I Dropped Dragon Quest Monsters, Here’s Why

Last year, I got Dragon Quest: The Dark Prince. I was excited because I have been enjoying my playthrough of Dragon Quest XI (which I’m still playing… PlayStation games always go on the back burner…). Having a Dragon Quest game that I could play on my Switch sounded amazing. Plus, this was a monster-catching game, and I love that, so I thought I was going to love this game.

I was wrong.

Starting off, you do not play as one of the typical Dragon Quest protagonists; you play as a half-human, half-demon son of a father who would rather you be dead than in his realm. Being half-demon means you are powerful. Powerful enough to take out monsters with a single slash of your sword. So, what happens when you are cursed to never harm a monster again?

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Become the controller over the monsters you would once slay and take out enemies in a new way. With your newfound vendetta towards your father, your focus is to become the most powerful man in the region in order to secure his defeat.

There are many different areas that you will be exploring, and each region has its own monsters roaming around. Collect as many or as few as you please (I like trying to fill out the whole dex, so I tried to get everything I could). Build up two teams of four for battles and start the journey. If your first team goes down in a battle, the reserve team comes in. No matter what team is battling, all alive team members will gain exp at the end. This is a good way to help maintain level consistency among all eight monsters. The main problem is that leveling high-level monsters takes forever. This means that the further you get into the game, the harder it is to level up new monsters. This is where my struggles come from.

Each zone has a storyline that all feel a bit similar. Explore the lands, pick up new monsters, and take on the big bad guy that runs the region. It boils down to a bit of a rinse and repeat thing, and I was going along with it until the immoveable wall appeared.

I was able to auto battle a lot of the content early on, and even to near the end of where play through got to. That was a great way to toss out a bunch of needless battles while I walked around new areas. It wasn’t until my second-to-last boss fight that I had to take control of the battling. I did have fun trying to strategize how to best beat the boss and keep my team alive. I beat it by a hair, and it was thrilling. I did get a little bit closer to the final boss, where I would get to see a battle between father and son, but the next boss gauntlet was where my joy ended.

My main thrill was catching the different monsters. I love filling out some type of list in monster-catching games; the collector in me finds great joy in it. After catching as many monsters as I could, I went to fight the boss, and it turned out to be three bosses. Even though I was over-leveled for the monsters in the area by a good amount, I was no match for the team of boss monsters sitting across from my meager team.

No matter what I would do, there was no possible way for me to get past this fight. When I managed to scrape by the three big birds, I was then hit in the face by a second phase. A fourth and (hopefully) final enemy to take down. By the time I got into that phase, my team was wounded and hanging on by a thread. This is the wall that has stopped my gameplay. I spent a few hours blindly grinding away levels to try and get by, but it felt useless. After Googling some things to get other views, I learned that my team was completely wrong. My monsters that had been growing alongside me this whole adventure were not the right ones to take on this battle. I hunted for monsters that were supposed to be helpful, but they were all low level and were quickly murdered in the rematch. I lost all passion for the game and could not fathom the idea of spending more hours blindly battling monsters, going back to heal, and coming back to fight more.

Grinding a level or two in a game is not a big deal to me. I love exploring and, once again, gathering all the monsters, so taking 10 minutes is nothing. But needing to spend hours and hours to get past a boss and no doubt have to repeat the cycle again at the next one is not fun for me. I’m sad about dropping this game. I wanted to love this game, but I have not played the mainline game showcasing this main character so I have nothing to keep me attached to this game. I enjoyed the early game, but I cannot continue my playthrough of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince.