to drive since I have been on a handful of medications that could very easily make me behind a wheel a danger to myself and/or others. Not good, obviously, so to pick up my pre-order I drove down with my dad. That night as he was going to bed, and as I was playing my game, he stopped by and asked how it was. I simply retorted with “preying on my addictive tendencies”. That sentiment reigned itself truer and truer the longer I played. That sentiment proved itself true by the end as I reached my 100% completed monster compendium. This game is not just fun, it is ridiculously so.

There is a borderline dangerous gameplay loop to be experienced here, one that pushes the limits and expectations of Dragon Quest’s deliciously satisfying party composition, turn based combat mechanics, and attentive exploration in new and inventive ways. While it does not have a cohesive and seamless open overworld found in the mainline titles, every inch of the provided world has some micro-decision to make that can be as simple as checking around a corner for an item, to ones that greatly impact how you experience the game as a whole. The usual trappings of mini-medal hunting and metal slime grinding are here in their fullest and Dragon Quest-iest, but it is accompanied with two monster arenas that give entirely new challenges to encounter, a monster synthesis system that blends the best of Dragon Quest 3, 8, and Shin Megami Tensei’s impressive party growth options, and a simple but effective story that had its hooks in me from beginning to end.

If you are anything like me, you will be absolutely enamored and addicted to adding every monster into your lineup, partially due to the thrill of discovery- and partially due to the slew of options each monster adds to your potential. There is some unprecedented amount of strategy you can pour into this game if you so desire, optimizing each monster to be freakishly strong compared to their standard counterparts. It is never necessary, but it is a testament to how wonderfully this game is open to your input. I played this game in a room with two Slimes, a King Slime, and Platypunk plushes in my peripheral vision- and putting them into virtual tournaments and watching them obliterate the opponents was always satisfying. Outside of the battling, there is still a huge quantity of areas and story dungeons that provide new puzzles, potential party members, and big-hitter bosses to fight. The structure of the game is fairly linear and repetitive, but in a way that is not inherently in a negative context and still provides plenty of choice and approach. In my own time, I brute forced through harder areas and arena battles earlier than intended due to my party optimization allowing me- and it was great!

While the hours I spent between story beats simply walking, scouting, and leveling around the seasonally-changing worlds in a way that didn’t serve pacing particularly well, I still really enjoyed the story. Terry’s Wonderland had a really solid story hook, but until the end was almost exclusively gameplay driven with only flavor-text and occasional character interactions. This game, conversely, has full cutscenes, unique stories for each area, and side characters to explore alongside you. If you have played Dragon Quest IV- a favorite game of all time contender of mine- you will be fairly familiar with many of the events that take place, but seeing them recontextualized in this pseudo-prequel is a ton of fun. This is definitely an alternate take on the characters, but I prefer that for how it allows for new and creative explorations of it all. The added flavor of playing as a villainous character in a Dragon Quest game in general is a lot of fun, too.

Something that I did not expect but felt right at home with was how this game felt. Many games of many eras feel different to play for various reasons- and modern JRPGs have a unique feel to them just as ones from past generations have. It’s difficult to describe without just feeling it yourself, but something about this game feels like it is a lost JRPG from a distant era- and I fell in love with that as a JRPG enthusiast. If not already for the dungeon design and monster synthesis, the rotating of the camera with the shoulder buttons, way you move, openness in choice, and environment design heavily reminded me of my time with games like Shin Megami Tensei III and IV, along with Dragon Quest VIII and other PS2 or 3DS JRPGs. It is incredibly refreshing that something new like this could be so evocative of that era, and I would love to see more new JRPGs that retain that feel when games like Final Fantasy XVI and Shin Megami Tensei V, for example, certainly did not.

The other aspect that remained from the PS2 era unfortunately is the presentation, because this game is definitely not a Triple-A title to say the least. The art direction is stellar, and all the monsters and characters have great designs, models, and animations- but goodness the environments are rough. While Dragon Quest XI S is ironically the stellar example of Nintendo Switch optimization, this game looks like it would’ve been right at home next to something like a resolution-boosted DQVIII via emulator. Again, I quite enjoyed that and found it refreshing, and even then there are aspects of it I found impressive like the seamless season switching, but for every impressive part of the presentation there is a lineup of framerate dips and loading screens that take the attention. The worst of it, unfortunately is the horrendous amount of times the game flat-out crashed. I am thankful for the generous autosaving, but a patch needs to come out that lets other players avoid the dozens of crashes that plagued this game for myself.

My other major gripe with this title is the RNG you have to deal with if you decide to be a completionist. I saw that you could unlock final bosses of previous DQ titles and that hook made me enamored to the point I couldn’t resist completion. It was satisfying to synthesize the big baddies- but the hours of walking around and grinding were not the most fun part of this experience. The very worst of it shows itself through the egg hunting- good god the egg hunting. There are probably 15 or so monsters that can only be found in eggs, which require a quantity of fights to respawn, and then are randomly peppered around the map for you to find and hope you get what you want. Some of these exclusive monsters took hours to find, and it doesn’t matter where you stand theologically you will be praying to the RNgods by the time you reach the compendium completion process. You’ll even need duplicates of some of the egg exclusives for full completion. Good luck!

Despite that, however, the game is still so much fun it hardly dented my enjoyment. This game is so entertaining, addictive, and endearing that I could easily have sunk in plenty more hours if there was more content to be squeezed out. This game doesn’t quite hit the highs of the incredibly dense and thoughtful DQ Builders 2 or Rocket Slime, but in terms of this specific gameplay loop (technical issues aside) I couldn’t really have asked for more. I loved Terry’s Wonderland, but this is the title that has truly cemented me in and made me excited for the next entry and to catch up on my Monsters backlog. This game was worth every penny, but when tech patches come out to fix the issues, any ports to more powerful platforms, or even a “professional” version akin to the Joker titles to add even more to this title it is absolutely worth the time and money investment. It has been confirmed that there are more DQ Monsters games coming in the future, so I don’t need to beg for sequel sales as I have with some other titles- but until then I will be clearing my backlog and preparing for the next time I get to scout slimes until sunset once more. I loved this game, and I hope anyone who plays it does too.

Pretty good. I'd go Act 2 > 3 > 1. I don't actually care for the greater sandboxy nature of Act 1, and I didn't run into so many bugs later, so the later Acts better story and character pay offs were much better than what was in Act 1. I also had no issues with the pacing of Act 3 that I had seen many people say, though that may be because other games have had worse and made me numb to those sort of issues, no clue. There are minor issues that persisted throughout like pathfinding being awful, sometimes AIs breaking and taking a minute before deciding what to do, but they aren't so bad as to impact my enjoyment. What does bring the game down is a few character's lacklustre endings and the nonexistence of any substantial epilogue As of Patch 5 they have since added an epilogue. It's not perfect, but it provides much more closure for the main characters, and even for most of the side characters' story threads, so it was good enough for me to warrant upgrading the game from a 9 to a 10.

This is an absurd product. I might finish this later out of curiosity/my history with the series, but this is definitely not a good game. Made it to main quest like 19/49 and had enough for now.

Cool Things About this Game:

- Eikon battles are a sort of unique spectacle
- Some good tracks
- Battling feels good and boss fights can be pretty tense
- The Attack on Titan Eikon system in the world

Bad Things About This Game

- Sidequests.
It's beat to death in the reactions to this game but it feels like these were put in as a bet or something. The first quest is literally bringing a piece of wood 20 feet. I was genuinely wondering if it was parody or something. I almost liked them because of how insanely bad they are.

- Dumb haptic stuff
This is not really bad in and of itself but when my controller vibrates after Clive puts an item in his pouch... I dunno it's just so fucking stupid.

- The Game of Thrones for Babies dialogue/tone/story
Game of Thrones is already "Game of Thrones for Babies". This is a level below that and it is real, real fucking bad. The dialogue is abysmal and the tone is just trash-tier grimdark.

- The presentation
Maybe I was hallucinating but the cutscenes look like shit? Half the characters look like shit? They said they mo-capped the English actors but the lips don't sync to the dialogue? Usually I wouldn't give a shit but this is clearly a cinematic game so ya gotta give me a cinematic presentation. I have played three Yakuza games and this looks like trash in comparison.

-Lack of Diversity
Honestly we don't even need to get into the politics here. The immediate problem is you will be looking at the most boring fucking white people you have ever seen outside of the main cast. Even some of them!

- Battle System at large
Three flavors here:
1. Regular enemies: mash button
2. Regular bosses: dodge, heal, mash button with some strategy
3. Eikon: Have fun with the light cinematic presentation and button prompts

#1 is most of the game and boring.
#2 is pretty fun but not especially deep
#3 is cool but absurd. Like we have lightly interactive cinema... I mean... they could have just programmed in some better Kaiju stuff? That's not trivial but if it's gonna be the main point of the game we could make it a bit more engaging.

-Frictionless Main Story Gameplay Progression
I was kinda enjoying my time but I realized it was just because this game is so easy to play. Follow the marker to the red tab, mash buttons, read dialogue, repeat. If boss shows up, mash buttons but be smarter. I could stomach this type of system if the story was super cool. It ain’t!

There’s a lot more!
I found this to be an utterly baffling product. I absolutely hated it at first, then I think I started to like it because of how bad it was… then I started hating it again because of how bad it was.