Every so often you’ll come across that one game that hooks you instantly. For me, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince did exactly that! Not just once, but twice!

Admittedly, this is my second time playing The Dark Prince as I first played it on the Nintendo Switch when it released in December of 2023. I decided to pick the game up as it was on sale for the Steam 2024 Winter Sale, especially since I enjoyed playing it on the Switch so much! Playing on Steam, especially on the Steam Deck, was phenomenal! The Switch version of this game suffered heavily with performance issues, primarily with drops in FPS, but the Steam Version ran very well! Going from a very rough 30 FPS to a consistent 60 FPS was a real treat! I also felt like there was an improvement in loading times in this version compared to the Switch one. Overall, I would say that this is the ideal way to play the game if you have the proper hardware to run it! With that out of the way, I would like to talk more about the game itself.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a spin-off game from the Dragon Quest series. The game takes place in Nadria, and has you traveling across the many different echelons, facing the heavy hitters in each of the areas. You play as Psaro, a half-human half-demon cursed to never harm anything with monster blood. To overcome this, Psaro becomes a monster wrangler, building a team of monsters to rise to the top! Throughout your adventure, you will fight, befriend, and journey alongside your monsters to form a formidable team to take on any challenge that comes your way!

The game offers a huge variety of monsters with there being around 500 in total! You can obtain them through scouting them through a show of force, hatching them in the wild trough discovering eggs, or by fusing monsters with the synthesis system. The synthesis system is the heart of the game and you will spend a lot of time here crafting your team to your liking. With a long list of skills and abilities, you’ll find yourself thinking of fun and new ways to create powerful monsters! I found this to be one of the best things about The Dark Prince. Being able to fuse monsters into even more powerful ones felt fun and rewarding! I was always excited to see what new monsters I could create and how I could utilize their skills effectively in combat!

The exploration was a real treat as well in The Dark Prince. As you travel through each echelon, you get to experience the changing seasons and how each season changes the surroundings! For example, in Winter, water freezes which allows the player to find new areas to explore and if you’re lucky, you may come across a mini medal, this games collectible item! While each echelon is fun to explore, I found the dungeons in The Dark Prince to be quite charming as well! Each dungeon will start off fairly simple but will progressively get more challenging towards the end of the game. You will have to carefully think and plan your moves accordingly to traverse these dungeons, especially the late game ones!

While the gameplay is incredibly fun and engaging, I did find some areas in the game to be lacking. Namely, the story. Now, I wasn’t expecting anything grand from the beginning, but I did find myself feeling like the story had some issues with the pacing in the narrative it was trying to tell. In my opinion, I believe the game would’ve benefited greatly from having more depth put into its characters. Most of the time, the characters ended up falling flat and overall feeling very generic. This is very unfortunate because Rose and Toilen were very intriguing characters and I would’ve loved to get to know them more. Other characters, such as Monty, fell into simple speaking roles and didn’t offer much aside from potentially providing a service or two. In turn, I felt discouraged to speak to NPC’s as they didn’t offer anything but just a simple generic text of dialogue.

Lastly, and this mostly applies to the Switch version of the game, the game would occasionally have performance issues. Traversing the overworld on the Switch felt very laggy and the there were often huge spikes in FPS. Thankfully, playing on the Steam version seemed to fix this issue. Again, I only mention this for those debating between the two versions. In my opinion, I would play the Steam version if you have the correct hardware to do so. The Switch version will lock you into 30 FPS and there isn’t much you can do with fixing the settings on that version. Thankfully, the Steam version offers settings to adjust performance.

Despite its shortcoming, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, was a real treat to play! With a fun and engaging system to create powerful monsters as well as areas and dungeons to explore to keep players engaged for hours to come, The Dark Prince was a very enjoyable experience. I would highly recommend this game for anybody that is a fan of monster collecting games, fans of the Dragon Quest series, or those that are just looking for something to chip away time. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince was a pleasure to play and as a fan of the DQM series I can’t wait to see what the future holds for this spin-off series!