Ten years ago, Square-Enix and Omega Force released a video game called Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below. It is a “musou” game, which means that it’s a generally mindless hack-and-slash game where you mostly just tear through thousands of hapless goons. It’s also a spin-off of the Dragon Quest series, but I think that part’s a little more obvious.
Nintendo did a similar thing with the Legend of Zelda the year before, Hyrule Warriors, which is a game that I played obsessively. Twice. I didn’t end up playing Dragon Quest Heroes, though, since I was poor at the time and had to be more selective about my video game purchases. But it has stuck in the back of my mind all these years. Ironically, now I have enough money to buy all the games I want, but there isn’t nearly enough time to play them all. The grass is always greener.
All that to say that I finally bought and started playing DQ Heroes the other day.
The game is… well, it smacks of Dragon Quest. Much like Hyrule Warriors, this is more of a celebration of the series’ history than anything else. And it absolutely nails that part! It helps that Dragon Quest has a very strong identity, so it should be an easy win to make it feel like a DQ game. The Akira Toriyama art is beautiful and Koichi Sugiyama’s music shines brilliantly in what I think might have been the very first HD Dragon Quest game (I’m not verifying that). The voice acting is on point, and as usual, every character has a different accent because why not (it makes no goddamn sense, that’s why). Alliteration is used to an almost exhausting degree. The world is varied and colourful, and the monsters are as utterly charming as they’ve ever been. Aesthetically, this game is exactly what you would hope for as a Dragon Quest fan.
Plenty of other Dragon Quest elements reappear as well: mini medals are scattered around the world and can be traded for sweet gear. There’s an alchemy pot that you can use to combine materials into accessories. You occasionally find treasure maps that lead to lucrative bonus levels. Gold isn’t handed out especially liberally, which makes every new piece of gear you can afford all the more meaningful. Monsters can be tamed to assist you in battle, though in a somewhat more limited capacity than usual here. Oh, and of course, a bunch of characters from previous games in the series appear as playable characters for a massive dose of fanservice. Probably other things I haven’t seen yet as well!
I think I’m roughly 30% of the way through the game, having played roughly ten hours to this point. That amounts to clearing the first four-and-a-half “chapters” and most of the side content that’s been unlocked so far. As a fun aside, the game clock keeps ticking even while my PS5 is in sleep mode if I don’t quit to the title screen every time I’m done playing, so it looks like my playtime is about 50% more than what it actually is. I hate when games do that.
So, in my ten-ish hours so far, what do I think of Dragon Quest Heroes? Well, it’s certainly a lot less fun than Hyrule Warriors was. I’ve never played any other musous (except for the Hyrule Warriors sequel), so I don’t have anything else to compare it to, but when you stack those two side by side? One is fast and action-packed, the other is… a little more plodding in its pace. And you know what, that’s also pretty authentic to the usual Dragon Quest experience. Even the most recent game in the main series moves at a fairly slow pace in both narrative and gameplay. So I really shouldn’t judge DQ Heroes for being true to its source material, right?
Well, the thing about musous (as I understand them) is that they’re supposed to be fast-paced, mindless fun; run around a battlefield and slay as many foes as you can with flashy attacks and sometimes do some other kind of objective. But DQ Heroes kind of falters there. For one, your characters are slooooooooooow. And there’s no dashing. So if you’re mopping up mooks on one end of the battlefield and another platoon enters the fray on the opposite end… I hope you’ve got a book to read while you meander all the way over there. Walking around each map looking for treasure chests is painfully slow and makes me just not want to get the treasure. Which is an absurd thought. And then when you defeat an optional boss, a treasure chest spawns somewhere on the map, which you have to pick up to end the mission. Why could the prize not just be awarded and save me thirty seconds to a minute of walking across an empty map? (Bosses also have way too much HP but let’s let that one slide for today.)
And also, there honestly just aren’t nearly enough enemies. This is a problem that the 3DS port of Hyrule Warriors suffered from, but at least that game had the excuse of running on hardware that simply couldn’t afford to have very many character models on the screen at once. What excuse did the PS4 have? Now don’t get me wrong, you will still be carving up hundreds – no, thousands of enemies, but they come in these little bunches that I don’t find nearly satisfying enough to chop my way through. But maybe it’s just because I’m still in the early parts of the game. Maybe it’ll get a little more chaotic as I progress through the story.
Also there was a weird bug where during my first play session, it would take my character nearly two second to put up her shield when I pressed the block button, making it nearly useless. Reloading the game resolved the issue and now she blocks immediately (and can even block cancel other actions!), so it’s a non-issue. Just an odd thing I wanted to mention.
The problems I’ve listed may seem huge in writing, but when you translate them into the in-game experience? It just turns out to be not very fun. Or at least not as much fun as it could be. It almost feels like busywork more than anything. But! I really like everything else about the game, and I’m interested in where the story’s going, so I’ll likely stick with it through to the end. I can’t see myself bothering to do much in the way of post-game content (if there is any) unless it’s story-driven, and even the thought of grinding out all the trophies gives me this weird, hollow feeling in my stomach.
So yeah, it’s okay. I’ll keep playing it, but it’s certainly not lighting any fires in my heart. I blame myself for putting it off for a decade. I think 2015 Ryan would have enjoyed it a lot more. Not only were there fewer games being released back then, but also it wouldn’t have been competing with modern masterpieces like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Donkey Kong Bananza for my attention.
(As a side note, while I was re-reading and editing this post, I remembered that I’ve also played Fire Emblem Warriors. It’s not particularly relevant but I figured I’d mention it for the sake of accuracy.)