Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is an amazing game, one I'm glad to play after having no DQM games for 14 years.

First off, this is NOT a Dragon Quest game, it's a Dragon Quest Monsters game. It has all the charm of Dragon Quest but follows a different battle system and mechanics. It's a creature collector with a unique twist; Synthesising/combining monsters to get even stronger ones eventually making your way to the final bosses of the main series. The game features a new Reverse Search feature to help you see what you can make and a new dungeon called the Mole Hole where you can scout (catch) every monster you've ever obtained.

And to touch on scouting it is RNG. You do a show of force to try and recruit your monster based on the strength of your monsters compared to the other. You can influence this by buffing your own team and debuffing the enemy but, most of the time it'll still be up to chance. You can disable autosave and savescum all you'd like, however.

The story is great, it's a sort of retelling of DQ4 from the point of the antagonist, who you play as. The story starts off serviceable. Nothing special but gets the job done. But, it does get quite good.

I could sing the praises of this game all day; the charm, the visuals, the music, the battling. This game does very little wrong. But, what is it that it does wrong?

Well, some synthesises (?) require 4 monsters. So you need to do 2 pairs of 2 then combine the resulting pairs. Reverse Search does NOT help you here, so you need to look them up.

There could be more end game, though the main story will run you 20-30 hours depending, and going for all achievements and synthesises another 10-20 on top of that. Still plenty of value.

And that's it. Yes, those are my only gripes. Get this game and PLEASE give us more DQM.