Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 (Hands-On) (Nintendo DS) Preview

What needs to be stated straight away is that Nintendo is only publishing Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 here in the West, the game that received 37/40 from Famitsu magazine and has sold around 1.3 million copies in Japan so far since launching at the end of April 2010, not the upgraded edition that Square Enix released almost a year later, at the end of March 2011, that has sold an extra 600,000 units to date. For most this may seem shocking that the improved version is being left without a translation at the moment, however the handful of Europeans that picked up the original Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker a couple of years ago will most likely just be happy to get anything at all Square Enix-related after seeing so many games left stuck in Japan (Nanashi no Game, Front Mission 2089, Sigma Harmonics; the list goes on).

Developed by TOSE, the team that worked on the original Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker in addition to other DS games like Super Princess Peach and The Legendary Starfy, this sequel uses a tweaked version of the already stunning graphical engine that made the first game look like a late PSone or an early PlayStation 2 title had been crammed into the diminutive touch-screen platform. It may well have taken a fair while before the DS reached its peak, but with Square Enix publishing games like Final Fantasy IV and the remakes of Lufia II, SaGa 2 and SaGa 3 in recent years it shows that developers have definitely tapped into the core of the platform to produce some amazing visual results, all running at a fair pace with no slowdown as well. As well as having highly detailed characters and monsters littering Joker 2, the whole game is accompanied by a sublime soundtrack from Koichi Sugiyama that complements the action really well.

In the short trial version on show at Nintendo’s recent Press Event in London, UK, players were able to go through the early stages of the game’s introductory sequence. The majority of the first section involved watching real-time cut-scenes flaunting the impressive graphics as the ship your character is currently travelling in comes under some sort of attack before crash-landing in an area filled with monsters that must either be defeated or captured, trained and then used as your ‘soldiers,’ in a similar fashion to the monster collecting and battling aspects of Pokémon.

After being shown the basics of the control set-up, how the use the menu screen and items efficiently, as well as the best way to capture monsters by draining some of their energy first before attempting a catch manoeuvre, the game opens up to allow for wandering around the jungle-esque local area. It is at this point that the amount of enemies on-screen becomes apparent, along with the long draw distance. All manner of monsters from the world of Dragon Quest wander around before your eyes, starting to chase after the main character should he be navigated within their field of vision. The aim in these opening stages was to initially avoid the attack of a gigantic snake-like creature, before hunting it down to the place it sleeps, all the while using your current set of monsters to capture others for the team and levelling them up by battling more. It was not a particularly in-depth hands-on experience, but it certainly gave the opportunity to show how the previous game has been stream-lined for this sequel.