It was arduous to get a gauge on Dragon Quest Treasures earlier than its launch late final yr. What initially began as a brand new Dragon Quest Monsters title, as revealed all the best way again in 2018, apparently modified course sooner or later alongside the best way to turn into one thing else. It is really considerably difficult to explain what kind of sub-genre Dragon Quest Treasures matches in now, as a result of it is surprisingly not like a lot else.
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Treasures is ostensibly an motion RPG, however does not fairly match the form of focus or construction you’ll sometimes count on in that class. The main target is not actually on the fight, and truthfully, the RPG parts are usually not on the forefront both. Treasures is generally about exploring, and the Monsters DNA remains to be readily obvious, as you may staff up with traditional Dragon Quest baddies like Orcs, Drackys, and Slimes to discover Draconia searching for treasure.
Paige reviewed the Swap launch final yr, and he or she goes into extra element describing the sport’s quaint fashion and construction. She praises how the sport encourages exploration whereas wrapped in a light-hearted environment appropriate for a kids’s present. As a primarily PC participant, I opted to attend for the inevitable port, which shadow-dropped on Steam earlier this Summer time. (Usually talking, Sq. Enix ought to cease with the timed exclusives, however that is an argument for an additional time. I am additionally not 100% sure why it needed to be a shadow drop and could not be introduced even barely beforehand).
The PC port is definitely fairly strong total, and higher than I anticipated for a comparatively easy and low-profile recreation. The sport helps 120+fps or uncapped framerates, and there are alternatives for antialiasing, shadows, textures, foliage, reflections, & bloom. It is even Steam Deck appropriate since launch, so you possibly can nonetheless play the sport on the go, even in case you do not wish to play on Swap. After all, no person would have anticipated a PC port of a Swap recreation to have any hassle working on fashionable PCs, and it does not, however Dragon Quest Treasures is a notch greater than only a easy port, someway.
The sport typically seems to be and runs nice on high-end machines, and extra modest builds should not have any hassle both, with the one actual blemish being the few low-resolution pre-rendered motion pictures clearly meant for Swap. It is a competent effort, which you’ll’t all the time say about Sq. Enix.
What I like most about Dragon Quest Treasures is that there is no such thing as a primary questline you possibly can beeline or stray from. In contrast to many RPGs that separate <primary story> and <facet quests>, Treasures mainly simply says “go discover, discover treasure!” as a broad guideline. Outdoors of the tutorial zone, you do not even have to go to the 4 primary zones in any specific order. You are not given a route to go off in, you simply have to discover, discover NPCs, full sidequests, and discover treasure. There is a very laid-back and hands-off strategy the to complete premise, which I truthfully vastly appreciated. The world design is surprisingly satisfying, scratching that itch for wanderlust and as a collect-a-thon.
To progress by means of the story and beat the sport, all you might want to do is locate all of the Dragonstones, which is perhaps tucked away within the deep reaches of the marshland, or guarded by a fearsome foe. As soon as you discover all seven, you possibly can go struggle the ultimate boss and clear the sport, which might simply be executed in lower than 20 hours. Or you possibly can simply probe for extra treasures and sidequests.
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For Dragon Quest sequence followers, there’s numerous nostalgia for the franchise all through, particularly within the more-than 700 treasures you could find. It’s form of amusing, nevertheless, and unhappy, to see a bunch of Dragon Quest X characters mirrored within the quite a few Hero Statues scattered all through.
If I have been to grade Dragon Quest Treasures on a extra typical (and hypothetical) rubric, it most likely would not rating very effectively. The fight is overly easy, the underlying RPG mechanics are excessively skinny, and the front-to-back story is mostly nothing (although narrative rigor is clearly not a spotlight to start with). However there’s merely a relaxed appeal to all of it.
Dragon Quest Treasures is maybe not a stellar recreation all issues thought of, however I nonetheless appreciated a light-hearted, comparatively brief, cozy RPG that shuts up and lets me play. It is charming, it is cute. Generally I would like a break from the 80+-hour dramatic world-ending epic RPGs, and Dragon Quest Treasures was a pleasant reprieve from that.