Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 notes

(Image from the Amazon page, used for review purposes only.)

I wrote up my thoughts on DQM:J3 a while back, and I'd shelved the 3DS game then because I'd gotten fed up on spending so much time on something that didn't seem to be going anywhere. To recap, I liked the artwork. The story was ok, not great. And the world itself was huge. I just can't stand the DQ tendency to suck all the fun out of the game by making it so unnecessarily hard to finish off the last of the optional stuff at the end. I'd collected all the monsters I found, bred a bunch of others that I couldn't find within the storyline part of the game. I beat the main storyline boss twice (once at the end of the first scenario, once "for good"). I opened up the optional battle arena at the end of the game, and won the first 3 of 5  stages of the "event battles". All that really remained that I cared about was beating the Slime Challenge races, and beating the last two of the Battle Arena challenges. And, I just could not do that. There were two other things that remained incomplete as well, which could make a difference, which were to unlock the best of the accessories, and to finish the Scout Master Q quests.

After putting the game away, I thought about the Scout Master Q thing. The idea was to capture or breed specific monsters, put them in the party, and then go to the SMQ character to receive an award and get the next quest. The monster I needed can't be bred, you can only find parts for it in the field, then assemble the parts to make the monster as a one-shot (there's another method, too, but it's much more difficult). Unfortunately, I'd built that monster, and used it for breeding before discovering I needed it for the SMQ quest. After that, it was too late and that part of the game was stalled. As for the accessory, I didn't think that was important. What I felt I needed was a way to make all new, more powerful monsters, which would have been part of SMQ.

After a few weeks, I started jonsing for a new game to play, and I couldn't find anything I liked at Book Off. Instead, I decided I'd try starting over from scratch on DQM:J3, and learn from my past mistakes. With luck, I'd get to the part of the game I stalled on more quickly, and then see how much farther I could go after that. I do this thing, and yes, I do manage to finish the Scout Master Q quests. But, I still failed to beat the last round of the Slime Races, or the last two rounds of the Battle Arena. The game is back in storage now.

What I want to do at this time is to document what I've learned. DQM:J3 came out in 2016, and in 2019 is discounted under 1,000 yen ($10 USD). It was never released for the U.S. market, and I think it never reached any other country, either. A few western fans created a hack that let them change the monster names into English, but GameFaqs has almost nothing in the way of fan FAQs or walkthroughs. I'm pretty sure DQM:J3 was a flop, and that Nintendo wants it to quietly fade away. I've found two "Perfect Guides" in paper form at Book Off, and both are selling for $1 each. That's pretty sad for a series that so many people seem to adore. I don't think anyone reading this blog will ever play the game.

Anyway, I've got a very short backlog of blog entries to run here, and I'm planning on writing up kind of a user guide for the game that I'll use as filler over the next few weeks as I try to build the backlog back up. If you don't like the game, or have no interest in trying to play it (I don't blame you), I apologize in advance. I'll just use this opportunity to document what I've learned, and maybe it'll be useful to me if I ever break down and try playing it again.

Story:
You start out by customizing the guy you see on the case cover, changing the hair and clothing colors, and typing in whatever name you want to use. I picked TSOJ, so that's how I'll refer to him in the game. When you're done, you wake up in bed in a little rustic cabin, tended to by a butler-maid-like robot. There's nothing to do in the cabin or in the field outside. When you're done running around, you go to a clearing on a hill marked by "Next!" Answering some questions will give you one of three monsters later when you get to the game proper. Suddenly, a hologram of a weird woman (you later find out she's Lena-te) shows up and attacks the robot. The illusion is shattered and you're now in a cave, with the wreckage of the robot on the ground and a space pod (the one you were initially flying in during the opening credits) in a crater nearby. Lena-te is with "the resistance," and your job now is to rejoin them. Lena-te disappears, and you're more-or-less free to wander around the main field. You also get tutorials on the fighting system and how to scout monsters to make up your team. In this chapter, the field looks like a big open grass field surrounded by rock outcroppings and mountain walls. In a nearby hut (Woodpark), there's a group of little dinosaur-like things that go by the species name of "Norochoi" (or something like that, I never cared enough to try to remember it). They're like two drumsticks with faces. They ask you for help to rescue their leader, King, who is being kept prisoner by the first chapter boss. The goal is to run around, reaching what little you can get to since you can't jump up much or ride monsters yet, scout what you can, and level up a bit. When you have 4 monsters in your party, and are at about level 5 or 6, you can go into the fortress at the other end of the map, try to open King's cage, and then beat the boss. King returns to the hut, where he shows you the first monolith. These are teleport gates that take you to scout master training rooms. The idea is that your party fights three waves of opposing monster parties, and if you succeed in surviving, you learn to ride ground monsters. These are the normal kind that can just walk and jump, letting you reach higher land your character can't climb on their own. (Open the main menu, and select "Ride". Assign your desired monsters to the Up, Left and Right buttons of the left-hand side cross controller, and exit the menu. Press the cross-controller buttons to switch between ride monsters.) Once you have your Rank C license, you return to the hut again, and King takes you to a ravine where you need to use your ride monster to reach the other side and knock over a log that the Norochoi can use to get to a full-on teleporter station. Explore areas you couldn't reach before. When you're done, use the teleporter to leave chapter one and start chapter two.

In chapter two, you're on another island in the ruins of a futuristic city. The Norochoi need you to climb some ladders to open the gate to the city. Once in, they make for the main building (Central) in the middle of the field, but the power is out. King tells you to go to the southeast part of the city, enter the power control center there, and activate two control boxes. This requires walking the roads in a circle clockwise, past maneater plants and blue dinosaurs. Try to avoid them because they're over-powered compared to your party right now. Otherwise, keep fighting the smaller monsters and try to scout one of each. In the power building, there will be metal dragons that are also a little too strong, but fight and scout everything else. You especially want at least one Drakky (the bats that mostly hang from the ceilings). Activate the power boxes and return to the Central building. In Central, there are now several things you can do. There are 4 booths in front of the door - an inn where you can sleep and recover HP and MP for free, a book seller that lets you buy skills, an item shop that sells potions and antidotes, and a meat shop where you can buy stuff that slightly increases your odds of scouting monsters. Past the shops is King, who gives you some of your marching orders, and exchanges metal coins you find in mimic chests for accessories and hard-to-scout monsters. The butler-like Norochoi next to King doesn't actually give you anything directly, but he represents the medals you receive in the main menu that turn out useful in the Disk Holodeck room later (these medals are unlocked as you hit various milestones, like scouting 10% of all of the zombie creatures, or beating a chapter boss).

On King's other side is a female Norochoi ("Queenie") in a floppy hat and pearls, who calls you "Darling". She asks for specific drop items you get from monsters after battles, or from stealth chests (invisible chests you can only locate by using your Google-glasses-like "reactor" (press the circle button at the lower right corner of the touch screen)), and in exchange you get to forge new accessories in the accessories shop at the back left of the room. Next to the accessories shop is the bank, where you can deposit your gold (there's a big upper limit on how much you can carry, but not on how much you can save. And, if you die in the game, you lose half the money your party is carrying). Using the bank means that you can die in battle, be resurrected in Central, and not be out much money. I've never really needed the bank until getting to the Battle Arena, and that's only because I'd amassed so much gold. On the right back side of the room is the Slime Chase game operator, and the Scout Master Q guy. The Slime game has you competing against 3 NPCs to grab slimes from a playing field and take them back to your goal point. The first 2-3 rounds are easy enough, but after that you need rarer monsters that can only be found much later in the game, so it's not really worth playing this now. The Scout Master Q side quest has you breeding monsters in return for rewards. The first monster is a Mage Drakky, which you can only get by breeding a Drakky with one of the sludge monsters found near the power control building. The reason for having a mage drakky is that it has a healing magic skill that is useful during battles.

Now, you may have noticed that as you level up, you get 4-8 skill points every 2-3 levels. These points can be applied to any of the three skills your monsters come equipped with. Certain skills are unlocked when you allocate enough points to that category, including various attack magics, and pluses to your characters' stats. All of your characters get experience points from your battles, but your main party amasses them the fastest, and your secondary party gets them second-fastest. You can keep over 400 monsters in inventory, and they get experience as well, but maybe only by 50%. During battles, you can press the Y button to switch monsters between the primary and secondary parties, which is useful if one of them is getting close to dying, or if you need to switch a healer for a fighter. If you have enough skill points assigned to a specific skill, when you breed that monster with another one, things like AtkUP-1 can cause you to receive the AtkUp-2 skill, and after you're done breeding the monsters, you'll be gifted with a copy of the AtkUp-1 skill book that goes into your inventory so you can attach it to a different monster later. The bottom line is, it's worth going into the action menu and assigning all of your skill points to the skills you like on all the monsters in inventory, before using them for breeding. Because now, the remaining Norochoi in the middle of the back room is Ace.

Ace lets you breed monsters. Talk to him, and he'll tell you to pick two monsters. The only caveat is that they have to be over level 10. When you select any two, you'll see a list of 5 monsters you can breed for. The first three will be things like zombies, dragons, slimes, and whatever. The last two are the same species as the parents. This becomes useful later in the game. You will notice that some monsters take up one slot, and others take up two. In general, the only real difference is that two-slot monsters have 50-100% higher HP and MP numbers than their one-slot selves (you can change the size of your monster during breeding later on), while the monster's battle stats (Atk, Def, Spd and Mind) might actually go down, and the bigger monsters may still only be able to take one action per round. This looks like it sucks to have the bigger versions of monsters, but they're less likely to be wiped out by enemies that target specific party members in one round. At the same time, look at the stats for the monster you want to create - these are upper caps for the species. They don't change depending on the parents. Once you've leveled up enough to reach any given cap, leveling the character up any further will not increase the stat anymore. For the moment, you're going to be capped at exp. level 50, which gives you lower caps on your stats.

However. When you breed your monsters, the offspring are going to have a plus ("+") number next to the Rank type. That is, say you have two level F monsters, and you breed them to make a level F slime. The slime you create will go to "F+2" or something (partly dependent on your monster's experience levels). That plus number increases for the offspring every time you breed them. When you get to Rank+50, the level cap for the offspring is raised to exp. level 75. You really want to breed your monsters to reach Rank+99, which lets them level up to exp. level 100. As you're doing this, I suggest keeping a primary party of four 1-slot monsters, and maybe two 2-slot secondary party monsters. Pick monsters with the highest desired stats you can for the type you want. That is, if you want a fighter, pick a lizard or something, since that species has the best fixed upper cap on Atk. For a mage or healer, pick monsters with the higher caps on Mind, or maybe Def. and HP (so they don't die as fast). Otherwise, don't bother being fancy on which parents to use, or how far up to level the monsters before breeding them, because it has no effect on the stats caps of the offspring (however, the higher you can get the stats before breeding the parents, the higher they'll be on the offspring when it starts out at level 1, and the faster you'll reach the stats caps as you level up. Also, you keep getting skill points until reaching the level 100 cap. The parent's skill points are inherited by the offspring, so you can assign them immediately after the offspring is recreated to access existing magics and stat bonuses right away.)

Ok, after activating the power control units, and starting the Scout Master Q quests (create your mage drakky and show it to the Q window), start the accessory quest, and then breed all the monsters you want (if none of them are at level 10 yet, go outside and level up more), then you have to go up the elevator to floors 29 and 30. None of the monsters here are all that bad, you just have to be careful of the Bombomboms, so they don't kill you when they blow up before dying. There are invisible traps, invisible rooms, and stealth boxes here, which can be revealed by using the reactor. You need elevator key cards, and to access two more control panels to turn on the next teleporter. You'll encounter another boss, and meet Lena-te again. She'll give you a little backstory (your character suffers from amnesia and can't remember anything from before the start of the game). You'll also learn a little more about Mother, the Resistance, the fact that the world is made up of 7 floating islands (each chapter takes place on its own island, although you can use the Ruler icon from the main menu to teleport instantly between Ruler markers located in front of key locations on each island), and that someone is trying to make cyborgs out of the monsters (the chapter bosses are all cyborg attempts). Once you beat the future ruins boss, you activate the teleporter, which causes the grass field (i.e. - Woodpark), and ruins islands to move up closer to the next island in the chain. Now, if you go to the teleporter at the other end of the ruins map, you can start the next chapter.

Continued...