The regular Dragon Quest series is far more known in the States than its Monsters spin-off. This situation might change, however, with the American release of Joker, the latest effort by the legendary trio who created the Dragon Quest world: the "mind" Yuji Horii, the designer Akira Toriyama and the composer Koichi Sugiyama. After having been compared to the Pokemon series for years, Monsters celebrates its first appearance on DS with a total restyling that makes it closer to an RPG than to a simple monster-fighting game.
The first and most noticeable improvement is a new 3D graphics engine that takes full advantage of the dual screens. The top screen displays the main character and the environment, with a 360-degree rotating camera that can be adjusted with the L and R triggers. The bottom screen shows part of the world map and the main menu. Exploration is even easier than in past installments, both because players don't have to switch to the map screen all the time, and because for the first time battles are not random. Monsters are visible on-screen all the time and it's up to players to decide whether they want to avoid them or chase them to earn points. Weak parties are a magnet for enemies, but leveled-up groups make opponents keep their distance or even run away.
The main character, an unnamed hero in fine Dragon Quest tradition, is a young boy who lives on one of seven islands in a fantasy archipelago. He dreams to become a famous monster tamer, but his father, the director of the organization CELL, shows his disagreement by putting his own son in jail. After ten days of misery, however, the boy is released and told that he has to take part in the Monster Scout Challenge, the biggest competition for monster tamers. Something is fishy here: not only has the old man completely changed his mind in a few days, he's also the boss of a suspicious organization that captures monsters to study them... or so they say. The mystery stays unsolved for the moment, and the hero leaves his home to travel to Domus Isle, where the Challenge is about to start. From here on, he has to find and tame as many monsters as possible, trying at the same time to level-up the ones he already has and find the ten pieces of darkonium stone necessary to proceed to the next stage in the competition.
Battles are fought by groups of up to three monsters on each side and, just like in every RPG, they involve a mix of physical attacks, magic and items usage. The hero never fights in person, and he never gets experience points: all the earned points are spent in leveling up the monsters in the party, so that they can access some special abilities. New in this installment is the scout command, an option that allows players to actively recruit fresh monsters in their party. While this happened randomly in the past, players can now decide when to try this option, according to the strength of their party. If the targeted monster is impressed, it will likely join the main character; if the scouting fails, the monster will attack with increased power. The scouting option can also be applied to opponents' parties: if it works, the other monster tamer will lose one of their creatures and the hero will earn it.
The player's initial monsters are weak and hardly able to face stronger opponents, but as soon as they level up, they start earning special abilities and can even equip weapons. In a break from previous installments, players aren't forced to start with a slime: they can instead choose between a slime, a platypunk and a dracky, finding the other ones later on in the game. These are the basic Dragon Quest monsters, but over 200 are available to be collected. In order to find them all, players will have to explore the seven islands both during the day and the night, since the day/night cycle directly affects the chances of encountering different species.
Joker also features some multiplayer options. We still know very little about them, apart from the fact that there should be a local wireless mode to battle human opponents, as well as some undisclosed features on Wi-Fi. From what we've seen so far, Joker looks like a solid game that does a good job of blending more RPG elements into the classic Pokemon formula.
