Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker serves as the return of the monster collection RPG series to western shores. Back in 2001 when the series' title was still under the westernized Dragon Warrior moniker, two games -- Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Cobi's Journey and Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Tara's Adventure -- gave Game Boy Color owners an alternative to the ultra popular Pokemon series. In those games, like Joker, you collected monsters, trained them and bred them to create even more powerful monsters. Six years later (and a name change back to the original Dragon Quest branding) we finally see the series return with a multitude of changes but with the same game mechanics at work.

Joker opens with a nameless protagonist locked away in a jail cell for disobeying his influential father (who just happens to be the leader of the shadowy CELL organization) for trying to join a monster scout tournament. After a period of cooling your heels you are let go and allowed to join the tournament, with one small caveat - you are forced into an infiltration mission serving as a CELL operative. After agreeing to do your father's bidding, you choose your starting monster (you get to pick from three low level monsters), and head off on a jet ski -- the only way to travel between the myriad of islands in the game -- to the island where scouts go to sign up for the tournament. After a brief visit to that island, you head off to the lowest level island in the game to begin collecting monsters.

One of the first things to note is that the series takes the jump to 3D and does so fairly well, providing our hero with an on screen third person perspective, colorful and fully 3D environments to explore and plenty of animated monsters to battle. Encounters in Joker are easily taken on or avoided because you see the monsters that you will face on the landscape, and running into them will initiate a combat sequence familiar to anyone that has ever played a Dragon Quest game. And that is what really differentiates the game from similar games like the Pokemon series; while this game may look, at first glance, like a Pokemon knock-off, Joker has its own unique flavor that leans strongly towards the fabled role-playing series whose name it bears.

The object of Joker is to collect as many monsters as you can, synthesize them and create even more powerful monsters. When we say synthesize, we mean breed (apparently the word breed is a little too strong of a term for Square Enix who avoids that topic altogether to keep young impressionable minds unaffected by one of life's fundamental questions: where do babies come from?). There are hundreds of monsters that you can collect, level and combine to create whatever kind of monster you see fit. In order to get a monster in the first place you have to scout them during battle. Scouting is sort of like combat but instead of doing damage your party uses its fighting skills to court the target monster. The scout (you) begins the courtship, followed by your three monsters. The higher the percentage the better chance you have of getting the monster to join you. Having a strong party ups that percentage considerably so spending a lot of time leveling up is always a good idea.

Joker also has a day and night cycle which affects what kinds of monsters will be on the map. During the day you'll see different types of monsters than you'll see at night and you'll want to catch as many of each as you can so you can create rare and exotic creatures from a wide selection of monsters.

Which brings us to the first strength and weakness of Joker; depending on your feelings about constantly grinding to reach higher levels, you may be turned off by the game. It requires a lot of combat and leveling in order to get higher level creatures. This is due in part to the fact that in order to combine two different monsters they have to be at least level 10 or higher. But beyond synthesizing your monsters, the higher level skills and magic require some good old fashioned hard work. It's a no-brainer that you'll be doing a lot of this, like in most role-playing games, but if you hate that sort of thing you'll be immediately turned off by this game. And to compund this fact, players can technically have six monsters to put into combat (three active and three alternate that can be switched at any time except during actaul combat) -- not to mention an entire cast of players that can be put in Monster Storage..

In order to create a new monster you need to use two monsters that are opposites. One other important thing to note is that your new monster can inherit some of the skillsets that its parents learned prior to becoming one entity. Players will have to think about what skills to keep, what skills to toss in the trash and what new sills are important to them.

Beyond the constant level-grinding and breeding, players will want to collect gold to heal and buy items. Joker does a good job of not punishing the player for dying. The only penalty for getting your butt kicked is losing a fair amount of your on hand gold, so the risk (if you put all your gold in the bank) is minimal. You can also equip your monster with a few weapons and trinkets which do help when heading off to a new area but all in all the main focus of the game is on collection and breeding.

There are a few fetch quests in the early parts of the game, but the main focus is the tournament that you set out to be a part of in the beginning of the game. It will be a very long time before you are able to take on that challenge, but that is ultiamtely the main focus here. Joker doesn’t pretend to be Pokemon or Dragon Quest, but what you get is a little bit of both without the obnoxious characters associated with the latter.