DQ Monsters: Joker 3 comments

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Dragon Question Monsters - Joker 3 (Square Enix, 2016) Grade: C+
Video games are expensive in Japan. A new game can run 4,000 to 8,000 yen ($40-$80 USD), and often the used copies at Book Off can stay expensive for years, at 2,500 to 4,000 yen. So, when a game hits the Book Off shelves for 900 yen 3 years after its release, that kind of says something (some of the older Dragon Quest games are still 2,500 yen to 3,500 yen, even though they're over five years older than DQM:J3). But, I liked the first two Joker games (1 and 2, I didn't play the Professional versions), and I'd been wanting to get something after having finally finished Bravely Second all the way through 3 times. There were two cheap games at Book Off - Puzzles and Dragons 1, and Joker 3 - that I'd been eying for a few days. PnD kind of looks interesting, and is at the 400 yen price point, but I'm not a big bubble puzzle fan. So, I settled for Joker 3.

The wiki page says that J3 sold over 368,000 copies in the first week, making it the top selling game in Japan. But, apparently it hasn't been localized for any other country. There are no English walkthroughs for it, and the Japanese walkthroughs are fairly sketchy. I assume that there's a commercial walkthrough book available for sale, but I'm not that desperate. I really could have used some hand holding here, regardless.

Basically, J3 is like J1 and J2. They're all Pokemon rip-offs set in the Dragon Quest universe, using Akira Toriyama's character designs. You play the hero, a boy with white hair, a red scarf and jeans, under whatever name you want to assign him (I used TSOJ). TSOJ wakes up in a cabin in the countryside somewhere, and is tended to by a robot servant. Pretty soon, a strange woman shows up, defeats the robot, and shatters a projection barrier surrounding the cabin to reveal the inside of a large cavern. She tells you she's part of a resistance, and to go out and explore the universe to find out for yourself what's going on. Eventually, you learn you're on one of 7 floating island continents, and that you have to visit all of them to reach the central "Core" island where Mother is located. Something somewhere along the way is corrupting Mother and the Core. As you go, you have the option of fighting or scouting the various monsters you encounter. If scouted, these monsters make up your party. You have 4 primary slots, 4 secondary slots, and the ability to store up to 400 other monsters before breeding them. Small monsters take up one slot each, while the larger ones can go from 2 to 4 slots apiece. The primary slot monsters do the actual fighting, and gain exp at the full rate. At certain points as they level up, they get skill points that you're automatically notified on that can be assigned to whatever skills (fighting techniques, magic attacks or stat bonuses) that the monster knows. The secondary slot monsters get exp at a slightly reduced rate (I think) and you have to go into the menus to assign the skill points manually. During a battle, you can choose to switch monsters between the primary and secondary slots as needed.

Fighting and skill point assignment are the same as for the earlier games. There's a specific city that you unlock a couple hours into the game that allows you to do the breeding, which is controlled by a specific minion of a species of monster that adopts you as their hero. If you choose to do breeding, you can select any two monsters in your inventory (there's no restriction on male and female genders this time). The resulting child will start out at level 1, and at a fraction of the average HP and other stats of the parents. You can also select 3 of the skills held by the parents, and carry over some of the skill points they had (about half of the original totals). If you maxed out the skill point assignments for a specific skill (say, 50 SP to Fire magic), then the child gets to pick Fire Magic 2 (100 SP max) during the breeding process. There are a LOT of different types of skill sets, and I ended up only using a few of them. The challenge is to get a monster with a high top HP stat, and then either high damage, or magic skill. The more you breed a specific generation of monsters, especially if you wait until the parents have reached level 40 or 50 first, the higher the starting values of the child stats with each successive generation. My party tended to consist of lizards and talon birds (high damage and HP stats), with just a bit of healing magic, and almost no magicians.

The world maps, towns, and dungeons look spectacular. The monster designs are goofy, and the supporting humanoid NPCs are ok. Your hero's designs are stiff, robotic and unexpressive, but there is a reason for that that is revealed later on in the story. The problem is in the leveling up process. There's a MASSIVE amount of churn in the game, and it gets very boring after a while. Fortunately, there is a way to access the metal slime level (it's a computer disk you can operate in the basement of your team's hideout). Unfortunately, to use the disks requires "energy" that is amassed over real time. "100%" in about 6-8 hours (I'm not sure of the precise rate), and the metal monster level burns 50% for about 10 minutes of game play. You can buy a 1-day pass for 100,000 gold, or the remaining fraction of the energy to get to 100% (about 50,000 gold to go from 2% to 100%), but there's no fast way to earn money. There was one monster I picked on that was an easy kill for 1,000 gold per battle. I could get roughly 10,000 gold in 10-15 minutes. But, again, that much churn is tiresome. The metal monster level is a large cavern populated with pearl, metal, angel and liquid metal slimes, worth 1,000 to 10,000 exp. each (no king metal slimes, sigh). But, they have high evasion rates and only one member of my party was ever fast enough to attack once before the slimes could escape.

The music is good, the story is so-so. The boss monsters look impressive, but on the whole I could defeat them on my first or second try. I was doing a lot of breeding and leveling up, but it was hard to scout the better level B and level A monsters to get any variety for the breeding process. There were a few times towards the end where my primary slot monsters were killed off, and I just barely managed to beat the boss with the secondary slotters. It took about 55 hours of game play to best the final boss monster, and then things just got monotonous. There are three post-story monsters that require some puzzle solving to unlock, and the first of the three was much stronger than anything in the story had been. Plus, the only way to unlock each of the post-story bosses is to use the disk access system, which costs a lot of money and uses up about 30% of the energy bar per try. That's on top of using the metal monster level to power up your combat team. That's when I decided it's time to shelve the game and get back to work on other projects.

There are a lot of ingenious puzzles and easter eggs throughout the game (most puzzles involve figuring out how to travel to certain locations off the maps that require monsters that can fly). Easter eggs include monsters sitting around a campfire, dancing groups, baby eaglets sleeping in a nest, and eagles capturing and flying off with bovine monsters. A lot of this stuff is fun to happen upon, but I do wish the fighting part wasn't so tedious. Overall, Joker 3 is ok, just not as enjoyable to play as J2 had been. Recommended if you can get a Japanese version of the game for under $5 USD.