I’ve spent a lot of time on this game in the last week and I really want to write my thoughts down. Looking around the internet I’ve seen a lot of reviews for this game but few that really captured it in the way that I see it. So, I’m putting this together both to start a discussion and hear what others think, and hopefully to provide additional context for those of you considering this as a purchase. I have no real credentials other than being an old gamer who loved the original Dragon Warrior Monsters on the Game Boy Color and has played many monster battler/collector games throughout the years. But, hopefully what I have to say resonates with someone :). As you’ll see, I have plenty to say.

I’m going to split things up into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, rating various aspects of the game on a 5 point scale. There will be no story spoilers but I will be touching on how certain mechanics in the game work and will be referencing various monsters. So if you want to go in completely blind not knowing the answer to questions like can you change the seasons and weather at will, or if it’s possible to control a monster’s size, or if the Slime King monster made it into the game, then don’t read this.

This will be a bit long, so we’ll start with a quick TL;DR here. Let’s get into it.

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Overall (TL;DR): 4/5

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (which I will refer to as DQM3 from here on out) is simply a lot of fun. Any criticisms aside, I plugged 75+ hours into the game in a week mostly because I was having so much damn fun the entire time.

DQM3 delivers in a huge way where it counts: the monsters. The designs, the names, the trivia, the synth system, collecting, all are top notch and that’s the main reason this game gets a good score from me. There are a few other positives such as the voice acting, some of the game mechanics, and the environmental design that contribute to the positive score but everything surrounding the monsters makes up the bulk of it.

It’s a good thing too because I have some heavy criticisms of the game otherwise. The performance issues are first and foremost, followed closely by scummy DLC decisions, and then other aspects such as some post-game mechanics and online features really hurt the game.

On the whole though, I really loved the game. It’s clear a lot of care went into it from the developers and there’s a lot of character and heart in the story and writing, even if the story is really campy and goofy and not at all why I recommend the game haha. If you’re a fan of the monster collector/monster battler genre there’s many hours of fun and enjoyment in this game for you and I’d recommend it highly.

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The Good:

Monster Design: 5/5

I really can’t say enough about the monster design being so good. Nearly every new monster I came across put a smile on my face for some reason or another. Whether their name was fabulous such as the Abracadabrador, the design was adorable like the Crème Caraslime, it was just badass like Lieutenant Goresby-Purrvis, or a combination of these factors like in Giruffian it was just a pleasure the entire time through. I know that all of these examples exist in prior games and aren’t necessarily new to DQM3, but it doesn’t matter. The designs are great, they look good in the game, and it’s a huge strength of the game.

Monster Synthesis: 4/5

Despite 4/5 being a good score I expect many players will tell me not giving the Monster Synthesis system a perfect score is a crime. And they have justification to say that. On the whole, the system is excellent. I have a single gripe that is important enough to me that I knock a point off.

The Reverse Synthesis option, especially with allowing the player to see “Not Possible Combinations”, is such a QOL improvement over the original that it’s hard to overstate. It works so well! Every time you go to the Synth station you want to open up the Reverse menu and see if there’s anything new you can fuse your monsters into. Looking through that list, hunting for Synth partners to get the next cool monster, experimenting and learning how different skills can “fuse” together to make stronger versions of those skills, all of that was fun for nearly the entire game. It makes everything feel very safe as you can see all the potential options for your monsters and it makes deciding when and what to synth very easy.

Until the post-game, that is. The “4 body synthesis” system spits in the face of everything I said in the above paragraph. Without specifically looking up a long path you’re highly unlikely to ever accidentally stumble into the 4 body synthesis. Most of them involve you uselessly combining two sets of two monsters into literally anything just so they act as the grandparents, then the hidden 4 body synthesis will show up for you.

This is the first example of something that will appear more than once in this review: SE having very contrasting mechanics in the game. For 95% of the game you’re conditioned into using the reverse synthesis and incentivized towards creating the “gold portrait” synthesis options. Then, to get the rarest and most secret monsters in the game, you suddenly have to decide to mash two of your strongest monsters together and not get anything new out of it, twice, with no indication for why you would do that.

That last bit there is the crux of it for me. No indication. I don’t mind the 4 body mechanic at all on its own. It’s a clever way to add another discovery for the player as these rare monsters won’t easily appear in your reverse synthesis. However, there needs to be a hint in the game somewhere. I find it very poor game design for players to be forced to rely on external sources for big unlocks. This wouldn’t be hard, I would be satisfied with various NPCs in the game giving hints along the lines of “I’ve heard if these four monsters are grandparents the offspring will be very powerful”. But without any hint or indication at all inside the game, I’m knocking a point off.

If you happen to know that this does exist in the game and I just missed it, please tell me! That’s absolutely possible.

Environment Design: 4/5

I’m extremely pleased with the environment design. There is the human land, 6 circles of hell, and 3 “echelons” for each of the 6 circles. It easily could have been very boring and repetitive to keep revisiting circles at a new level but it really never was. Every circle felt very unique, and each level also felt like a fresh experience running through them. Plus, exploring a circle you’ve spent a lot of time in could even be a fresh experience thanks to the Seasons and Weather mechanics. Combining small areas of the map only unlocking in certain seasons with monsters change depending on the season and weather makes it so you can spend many hours on a single map always finding something new.

The world mini-bosses were a really nice touch too.

EDIT: Oh, and the dungeons! The dungeons were a surprise. There are some puzzles I would say approach the level of Zelda puzzles near the end of the game. It was a pleasant surprise to me at least.

The only reason I’m knocking it down to a 4/5 is because at times, traversing the maps is frustrating. There are very small ledges that your character will suddenly not be able to go up without jumping so you end up feeling like you slam into an invisible wall. It’s very jarring when it happens the first few times, and downright frustrating in the post-game when you’re trying to farm, get stuck on some invisible ledge/wall, and get forced into a battle you were trying to avoid.

Additionally there are a few platformer-esque areas in the game, where you need to be jumping from platform to platform in order to reach a chest or something. But the controls and jumping mechanics are too clunky to work well for these areas. Oftentimes I found myself seemingly stuck in an area because my character didn’t seem to be able to jump over a ledge, and then suddenly I’d find a very small bump or rock on the ground and that’d give me just the boost I needed to get over the ledge. If this were a platformer game with more intuitive ledge and jump distances, I’d be just fine with that. But none of those 3 things are true here.

Voice Acting: 5/5

I don’t have a ton to say here other than that I was pleasantly surprised at both the amount and the quality of the voice acting throughout the game. It’s absolutely over the top and campy, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously and in my opinion it just works. The puns absolutely littered throughout the dialogue did it for me too. For example, I was very impressed by the Slime voice actors putting emphasis on things like categooey instead of category. Just very well done all around.

Story: 3/5

Yeah the story’s good enough for me. The pace is very fast and, to me, it’s clearly not the main focus of the game. I’d say my general opinion of the story is that Square Enix wrote it with the motto of “We know why you’re here, it’s to collect monsters, here’s a decent story to serve as the vehicle for you to collect more monsters”. It’s got a couple nice surprises and twists in it, it’s charming enough…sure it won’t be winning any awards and it wasn’t super gripping or anything but I also wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m not even sure I wanted it to be. I just wanted to collect more monsters. It is kinda funny that they seemed to want to set an Any% Speedrun for giving a character PTSD in the intro though.

Music: 3/5

The music is not anything to write home about, honestly. The themes are too repetitive most of the time and don’t stand out to me in any way. I’m pretty sure if I listened to any given theme I might have a difficult time telling you which map it belonged to. The nostalgia factor in themes such as the Arena battles and Mole Hole were an A+ from me but I’m not going to give a good score just for nostalgia. Music wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. I’ll call it good enough.

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The Bad:

The UI: 2/5

This one is maybe just me, but I’m still calling it out. Man did I find the UI clunky. The number of times I tried changing my party only to open the monster information screen or vice versa was high. The number of times I changed my party, or changed my filters in a Synthesis search, then lost all my changes because I didn’t press + to confirm was maddeningly high. If I spent all that time changing my party around, why do I have to “confirm” it? Backing out of the menu after selecting what I wanted was intuitive to me, having to confirm everything after selecting it was not.

Z and R will scroll left and right on your monster information tabs but not when you’re giving orders and want to go to your 2nd skill page. And how often did I try to see my monster’s 2nd talent layout but accidentally changed to the next monster instead or vice versa. The + button hides on screen info rather than opening your menu. Z and R suddenly spin my camera when my cat gets in my way and I’m holding my Switch funny and accidentally bump one of those buttons. Why would I ever have wanted those to control the camera?

Also, there was some serious menu lag for me. Sometimes at the end of a fight I wanted to open the Talents menu, but I pressed Y too early I guess? Then I’d press A one too many times and leave the end-of-fight screen entirely and have to open up my menu and go to Talent Points that way. And, you know, of course I’d press + to open the menu lol. I dunno. It was all just clunky and frequently frustrating to me.

Post-Game Mechanics: 2/5

This is a real shame because it’s almost so good…but just not quite. I alluded to this in the Monster Synth section, but this is where I find the game to be full of contrasting mechanics that are in conflict and end up falling flat on their face because of it. This area got long so Imma split it up a bit more.

Post-Game Content

Aside from the mechanics, the post-game content itself is just rather lacking. What is there is fun and cool and I love the boss designs….but then there’s just not much. You get S class in the arenas which are neat battles but…no high level dungeons to be taking on, no real replayable content. A shame.

Discovery vs QOL

Before I get into the mechanics there’s an important concept I want to convey. I feel that giving players a sense of wonder and discovery vs giving players agency to do what they want via QOL features in the game is a very delicate balance. A friend of mine put it well, he said he was really enjoying DQM3 compared to Pokémon as he was playing through the story because “without knowing how everything works, the fun-goggles get to stay on”. Damage scaling, monster size, monster abilities, evolution of abilities, fusing of abilities, all of that remaining a mystery as you play through the game is fun. I mentioned earlier that the seasons and weather changing are a huge positive to zone exploration remaining fresh throughout the game. These are perfect examples of allowing the player to have that sense of wonder and discovery, and I think all of that is done really well in DQM3.

However, in the post-game there’s little left to discover. So now it makes sense to give the player information, agency, and other QOL features to start optimizing. In many ways, DQM3 does this very well. But it falls flat in enough places that in my opinion it completely cancels out all the parts that go well.

Seasons and Weather

A really good example is the Flute of Seasons. Square Enix clearly realized that, in the post-game, the changing of the seasons that was such a positive during your story playthrough will become a huge negative. If you really want a monster that appears in the summer and it’s currently fall you don’t want to have to wait 30-40 minutes just to get the monster you wanted. So they give you the Flute of Seasons so you can change the season at will! Great idea!

…except that they forgot about weather? So…if you need a monster in clear weather and there’s currently a weather event going on…you still have to wait until that’s over. And there’s no timer for when that might happen…so…the benefits of the Flute of Seasons are entirely negated in any case where a monster spawn is also related to weather. So close, but this one detail was a huge one to miss so ends up being that, in the post-game, weather is just a huge source of frustration and nothing else.

Eggsclusive Monsters

There’s no way I can not mention Eggs in this section so let’s talk about egg-exclusive Monsters. The idea behind the eggs is really fun, especially before post-game. It’s great getting a random monster every now and then, especially rare ones! I don’t even mind some monsters being exclusive to eggs, but if that is the case, there either has to be a more straightforward way to get those monsters out of eggs, or the RNG for eggs has to be a lot more forgiving, or maybe both. If, say, there were 1 egg-exclusive monster that appeared in each of the 19 zones and there was a reasonable pity timer of how many eggs it would take you to get your egg-exclusive monster, and you could reason out which map held which egg-exclusive monster from information in the game, that might not be so bad. But players are reporting 9-10 hours spent farming eggs looking for certain monsters. The playerbase has already developed a mildly convoluted way of regenerating the random egg seed in order to try taking some of the pain away from farming these things. And it still sucks.

This just wasn’t well executed, even if the idea is not inherently bad. It directly contrasts the ease in getting most monsters you need in post-game, especially with the Mole Hole DLC. It just ends up being a very frustrating and tedious grind for all players, and a soul-crushing one for players with bad luck.

Specific Information

The lack of specific information is another one. How much does Ultra Crafty Banger/Frizzer/Cracker/etc reduce resistance by? How much does it raise potency by? Is Big Banger or Kaboomle better to run on monster X? What about monster Y, where I don’t want to run Wisdom on it? The experimenting that was fun during your story playthrough is no longer fun if you’re trying to optimize for competitive play. Now I no longer want that information abstracted away from me. There should be a way to get it at some point in the game.

Positives and summary

There are some positives here though! Metal King Slime grinding is dramatically improved once you finish the final boss in the base game, making leveling a breeze. I love that. Also, the Talent scrolls you can get are a huge time saver; allowing you to almost completely revamp your monsters without having to resynth and relevel them. Getting them is the slightest bit tedious and I really wish they’d have alluded to it a little more, but, it’s there and not too bad to grind. Mole Hole is…well, we’ll talk about that later. So it’s not all bad by any means. But to me it’s like…say there were 10 things that were cool during your playthrough that would become tedious in post game; maybe they solved 5-6 of them, but since there are still 4-5 remaining it doesn’t really matter. The post game still ends up being needlessly tedious.

Online Features – 2/5

I won’t spend a lot of time on this because frankly I haven’t spent a lot of time on online play, so my opinion here isn’t as informed. But from my brief foray it’s not been fun.

The “Quickfire Battles” are an entirely useless feature until you’re done with the game and have a level 100 team of your own. I tried them when I first unlocked online play and my level 15 team got wrecked, as expected. They should scale matchmaking on this to where you are in story progress.

Then online ranked battles…let’s just say I haven’t been a fan yet, but, it’s still early and competitive metas take time to develop and settle. Maybe it’ll settle into something I find fun. But for now, I typically love competitive turn based games like monster battlers and card games…but I found DQM3’s PvP to be quite underwhelming. There’s a clearly dominant strategy and you’ll see it on 100% of teams. That’s just not real fun.

No ability to Synth with friends, no way to do dungeons together or anything…just underwhelming online capabilities IMO. I give it a 2/5, but it’s not contributing to my overall score of the game much. I play this mostly for the single player stuff anyway.

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The Ugly:

Performance: 1/5

Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat this at all. This game performs like hot ass on the Switch. It did not keep me from having fun with the game, but it still needs to be called out.

You might see players claim they see no problems. I dunno, maybe someone at Nintendo stuffed better hardware in their Switch. Or maybe they’re emulating the game, or maybe they just haven’t gotten far enough to experience it yet. But even if they do truly not experience it, it doesn’t take away from the fact that most people do.

I’m really not that picky when it comes to this stuff. I’m not someone who’s going to be like “Omg I dropped from 30FPS to 24FPS this is unplayable” or “I see screen tearing!”. But the game runs like crap. Forget frame drops, there are plenty of times I get complete stuttering. There are of course frame drops though. Candy land while it’s raining is oof.

Monsters in the distance rendering in as low texture/low frames is particularly jarring to me. The Lumbering Lizard in the Circle of Conquest lower echelon in particular stands out as an example. Maybe someone can convince me I’m ignorant and wrong to say that after falling from a Sky Island to the Underground in Tears of the Kingdom without a load screen, with minimal frame drops, and with everything looking gorgeous I expect better than highly pixelated monsters drawn in the distance but that is my expectation.

Speaking of load screens. Holy fucking hell the load screens. I’ve got about 80 hours in my file, I have to assume somewhere on the order of 20 hours of that is just staring at a little slime in the corner of a black screen stutter-jumping up and down. I’m pretty sure there are 30 second cutscenes that have 5 load screens, each taking 5-10 seconds, doubling the cutscene time. Heaven forbid you try one of the grinding techniques for post-game where you have to cut back to the title screen.

And lastly, most importantly, I want to say this: I would’ve given this game a 2/5 in performance except for the fact that the further I got into it, the more it started crashing. I’ve crashed all the way back to the switch home screen maybe….10 times? Maybe 15? Sometimes mid battle, sometimes right after a synth…then I have to figure out where my last auto-save was so I know what I have to redo…The longer I’ve played the more this issue has cropped up. Just this morning I crashed twice while trying to climb Zoma’s synth tree. Once or twice I could forgive, but it’s become too common to rate the game any higher than 1/5 on performance.

Regional Exclusives: 1/5

Yeah Imma knock Square Enix for this one. It’s some crap that Japan gets exclusive monsters. It’s pretty much par for the course sure but in a monster collection game locking some players out of collecting everything because they don’t live in a region is crap.

Also, seriously, Japan exclusive McDonald’s monsters? What’s more American than McDonald’s? I wouldn’t want it to be a US-exclusive monster either but c’mon.

Day 1 DLC – 1/5

In general, I find Day 1 DLC indefensible for one simple fact. It means that the game developer/publisher/some rich ass with a C in his job title made 100% of the game, then took out some percentage of that 100% and said “Sell this as extra.” To me, DLC should be adding extra to the game. Day 1 DLC can only ever be taking away from the game.

That said, some are worse than others. Costumes/Cosmetics…I still pine for the days when costumes and such were unlockables instead of DLC you have to buy, but, that kind of stuff bothers me the least.

The DLC for this game is straight up egregious IMO. The Treasure One is just “Have some extra useful items every day forever”. Like. DLC stands for downloadable content. Is that really content? That’s just the online store that you offer for free except better. But, whatever. The items are nice but not necessarily game-breaking. Just…pretty damn nice and you’re at a minor disadvantage without it.

The dungeon DLC? Man, remember that whole bit I said about post-game lacking replayability/challenges? Well, here it is! Just you have to pay extra for it instead of it being in the game. I find that to be infuriating. The content itself is cool, I like the challenges, it’d be great to do them with friends…and since it was clearly finished by the time of the game’s launch it should just be in the damn game.

And then there’s Mole Hole. Mole Hole is the most unforgivable. The Mole Hole puts you into a little dungeon with each floor being a rank, starting with G, then F, E, etc. On a given floor you can find monsters of that rank that you’ve scouted before. If you happen to unlock it during your playthrough it can be abused to make your playthrough extremely easy. If you’re looking to complete the Monsterpedia in the post-game….With how many duplicate monsters you’ll need to Synth the entire Monsterpedia, this is insanely useful. I’d say it could save you dozens of hours easily if you’re trying to 100% the Monsterpedia.

Since so much effort, quality, and care was put into the monster designs/collection systems/synth systems, clearly Square Enix recognizes the value of the Mole Hole. Which is why they took it out of the game and sold it as Day 1 DLC instead of just adding it to the game as a post-game unlock. Seriously, that’s some egregious predatory bullshit to me.

For the record, it’s an awesome area and absolutely worth the money. Like, as content, I rate the Mole Hole 5/5 easily. But to make it day 1 DLC is bullshit. Just leave it in the game for everyone to enjoy, don’t make the most enticing area pay2play.