Review by: Brandon "Zip and Zoom" Cackowski-Schnell

Despite the fact that the monster hunting RPG genre is pretty well defined by the Pokemon franchise these days, the idea of taking monsters into your employ for the sole purpose of fighting other monsters began back in Dragon Quest V. Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 continues the DQ monster hunting party by combining the great monster design and combat of the Dragon Quest universe with the monster hunting and gathering of Pokemon to make a game that can stand well on its own once you get past the obvious comparisons.

It’s a good thing that the combat and monster design in the game are so strong because the story certainly isn’t. You play a young lad who stows away on an airship heading towards a monster scouting competition. Before long the airship crashes with its monster scouting passengers scattered to the four winds. As the only monster scout not currently lost in the jungle, you’re tasked with heading into the wilderness and finding the wayward scouts. To complicate matters, the ghost of the ship’s captain appears to you in visions and tells you flat out that you won’t be leaving the island until you become the best monster scout ever. No pressure!

As you head out into the jungle with nothing but your wits and your scouting ring, it’s up to you to build a party of impressive beasts and then use these beasts to beat on other beasts until they want to join your party and so on and so forth. The monster scouting mechanic differs from Pokemon in that there’s no inventory component involved. You don’t need Pokeballs or any other item to capture monsters, you simply select Scout as a command during battle and your monsters will kick the opposing monster in the head, or whatever passes for a head on it, in an attempt to impress it enough to get the enemy to switch teams. Not needing a special item is a nice touch, however what’s not nice is that if you fail to impress the monster enough, it can become offended and once that happens, you can’t scout it any more. Unlike in Pokemon, where you can try to capture as many times as your Pokeball inventory allows, here you usually only get two chances before the monster tires of your shenanigans and scouting is unavailable until the next battle.

Once you have successfully scouted monsters, you can split them up between three active members and three back-up members with the back-up members obtaining experience alongside their first team brethren. You can also equip weapons to make their attacks more potent as well as invest skill points to give them new abilities such as healing spells, special melee attacks or stat changes. The skill point allocation system is brought over from previous Dragon Quest games, as is the combat system, making series vets feel right at home. For those that don’t know a metal slime from a healslime, the combat system and leveling is simple enough to grasp easily however the more complicated aspects of the game are hidden away in the in-game manual which can lead to some confusion as you start to get into the more complicated parts of the game.

Once your beasties are at level 10 or above you can start making use of the game’s synthesis mechanic. Monsters are divided up into different types and based on which type your monster is, they can be paired up with a monster of a compatible type to create an entirely new monster, or a more powerful version of an existing monster. Doing so passes down traits and skill points so spending skill points to build abilities isn’t a total waste however your new monster does start all over again at level one, making grinding an ever present necessity. Adding to the need for grinding is the fact that monster have to be level ten in order to be synthesized in the first place and you may find yourself revisiting areas to get monsters ready for synthesis, only to revisit the same areas again once the new monsters are created.

Luckily the game does an excellent job of changing up which monsters hang out in what areas, using both the game’s night/day cycle and random weather generator to brew up new batches of beasties to confront. It’s a nice surprise to head to an area previously considered safe grinding grounds to find hordes of dancing orcs all too happy to smack you around in a storm of healing rain. The ability to instantly warp back to your ship and heal up your party as well as activate markers to zip to from anywhere in the current region also takes some of the sting out of grinding.

Once you get past the inevitable Pokémon comparisons and let Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 serve up its own brand of monster hunting mayhem, there’s an enjoyable combat model and monster synthesis system to be had here. The story is largely forgettable and the need for grinding seems more pronounced than in other monster RPGs, but the Dragon Quest charm goes a long way towards addressing these issues. It may not ever kick Pokémon out of the top monster hunting spot, but it stands as a charmingly worthy alternative.