Handheld gaming is more than a compromise of power and portability. Whether it’s the ability to play anywhere, multitask or hold an entire console in your hands, it’s a special experience consoles have never replicated. In a world where high resolutions and teraflops reign supreme, we take a look at a portable relic every month and reflect on what makes it memorable. Be warned, spoilers may occasionally populate these articles.
Dragon Quest games have a certain homogeneous quality to them thanks to the same core designers working on all the games. One of the consequences of having someone like Akira Toriyama consistently work on character and creature designs is the monsters become one of the more iconic elements of the franchise. Just seeing the silhouette of the slime is enough to know that something is going to be related to Dragon Quest. There’s been a few games set in the Dragon Quest world where the focus is on the monsters, including the current mobile game Dragon Quest Tact, but one of the earlier and more celebrated ones is the 2010 DS Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2.
The general idea for Dragon Quest Monsters is essentially Pokémon with monsters from Dragon Quest. This would make the iconic slime the equivalent of Pikachu. A blue Pikachu isn’t that far fetched of an idea as the poor mouse got spray painted in one rather slapstick episode where Meowth mocked him and stated he looked like Wobbuffet, but I digress. The premise is the player wanders about the world, taming monsters through battle against currently tamed monsters to amass a legion of Dragon Quest monsters.
The story begins with a stowaway on an airship. The airship is headed to the Monster Scout Challenge, which is exactly where the stowaway wishes to go to fulfill his dreams of becoming the greatest monster tamer. Unfortunately he gets caught, but is allowed to remain on board if he works off the cost of the ticket he would have paid. Before reaching the destination, the airship crashes. Marooned in an unfamiliar land, the boy’s talents for scouting monsters is recognized as he sets off to explore the new area, compete in monster battle tournaments while searching for the missing scattered crew members.
Compared to mainline Dragon Quest games there’s less emphasis on exploring different towns and helping the people. Buying gear is still a thing since arming the monsters leads to better results in battle, though I’m not exactly sure how a slime is going to use a whip. The hero doesn’t participate in battles directly; he stands back while the team of up to three monsters do the dirty work, though he can deliver items. The monsters can fight on their own with a few different tactics, similarly to how everyone except the Zenithian hero fights in Chapter 5 of Dragon Warrior IV. But unlike the original NES release of Dragon Warrior IV, the player can manually command the monsters to behave how they want them to in battle, which is a nice touch.
Aside from roughing up monsters on the battlefield another way to get more powerful monsters is by fusing two monsters together. The resulting new monster doesn’t always make a lot of sense when the “parents” are taken into consideration, but if realism is something you’re after, Dragon Quest games are not the place to find it. One of the consequences of synthesizing bigger and better monsters is some of them are indeed bigger than others. The player has two benches in which their monsters sit, one that’s active and one that’s the backup one. Each bench has three spaces on it, but large monsters take up two spaces and gargantuan take up three. This makes sense since a behemoose and slime shouldn’t take up the same amount of space.
Most of the time in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is spent battling monsters to make the player’s army grown even grander. It does require grinding because new monsters need to be leveled up and have to hit a certain level before they can be fused with another monster, but catching and growing them is enjoyable. This is especially true after the main story is completed when more monster hunting options open up. One of the more appealing aspects about this title back in the day was it did support WiFi connectivity so friends could face off against each other with their teams of monsters in battle. Unfortunately this feature has officially been discontinued, but there have been whispers going around about fan-made WiFi revivals.
Dragon Quest spin offs are never as grand as the mainline entries, but they still can be a lot of fun. Such is the case with Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2. The story is essentially about becoming the greatest monster tamer, which doesn’t have the same level of gravity as saving the world from some evil in the mainline games. Dragon Quest names were never geared towards mature audiences despite some of their risqué humor and the writing in this one seems to aim for even younger demographics. On the other hand the pursuit for new monsters to level up and synthesize is weirdly addictive. The story itself is lackluster, but enjoyable gameplay mixed in with an obscene amount of puns and dad jokes make the overall experience enjoyable.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is a general improvement over the original. It received a sequel, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3, a few years later but that was sadly never released outside of Japan. With the closing of the DS eShop and Nintendo’s less-than-ideal means of making older games available, there aren’t too many choices to play this outside of emulation or the second hand market, which is usually quite a bit higher than what it sold for new. But for hardcore fans of Dragon Quest it’s worth picking up if a copy priced in the double digit range can be found as it’s easy to get dozens of hours of entertainment from this title.
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