• Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:

    1. The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
    2. Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration

    Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.

DraQueMon: But Thou Must Catch Them All! Talking about Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
Staff member
Moderator
This is out today. It looks cool! But I don't have it yet, nor anything to say about it. I just didn't want the thread title to go to waste.

giphy.webp

Sorry! Talk amongst yourselves.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I haven't heard of this, good to know that the Dragon Quest Monster series gets a new try. The last one I played was the first Joker. And I played a lot of the very first one, that was a fun game (I think I liked Joker less, which didn't stop me from trying to get all the monsters in both games). Looking forward to hearing more about this, especially how it compares to the first two games.
 

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
I've been quietly interested in this, but I haven't even played through Joker 3 yet (it got an English fan translation a while ago on 3DS). Granted, it's not like the plot carries into the next one, it's just the mechanics get better with each entry, and I might never go back and play Joker 3 if I play this... I'll be getting it eventually, though.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
I'm in on this. What are some of your favorite cool strats & rare gets?
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I played enough to beat the Category F tournament. I had to try it 3 times before I won... because of some RNG shenanigans and also my pepper monster never actually healed anyone despite being set to Assist Allies.

I'm in on this. What are some of your favorite cool strats & rare gets?
1. Monsters get fully restored when they level up.
2. The monsters in your reserve get half the EXP.
3. Dracky is the strongest spell caster in the first area.

I scouted everything in the first area except the Cyclops. I have no idea how much effort that would take, considering it hits for like 150 HP...
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I've made some decent progress in this game now! I am glad the gameplay loop has gotten a bit more layered, because I was worried it would feel too simple to retain my interest.

I do have a minor quibble about the flow the game sort of enforces when you get to a new area though; since your scouting rate is reduced by ~half until you complete whatever story event happens in the area, it incentivizes you to finish the story stuff ASAP. But I would rather take my time to explore and scout new monsters in a new area first, and it just doesn't work super well to do it that way.

Here's some more tips/observations:
  • It seems every field map has 1 mini medal which requires a specific season to be active to find
  • Monsters in your Pokebank get 1/4 EXP
  • There's kind of 3 "modes" that party building can take into account: 1) scouting and fighting monsters in the field, 2) fighting a story boss that's more difficult than random encounters, and 3) tournament fights where your team is entirely AI controlled
  • The one DLC with the zone that lets you scout any grade of monster you've seen before regardless of the season is mighty tempting already
It's also been difficult to try and de-program myself from thinking too long about monster synthesis. This is not an SMT game where the difficulty means I want to gain a big advantage for thinking through some galaxy-brain synthesis (at least not yet, I'm assuming this only comes into play during post-game).
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I was not expecting this game to elaborate on Zenithian Lore, although in retrospect it's an obvious choice.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Folks, let me tell you about Shadow Slime. Shadow Slime is a C rank Slime monster that learns Black Breath from its innate talent tree (Blighter). This is a dark-element breath attack that deals ~200 damage to everything at neutral resistance, and it can nearly single-handedly win every fight in D-tier tournaments and below. Now, what makes this monster special is how easy and quick it is to synthesize.

As soon as you get to Circle of Fortitude - Middle Echelon, you can scout a Beleth. You can then take a Beleth and fuse it with any rank Undead to get the D rank Demon Hypothermion. You then take that monster and fuse it with a regular Slime to get a Shadow Slime. So, you're jumping immediately from the E ranks to a C rank. But wait, there's more!

You can also fuse Shadow Slime with another easy to fuse monster, the Meowgician (E rank), to make a B rank Mogus (palette swap of Meowgician). All of its traits are elemental spell buffs, and it's going to get several spell talents just making it, so it makes an excellent spell caster. So if you wanted to, you can repeat the Shadow Slime process and then fuse a Meowgician by scouting a Vampire Cat (Circle of Temper - Lower Echelon story dungeon), and now you have both of these pretty strong monsters starting from just E and F ranks that you can scout normally.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I wished I had money for a Switch and this game. Maybe I should just replay DQM 1.

Monster synthesizing is such a great mechanic.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Got another hot tip for an quick and easy synthesis. Shogum! This is a B rank slime that's got a nice innate talent tree, and I believe you can make it as soon as you get a Metal Slime from mini-medals. So here's the steps:

Shogum = Beshemoth Slime + Metal Slime Knight
Beshemoth Slime = She-slime + Behemoth Slime
Behemoth Slime = Jargon + Slime
Jargon = Airbagon + Any Beast
Metal Slime Knight = Slime Knight + Metal Slime
 
Top