REVIEW: ‘Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince’ Is Not Quite A Royal Experience (Switch)

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is Square Enix’s latest entry in its long-running Dragon Quest franchise, specifically the Dragon Quest Monsters series, which has not received an installment in a while. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince introduces new elements, including a new cast, story, and more. While it succeeds at adequately displaying some of this, several negative traits also unfortunately mar the overall experience.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince follows Psaro, the half-human, half-demon son of a demon king who abandoned him and his mother. One day, his village’s inhabitants discover he’s part demon, sending Psaro and his ailing mother out of the town in fear. Frustrated, Psaro decides to confront the demon king to get revenge on him but fails and is cursed to no longer be able to harm monsters. Luckily, he meets a monster wrangler named Monty, who teaches him how to use monsters to battle. With his newfound abilities, Psaro decides to make a name for himself and build his strength up in order to usurp his father. It’s worth noting that Psaro is a recurring character in the series and this entry basically serves as his origin story and even features some familiar faces from the franchise.

The game’s story follows the prince and his journey as he gains monsters, fights battles, explores several realms, and meets new people who help him in his quest to defeat his father. The game’s story is relatively inoffensive as it tells the prince’s hero’s journey that is unconventionally driven by revenge. 

While the game doesn’t offer a grand narrative and sports incredibly tame themes, its story is still perfectly serviceable for Dragon Quest fans to enjoy. It also introduces characters, several of whom are quite endearing in their own ways despite being a bit one-dimensional and displaying typical JRPG character tropes. Characters like Psaro’s elven friend Rose and Monty essentially only serve as the token female character and old mentor. On the other hand, characters like Toilen, the kleptomaniac researcher in-training, who is still somehow the most charismatic character, and Frizzy, the little monster wrangler trainer who talks like a parody of a New Yorker agent make this entry’s story a lot more unique than some of its counterparts.

Despite players engaging with the story through the game’s visual novel-style dialogue system, it doesn’t have many of the critical features JRPG players are used to or expect from the series. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince doesn’t include a fast-forward text button or a log feature to keep up with missed dialogue. While there is a way to turn on automatic advance for dialogue text in the menu, there is no button to toggle the option. This means players will have to go to the settings menu every time they want the feature which is highly inconvenient.

Additionally, unlike many JRPGs, it also doesn’t feature multiple save slots, which means that players are stuck with only one save. As such, they have to keep overwriting the same file and turn off autosaves. Otherwise, it’ll constantly overwrite their saves when they don’t want it to. The game also lacks an in-game load feature, so players will also have to navigate to the main menu when they need to load a save, which is always frustrating and highly inconvenient.

In terms of gameplay, like previous entries, The Dark Prince sees players collecting monsters, leveling them up, building their armies, winning tournaments, and fine-tuning their strategies to make the most optimal gameplay experience and victories in battles. Players fight battles via turn-based combat, using typical elements such as basic attacks, magic attacks, defense moves, several types of items and accessories, and more.

Unfortunately, while entirely enjoyable, the combat is quite shallow without any complex combat systems aside from the Tactic options that make monsters either be aggressive, passive, or focus on healing. There aren’t even distinct systems to take advantage of monster weaknesses, which I found odd, especially for the genre. However, The Dark Prince still includes the staple monster synthesis system, which allows players to fuse several types of monsters of varying levels. This installment allows players to synthesize over 500 monsters, including completely new ones. It also notably includes an online system where players can take their beefy rosters and battle against other monster wranglers worldwide. 

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince’s online system is surprisingly well-functional, at least when I could find matches, as they were surprisingly scarce. Battles are relatively simple and direct, but due to the game’s limited combat depth, players with higher-level and higher-ranking monsters will usually win unless the other player gets really lucky.

In terms of visuals, the game’s character models are unfortunately not very detailed, and the Switch’s limited power is most likely partly to blame. However, its backgrounds and art direction are quite vibrant and eye-catching. The character designs are also impeccable, as many of the game’s monsters are creatively designed. No two monsters look alike except slimes, who always have hundreds of variants for some reason.

Unfortunately, the game’s performance doesn’t live up to its art, as Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is plagued with constant frame rate dips, teeming with load screens, and sometimes even freezes during some battles. All of these performance issues made playing the game a hassle at times, especially during moments that are supposed to be engaging or immersive.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a pretty mixed bag of a JRPG. While the game offers a serviceable and sometimes fun narrative and gameplay, the overall experience is unfortunately bogged down by its performance issues and the lack of simple yet essential features. As such, it’s hard to recommend the game to anyone who isn’t a hardcore Dragon Quest fan who was already excited for its release.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is available now for Nintendo Switch.