April 2019 Together Retro: Monster Raising (NOT POKEMON)

[BoneSnapDeez]

Played some more Dragon Quest V. Hope to beat the game sometime next week. The end draws semi-near.

I regret to say I haven't been utilizing the monsters as much these days. My main party is a trio of humans, and the monsters are my back-up crew. Most of 'em have healing spells, which is incredibly useful.

I have to say, the final "generation" of the game (where the hero is an adult and has kids) is the weakest. The game attempts to go "non-linear" at this point, but it doesn't really work. I find myself just trawling the overworld looking for new locations to enter. This is hampered by the fact that overworld navigation is so slow and limited, and the world itself is both huge and nondescript. I'm also relying on a walkthrough, as some requirements for advancement are now quite obtuse. I don't remember having this "problem" in the DS game, maybe things were tightened up a bit in that regard.

[noiseredux]

I regret to say that Etrian Odyssey Nexus and Tetris 99 are pretty big distractions.

[MrPopo]

I finished Revelations: The Demon Slayer last night. It's unfortunate the monsters peter out so fast in that game, but you still have to use them. At least for the end game you are provided with several high level monsters if you've done a basic amount of searching each (tiny) dungeon for treasures. Their status of being 10-15 levels higher than the party with double the HP makes up for their weaker stats.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I regret to say that Etrian Odyssey Nexus and Tetris 99 are pretty big distractions.

hi there remember me

[noiseredux]

yeah this is how I roll though. I'm content to playing a game for how ever many hours until something else catches my attention and coming back to it in the future. Skyrim and GTA5 were two of my favorite games of the generation, and both took me a span of 3 years of on-again-off-again playing to finally beat them.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Dragon Quest V is done!!!

I didn't utilize a single one of my monsters throughout the final dungeon, I'm sorry to say. Also, ran from every battle (except for the final boss) with a 100% success rate. Noice.

Woke game. Long azz Games Beaten post dropping eventually.

[Nemoide]

I had a really good session with Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Tara's Journey yesterday.
This game is largely a big improvement over the original Dragon Warrior Monsters, though it still has some flaws. First, it feels like the vast majority of monsters I recruit are female, making the males EXTRA valuable and effectively forcing me to spend extra money to make sure any new monsters I breed are male. Is this because I'm playing Tara's Journey and it's the girl version? I'm not sure. But it's kind of annoying!
Second, it's a little weird that you don't get money from combat. It's not like I've run out or anything, but I feel like that makes more sense than just randomly finding it on the ground (not a joke: that's the main way to find gold in the game). Extending from that, I feel like every town should have a merchant, but instead they seem pretty rare. When I find myself in a new area, I'd often like to use meats to attract new monsters, but unless I get lucky and find them on the ground or prepared well ahead of time and bought some in the hub-world, I can't get any.

Those flaws aside, I feel like Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 is a top-notch monster raising game. I was never really into the Pokemon games, but I like it a lot more than Pokemon. The breeding aspect is a lot of fun. The fact that monster-offspring is always stronger than the parents encourages experimentation. The worlds are a lot more fleshed out than in the original. The monster designs are excellent, ranging from Dragon Quest mainstays to new monsters that look like they'd fit right into any of the main games. The game has a pretty lightweight vibe which makes it well-suited to picking up and playing for a bit in chunks and makes grinding less tedious.

I still have a long way to go in the game, but it's a great one I'd recommend to anyone looking for a decent Pokemon-style game OR to any Dragon Quest fan.