Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime

August 4, 2013 /

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Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is the sequel to a personal favorite of mine, Slime MoriMori: Dragon Quest Shougeki no Shippou Dan for the Game Boy Advance. Previously set to be released on the GBA, Square Enix decided that DQ Heroes should be moved to the Nintendo DS because it would work much better on it for what they wanted to do, although this causes the symptom of GBA-caliber visuals. And while their usage of the dual screens isn’t exactly groundbreaking, it does a good job at several other points.

DQ Heroes stars a young blue Slime named Rocket, a resident of Boingburg. One day, he, his sister Bo, and his friends Hooly and Swotsy decide to play with the King’s flute, but when Rocket’s father comes by, Hooly sticks it in Rocket’s mouth to hide it.. Soon after, the town comes under attack by the Plob, a mafia group of Platypunks. A massive vehicle resembling a Platypunk rolls up, and obliterates the town while the Platypunks kidnap all of the Slimes – all except for Rocket, whom they believe is not a Slime because of his shape. He is then tossed into a nearby forest, and must go on an adventure to defeat the Plob and save all 100 of his friends throughout Slimenia.

The game has two gameplay types – the Zeldaesque adventure levels and the tank battles. The majority of the game is adventuring, where you explore levels, collecting items, enemies and allies and fighting enemies as well. Rocket’s primary ability is the Elasto Blast, a technique performed by holding down A and aiming up, down, left, right or diagonally in any direction. This is not only used to damage enemies, but it is also used to activate certain events and pick up various objects and creatures, that can be thrown around or sent back to town. Rocket can carry up to three different things at once, which can be used as projectiles, usually to damage enemies. You can swap through the items by using the R button, which you will have to do in situations where you are harvesting items and enemies. The controls are easy to use by even the most inexperienced gamer, but they cannot necessarily master them. Each enemy type has its own personality and attack style. For instance, Jailcats will pounce at you when they see you, but will not be able to pull their attention from a piece of Catnip, while a Hammerhood will swing his hammer, but when he loses it, will begin crying and flail towards you in a fit of rage.

Once you get far enough into the game, the levels become very large and very complicated. One thing I didn’t like about Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest is that you had to constantly press start to see where you are on the map and where you wanted to go. While this is not an excellent use of the dual screen feature, being able to see where you are and what is coming up just by looking at the top screen makes the game feel a lot smoother. In each level are regular bosses and tank battles. The bosses play in a similar fashion to Slime MoriMori DQ – they all have a nine bar HP meter, and you have to hit them at a certain point using a certain tactic with each of them. There are a variety of different themes for all of the levels – there is a desert theme, a mechanical theme, a forest theme, and more. It really helps to keep the game fresh.

The tank battles are quite possibly the coolest and best part of the game. Tank battles use the dual screen well – the top screen shows a zoomed out view of both tanks, and the touch screen displays the typical DQ Heroes adventure gameplay, although on the tank battlefield. Before proceeding with any battles, you must load it with ammunition. Any item you send to town can be used as ammo. At the start, you only have rocks to work with, but you work your way up as you acquire better ammo. Some items merely do damage to the enemy tank upon contact, while others have a specific purpose, such as the invisibility cloak and the thunder staff. You fire ammo from one of two cannons situated at the top of your tank. Once fired, the ammo will slowly make its way to the enemy’s tank, and assuming they do not hit any incoming ammo, they will do what they are capable of to the enemy tank. A good way (and often the only way) to get great ammo is through alchemy, where you provide the Krak Pot with the two items listed in the recipe and have him fuse them together. There are a ton of tanks available for use once you’ve either battled against them or used them, although the one you will be using most is the Schleiman Tank.

The number of strategies available for tank battles is incredible. Not only do you have a ton of tanks to choose from, which each have a unique internal design, but you can recruit villagers to be your tankmates after a while. Depending on which villagers you have, you can form a very capable team. For instance, you start out with Hooly, Swotsy, Glooperior, Blubba, and Curate Rollo; I chose Blubba, Glooperior and Hooly. Glooperior and Blubba would fire ammo from the cannons, while Hooly would infiltrate the enemy’s tank. However, when I need to, I would order Glooperior to heal me and for Blubba to guard the tank. Presently, I stick to Mamia Mia, who can be used as ammo to do tons of damage, Killing Machine, who has more health than others and can target the commander, and Blubba, who can carry three pieces of ammo. The only thing I did not like about the AI of the game is that they did not care what they were throwing into the cannons – they would throw healing items when they weren’t necessary, for instance. You can also choose your own strategy while the others do as you commanded them to. Some choose to stick with their tank and fire off as many pieces of ammo as they can to damage the enemy and defend themselves, while others like to invade the enemy tank and destroy everything in their path to do the same. Me, I balance it out – I tend to stay in my tank, but when necessary, I take an invisibility cloak to their tank and just mess with them.

DQ Heroes has some of the best writing I’ve ever seen in a game, ranking along the likes of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It had many laugh out loud moments, a rarity in games for me. Not only does it have excellent writing, but it actually has quality puns. Two of my favorite puns come from two tank names – the “Chrono Twigger” and the “DQ: Swordz” (with a description of “The revolution is Coming! Wee!”, in reference to the Wii DQ game). And the credits were also pretty funny – just like many names and words in the game are modified to be Slime puns, developer roles are modified as well (“producer” being called “progoocer”). I just hope they put this wit from their translation team to good use again in the future.

Seeing as how it began its life as a GBA title, it looks almost exactly like the original with some minor visual touch-ups. It looked pretty great on the GBA, but not quite as much on the DS. The creatures are cute, and TOSE does a great job with the character design, although it’s not too difficult to design Slimes). TOSE also did great with the designs of the tanks, they all look so cool and different from each other, not only in their outer appearance, but also their interior. The backgrounds are even better than the designs; bright, colorful and somewhat detailed, and they don’t look too bad for a DS game.

The music is a love or hate thing. It’s noticeably repetitive, but I found almost all of the songs highly enjoyable. My favorite songs are the standard tank battle song, and the song that plays when battling most major villains. Dragon Quest fans will also notice that several songs in the game were taken from Dragon Quest VIII, including the song that plays while your game is being saved. The game has a ton of cute sound effects. Each Slime has a voice (although not one unique to them), as do the various enemy species. But other than voices, there aren’t any sound effects that really stand out.

The game has tons of replay value, much more than in Slime MoriMori DQ. I was considerably disappointed when I learned that the excellent town expansion system was replaced by HP expansion of the tank, and that the footballesque stadium minigame was merely replaced by a tank battle stadium, but it does have plenty of new things to do. It brings back enemy/item farming and the surfing game, and introduces the alchemy system, where you collect recipes, and combine items together to make a different one. But the real meat of the game following the main adventure is tank battling. It’s good to play against the computer, but you’ll never truly enjoy tank battles until you play against a capable human player (even though there’s still stuff to do without friends to play with). While computer-controlled players have a one-track mind, a human player can actually strategize as much as you.

Overall, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is an excellent adventure game, and if you can get over the main game being somewhat short and easy, you will probably enjoy it. If it weren’t for the tank battles, this game might have been too similar to the first and somewhat of a disappointment, but they add so much depth to the series that it complements the original instead of replacing it. I also encourage everyone to get it; according to the director, if this performs well in North America, we may get a sequel. And with two excellent modes of play, TOSE can focus almost exclusively on perfecting them. But next time, I hope to see some online!

-Originally Posted by Negative Hippie

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