Cast - 6/10

Half the cast was either too kid-like, too young for me to really gel with or just annoying and added far too late for me to wont to use them in battle. I liked the protagonists, stereotypical young Escha, mysteriously good at alchemy, but not in the ways of the world & Logy, city guy now in a small town and good at his weapon synthesis and combat. Really liked the combat ability of Linca for her pure combat power & Wilbell voll Erslied for her pure magic power. It seemed important to the story to keep Awin (Escha's cousin) around and he was good in combat, and Threia was introduced early and was an early powerhouse, although she faded away later. Other characters I didn't interact with much.

Gameplay Loop - 9/10

The loop of this game is what really hooked me. Every 3 months you'd get a main task to complete, and 8 secondary tasks to complete in a 3x3 grid. You'd get rewards for completing rows of these tasks. I'd spend maybe a week to a month completing all these and getting all my bonuses. That's when 16 more tasks would open, making a 5x5 grid and the really fun trial to get them all complete in the 120 days would come in. There were battle, alchemy, and item delivery tasks, but they all involved a bit more than that and the time limit actually worked OK keeping me from doing this forever and freezing up. Many times I did all 25, there were a few times I couldn not.

Battle System - 9/10

This was more than a standard turn-based battle. There was a turn order visible at the top and there were plenty of AOE attacks and spells and item-usage that you could see what would be attacked/healed. You brought 6 people into combat in pairs. You could switch between front and backup people on their turn freely. Escha & Logy could use items they and brought with them, these were quite powerful, and you had limited inventory & usage until you returned to town. Everyone else just had their weapons and skills/spells. You could chain attacks together, do duel alchemy, cover for each other defensively, and the non alchemists built to special attacks. Really loved it.

Alchemy - 10/10

This was top-notch. Basically making good stuff was a puzzle with many solutions, and I was super-excited every time to try it. Took a few in-game months to get used to it all and stuff added along the way, but it always got better as I learned. Basically, you'd pick your materials from what you have, each had different properties. You'd be able to add them for a cost to a recipe, they would add certain elemental powers. You could see how powerful the meters went up to unlock latent bonuses. There were special skills you could use to add ingredients multiple times for higher power and for less cost that made them all a puzzle to create in unlocking the most latent powers if you desired - and boy did I!

Monster List - 9/10

There are plenty enough monsters in here to be happy with. Over 500 is fine enough for any monsters game, and with a bunch of recolors (not too many mind you), this was just great. My favorite part about this DQM game was that the lower-ranked monsters were actually worth something. They could be viable for a long time. Also, this was NOT top-heavy. There was not more S or X ranked monsters than F or G. The boss monsters were rarer, not completely stacked like the 3DS games seemed to do.

Gameplay Loop - 8/10

I found the environments to be pretty cool, especially the candy circles. Going through the sameish 7 circles, but doing different echelons: lower, middle, upper, was pretty good too. The areas changed between echelons, but were recognizable as being similar. Also each area had 4 seasons, and they were visually different and offered different challenges/monsters/means of navigating the map. The gameplay loop was enjoyable, and beating the boss of each area made going through again to clean up monsters not recruited on the first pass easier, nice mechanic. Occasionally there were too many puzzles or too many mazy areas that killed my enjoyment of certain circles. I'd have preferred more straightforward exploration, especially with narrow corridors and tons of encounters.

DLC - 9/10

First off, the fact that these options aren't baked in to the main game absolutely sucks. However, it's a well-spent $25 to get everything. The treasure chest rewards hourly are excellent items to help with quick leveling and stat boosts. Coach Joe's training is fun rogue-like areas. The EXP gained from those was amazing and I loved making and taking in parties that I'd never think of such as Rank C or just Dragons. The Mole Hole was invaluable for getting extra copies of monsters for synthesizing. Used it a ton, especially in conjunction with Coach Joe.

Monster Synthesis - 10/10

This is the heart of all DQM games for me and this one is EXCELLENT. The reverse synthesis made this perfect, it was great to search for stuff in general or specify a single parent. One thing I really liked was the ability to search for breeding patterns from monsters I didn't currently have. Many times that showed possibilities that a quick trip to the Mole Hole could make a reality. 

Characters - 5/10

I'd expected to really not like the cast because... well, I just can't stand Mario. I did however really like Geno as a character and Bowser as a party member was really cleverly written. I like how he kept referring to the party as his new group of minions and wanted to leave near the end, but stuck around for selfish reasons. Bowser alone was worth a great deal of entertainment. Mallow & Peach were nothings for me.

Visuals - 9/10

This game was extremely good looking. This is about the level I'd love to see all video games be at and continue at. The cartoony aspect of the entire world was excellent and everything was quite colorful and rendered just perfectly. I could look at the visuals all day.

Battle System - 3/10

Timed button presses can go to hell and die in a burning pit of fire. The FP stuff seemed quite out of proportion for what extra attack they offered. I could spend 3FP on an attack and do 100 damage, but the 6FP or 9FP wouldn't really do 2-3 times more damage. I didn't like the battle system at all, and the encounter rate was horrible. I tried avoiding fights, but needed the EXP. Really my biggest fight was with this system.

Interaction - 3/10

I wanted people talking. I know Nintendo doesn't do a ton of spoken dialogue in Mario games, but this being an RPG, it feels like it could've gone very well. I didn't like platforming impeding me advancing, I think most of that was me (also, see below), but some of it was maybe not implemented well. I don't like isometric games, things being at 45 degrees off messed me up so much, especially seeing where I needed to jump and platforming stuff. I don't like puzzles in my games and there were far too many of them.

Game Modes - 9/10

They're not all for me, but holy cow, does this game about diving down and spear-fishing have a ton of other stuff to do. First off, there's the sushi restaurant business sim. It has recipes to learn and you need to hire people, serve drinks (which each has a mini-game), serve food, grate wasabi, and even do a plethora of other mini games when you do cooking competitions. Underwater there is just a TON of different modes and mini-games to do. Heck, the game turns into a schmup near the end and then the credits have a game built into them too. In addition to underwater and restaurant, you can manage a fish farm, and a plant/animal farm. Oh and throw in rhythm things and basically a casino... The game sure keeps you busy with new play features all the time.

Visuals - 9/10

The pixel art is beautiful. From the stuff you see when you're diving to the amazing cut scenes, there's always something great to look at. It's amazing what can be shown underwater with just a few pixels. The layers to the ocean, up close to far away, are done very well. Even the tiniest fish and seahorses are noticibly different, a mean feat due to their tiny pixelized sizes. There were a great deal of cutscenes that showed off a lot of neat stuff that the developers could do with their pixels, so many so that I kept thinking, "wow, they did all this for a 20 second scene I'm sure I'll never see again?"

Battle System - 8/10

It was a little weird not to be able to take upgraded spears into the water often, but I really enjoyed the rogue-like nature of the dive. It kept me searching the weapon chests each and every time I went down, not for A better weapon, but just for ANY better weapon in general other than what I dove down with. Eventually I learned to make the special weapons that I could bring down every time. I liked the triple spear for a long time and then when I unlocked it, the grenade shooter became my main. I spent a good deal of time getting upgraded to the poison grenade launcher and would've upgraded that one to the one that did damage AND poisoned if I'd played more or ever found the ore that I needed to upgrade. Different weapons/spear tips required different mechanics to shoot get fist, kept me on my toes and forced me to find a favorite.

Story Pacing - 9/10

I felt that the story went along at a good clip. Sure I could've spent blank days and days just doing the diving or just playing the sushi restaurant, but the way the game was structured kept me wanting to come back and do both, each at their certain time of the day. I never really felt that I needed to grind for fish or money, there were enough little story bits that kept me moving from one to the other. The reporter bringing challengers to the restaurant, Dr. Bacon wanting me to explore the Sea People things, the earthquake problem, other rando antagonists that would pop up. I would've preferred an in-game day or two to catch my breath occasionally, but honestly everything kept pushing me not to stagnate in one area, in one mode too long.

Heroes - 9/10

I really enjoyed my time with the Black Eagles. Edelgard was the one I was most interested in, but then again, the plot of the Crimison path I took basically starred her. I did have fun with the huge variety of characters and eventually settled on a couple magic users, a couple sword weilders, a few axe users, and one calvary. The conversations were all quite interested and held my interest enough to listen to anything I unlocked, and actually unlock more and more.

Battle System - 9/10

It's musou combat, people are flying all over the place and you're batting 100 foes at a time. I liked getting the combos down with my main characters and building up to larger attacks. The system of breaking shields on some enemies worked well, and doing that and then launching a huge attack on them was beautiful to execute. Absolutely loved the tactical parts of this as I could order all the other playable characters all around the battlefield & give them more than a couple different things to do. Felt very general-like!

Job System - 8/10

I do love a great job system and this was pretty good. Honestly couldn't tell the difference most of the time if I changed between classes that used the same weapons. The jobs were broken into 4 main job lines, and you had to open more advanced once with items you could buy or find. I was mastering a ton of 2nd level ones long before I could open the 3rd level jobs, so it was slow progression down the job lines. And then the 3rd ones opened and I mastered them quickly and really felt no need to branch out as each character had a recommended best job.

Camp - 8/10

Oh my, there is a TON of stuff to do here. Blacksmiths, item shops, talking to everyone, the training grounds, upgrading facilities, replaying old battles, ... and that's probably a third of what you can do there. More time was spent here doing the mundane stuff than actually in battles. Luckily there was fast travel to people and places. This did get a bit negative for me as I was constantly at a loss for money for things I wanted to do to improve my characters, their weapons, the camp itself, etc. Had to rerun and rerun battles a ton to get money.

Story - 1/10

There's an island, something once happened, go explore and see what's up. Each playable character has a story/plot, but they'll take up no more than 20 or so sentence in the game. Total.

Exploration - 8/10

This was the best part of the game. I really wanted to 100% every map and spent more time than necessary to do so. Exploring was fun!

Battle System - 5/10

Again, meh. With only 3 part members, and limited SP and SP costs for good attacks being a lot, one person mainly had to be a SP-regen machine, and thus battles took FOREVER to end, even random ones. I just couldn't output enough damage to end things quickly. And screw that bird in the batttle above. 10% of the game was mainly fighting those Archwings.

Character Building - 3/10

I absolutely hate this damn random system of learning new skills and getting stats up. I can deal with the skill learning and did OK with it, but that did keep me away from changing weapons or stances so I didn't lose progress. What sucked is I never got a new SP point after about 10 hours. My max SP never changed and that sucked. Bug?

Poker - 9/10

Loved this. Loved playing poker over and over and over. I learned the game from one of my grandfathers and while I'm not all that great on in playing against people, I love video poker.

Power Ups - 8/10

Really love getting the planet cards and leveling up certain poker hands. Love leveling up Flush and Straight the most. I always felt like that those give the most rewards for how kinda easy they are to create.

Jokers - 7/10

These are what makes or breaks runs. There are so many cool ones that combo'd together help simple card hands be worth tens of thousands of points due to adding chips and multipliers. I felt there were too many junk ones and if RNG just gave you too much junk, your runs ended very quickly.

Progression - 2/10

I know, I know, it's a roguelike, but I wish I could pick better cards in be in pool runs. The RNG feels so unfair when I have a great run & see the possibilities but might never have a similar setup again. I wanted to rerun certain builds, but never could. Liked unlocking new decks and Jokers, but then it's mostly RNG if I even get to use them ever.

Battle System - 9/10

So many excellent thing this does. Pretty cool that it's all magic, no physical damage/weapons. Turn order is clearly shown, and there is no MP. Each spell costs time to use. Cast a big one, wait 10 turns to go again, cast a small one, go again in 3. Always a decision. The monsters have elemental shields to be broken that knock them back and allow for extra damage if gone. You play with a party of 6, but 3 cast spells and 3 are support. The support ones are divied up randomly before each battle. They support 3 ways: one turns heal spells to attack & vice-versa, one reverses single-target & multi-target spells, and a the third changes spell elements around. The fact that it's random each battle makes for each battle being unique and fun to play. Wouldn't use autobattle in this game even if it was there.

Town Building - 5/10

I think this game being advertised as a "cozy game" because of this mechanic. It unlocks after 5+ hours and honestly I wasn't a huge fan of it. Everything costs a bunch and it doesn't seem to offer any benefits for building things. I felt this whole thing just fell flat.

Overworld - 7/10

This was pretty good. There were environmental puzzles and real puzzle puzzles. You could find new battle spells by searching around, you didn't get them through level-up. Lots of monsters to kill and food to find, which was important because Max HP only goes up when you cook new recipes, not when you level up. There was maybe too many things in the overworld, and once I got stuck, but they built in an free zoom-like escape spell back to the last save point, so you're never stuck forever.

Characters - 8/10

I liked all the various characters. The huge rhino that decided to become a mage against his physical nature. The fox girl that needs to find her family. The hippo guy is a mage, which is unusual for his big, strong race of people.... And the rest are pretty good too.

Cast - 8/10

Fun cast of characters. I had most everyone in my party at one point or another. I figured I'd stay with the core three throughout, but then kept switching someone out every time I got a new person, so that felt right instead and I got a better feel for how each played in combat. Never felt like any character was super-annoying, which is something I usually latch onto, but at the same time I don't think I had a favorite character either. It was just a great ensamble.

Gameplay Loop - 9/10

Go exploring a new area, harvest a ton of materials, come back and do alchemy. Rise and repeat a couple-dozen times. Sounds simple enough, and yet it was new and fun each and every time. I rarely had to go back through areas to grind materials, but definitely did when I learn new methods of traveling through or around different obstacles blocking the way the first time. Sidequests never really felt too difficult to deal with and I really loved the ones that challenged me to alchemize specific things over a certain level or with specific abilities. Those were the most fun, basically anything to get me back to doing alchemy!

Battle System - 8/10

I thought I was going to hate this. After a while, I got used to it and thought it wasn't that bad. After a longer while, I got to where I enjoyed it. I'm still preferring a purely turn-based approach, but this one won me over enough to buy part 2. Basically everyone is attacking & then recharging. You can switch between any, while the other two auto-battle. When your cool-down is over, you pick your attack. Items cost from a pool of ?item magic? to use, when it's empty you can sacrifice an item until you're back at the inn to refill meter. There are combos you can do with others, you'll see what they're yelling for you to do and then they'll follow up.

Alchemy - 9/10

I enjoyed getting to know this system. I wasn't able to exploit it nearly as much as I'd done in Escha & Logy, but its good, really good and I could do a lot of stuff early on that made the game that much easier. I don't think I'd have enjoyed the battle system as much as I did if I couldn't make all the high level stuff that I was able to with this system. Put in the pieces and watch the items grow more powerful!

Castle Building - 8/10

This was really fun. I love the sphere-grid like way that the castle upgrades were done, and loved seeing the old broken places turned into useful areas. Gave good reason to work on getting specific resources, and the resource guild (once that opened) was great to direct towards what I needed to get instead of farming it all myself. Sadly, I didn't get to experience the full level 4 part of the castle due to my issues with the next category over. I liked things to do at the castle like the card game and the cooking battles.

Recruiting Heroes - 5/10

Half of the heroes were fine, just meet and they're yours. The other half required doing some small sidequests. Most were fine, some were hell. The big problem I had was with the RNG. One hero needed to unlock a major mini-game area of the castle. Cool, just get these 5 eggs as drops. I spent 30 minutes fighting egg monsters, no egg drops. OK, let's get those charms to boost drops & increase encoutners. Had to recruit the lady who sold them, that also needed a random drop to recruit. Did that, go back with the accessories and fought another 30 minutes. Still no egg. That killed all desire to continue recruiting, and I stopped at 85 characters out of more than 120. Wasn't going to fool with that when the game was being such an ass.

Battle System - 5/10

There didn't seem much to this to set it too far apart from generic turn-based combat. First, I hated that it was random encounters. Especially since there was so many little puzzles and back and forth going on in dungeons. The encounter rate wasn't horrible, but everything seemed so very far apart so all those encouners sucked big time. Then the battles themselves were kinda bland. Big boss battles weren't too bad, but really each character just had a few things to do in battle, it really wasn't deep at all. I left the game on autocombat/don't use MP a good 90% of the time and didn't really engage.

Performance - 1/10

Initially I was really disappointed in the load times for battles and walking between areas. This game isn't more impressive than the Octopath Travelers, it just runs crappier. Eventually I got over that, but that was just the beginning. I experienced a freeze and a crash in the first 10 hours, but that was just the start. Once the castle-building began, it was a 5% chance anything I did in the castle that activated the load screen would freeze the game. Castle upgrades, fast travel, walking into rooms, anything was fair game. I had ~20 feezes on that. Then I hit the 40 hour mark. The last 6 hours of the game, it crashed a good 10 times. I lost over 5 hours progress total from the horrible performance.

Gameplay Loop - 9/10

Exploration was pretty awesome. I enjoyed trying to at least map out all 100 islands (amazing that it was kinda random). The dungeons were fun and I did all 40. Loved how everything was numbered, or parts of lists to get checked off. No timer running in the background for stuff (and you could turn up or down encounters or how long the day lasted). It had enough time daily to farm, chat up the locals, and then go out exploring. It was really quite balanced.

Farming/Crafting - 10/10

It couldn't have been simpler. There were plants that grew in specific seasons, and it told you want they'd do. You had options later on to add fertilizer to boost a stat of the crop, that was easy to understand as well. The crafting was easy to do at tables, and I loved that there wasn't a million types of ore and stuff. You had to save up, but most materials were ready from the start, there wasn't a lot of secret stuff to unlock.

Battle System - 9/10

Card-based awesomeness. I loved all the card effects and how you could get new cards on level-up and how leveling up affected strengths of certain cards. Cards could be added, removed, and evolved from decks. It was damn-near perfection. I sadly didn't experiment more with different monsters or enough types of sprits to get a feel for different types of decks, but I had a heck of a lot of fun perfecting the ones I had.

Relationship - 10/10

I loved this system. It was so informative. You saw what relationship points you earned with each choice, with each gift. Nothing was hidden. Dates were at certain times at certain places. Everyone, even the men and MILFs were able to romance. Nothing was cut off from being able to do. And it was pretty simple at the end of the day, not a ton of hard things to figure out. And it went to PG-13, didn't hold back!

Gameplay Loop - 7/10

There were just so so so so so many places to go and things to do. You'd have jobs to do and sidequests available every 5-6 hours or so on top of an overall mission. This was fine, but felt dumb later on in the game. War was breaking out in 4 hours and there were still more things popping up. It was long enough, some of this stuff was unnecessary filler. Did love the sidequest to stop an Amazon distribution center from going in. That cracked me up! 

Story Wrap-Up - 9/10

It was quite satisfying to know what went on. Didn't mind the normal ending, but glad I went back for the true ending as it had a ton of story stuff that took place after. Still don't know WTF is going on with Oroboros, and they just got a new member, so that's still left open for series continuation I guess.

Battle System - 9/10

Always love this system. Arts & crafts are a good mix of magic and special attacks. I know I dipped difficulty down to speed through this playthrough of the game, but the speed-up options and skipping animation stuff helps move this along, although it all looks beautiful anyway. Like breaking the systems, the movement around the field and AoE stuff. 

Outfits!!! - 10/10

Had a freaking blast dressing people up this time. There were a huge variety of hilarious stuff. Loved the girls' magical girl outfits, they were tastefully colorful and big. Everyone got rainbow hair! Just wish the people outside Class VII had some more options. 

Characters - 4/10

I read all the manga, all 6000 pages and just really cannot care much for any of the characters. A big part of that is I couldn't care less about bad guys that eventually become good guys, and that's like half of Dai's group. Also, I never liked Popp or Dai, so there ain't much left.

Gameplay Loop - 1/10

This is mission based. Set number of missions per chapter. Early on it's 75% of missions in a chapter are battles. By the end, that dips down to 30% or so. They ran out of money and made so many story missions that just are screenshots from the anime with dialogue. Dumb & screams of budget limitations.

Battle System - 9/10

I really like this system. It's almost musou, but perhaps a tad slower with the cooldowns. Other than that, it's just straight up fun, and it always left me wishing for more combat missions to keep just fighting. Also, wish there were fewer missions VS just one or a few enemies. More enemies = more fun.

Graphics - 9/10

It looks great during combat, and it looks even better during the (extrememely limited) in-engine cut scenes. They're beautiful and make you feel like you're playing an amazingly beautiful DQ anime. 

Characters - 7/10

Maybe I should do party chat more, but while the characters that join along the way are just fine, I don't think I'll ever see them as memorable as pretty much any other DQ game ever. They're there, they do their job, but maybe it's the DQIX feeling that they're just empty shells. They definitely do have personality, but it's not quite always there.

Story - 9/10

There are so many good stories here. Much like DQIX, there are awesome stories going on all over the place. There are the Key Emblem quest stories, which are pretty good to amazingly excellent, and then each job has a series of 5 quests that go with them, and they've proven to be fair to excellent themselves. Right there that's 10 good storylines for the Key Emblems and another dozen plus for the job quest line stories. The Key Emblem quests are hand-translated and well done, while others are machine translated and good enough!

Progression - 10/10

There's so much stuff to do! To start off with, there are 2 main towns on each of 5 continents. Each one has something going on there, so 10 big adventures to get the 10 Key Emblems. 40+ hours only netted me 6 because there's so much else to do with sidequests and job quests and just the immense size of the world, and fishing, and a casino, ...

Battle System - 9/10

But it's just the same ole' DQ battle system, right? Well, it's a great blend of DQXI and DQIX. There's a reason this came right between them. Main character can switch jobs like DQIX, but the rest of the party are set character types like DQXI. You enter commands when it's your turn, not at the start of a full turn, and there's a convenient Auto button per turn, so if you don't want to go full auto or just want them to do the best thing for a single turn, have at it. Really liked that button and therefore haven't put anyone on full auto.

Pay to Win - 0/10

The monetization pops up right away. Checks for online constantly and a dude offered to sell me a gem for $0.99 in the first dungeon. I was out pretty quickly after.

Catching - 5/10

I thought the magic of the 3DS games was walking around finding new WiFi signals to see new men. This, they're just there. And you need to pay for the good ones. It's meh.

Visuals - 7/10

From what little I played, it all looked fine.

Battle System - 7/10

It was fun. I enjoyed having them just all out attack or taking more detailed approach and giving individual commands both. It was fine.

Characters - 8/10

Great selection of DQ people. Cristo, one of my favorites, was there. Yangus is always good. The iconic blue slime and such bad guys like Kandar and the Dragon Lord!

Boards - ?/10

Blah blah blah

Gameplay - ?/10

Blah blah blah

DQishness - ?/10

Blah blah blah

Golfing Gameplay - 9/10

It's got the standard Mario Golf 3-button system to start, stop for power, stop for accuracy. You level up and can increase your driver distance. Can't quite figure out where to change putter type for longer/shorter putts when I'm picking a putter while in the rough. It does it automatically and fine when on the green.

Overall Gameplay - 6/10

Nothing to do but do practice challenge things to earn coins to enter tournaments. Only 4 tournaments. Not a lot of content, but I paid $2 for this, so worth it. Courses and challenges seem to be auto-generated, never the same twice.

Hazards - 6/10

If you land your ball in a circle around a turtle, the turtle will charge the ball and knock into it, birds do the same, but worse. There are stripes across fairways that will blow away your ball. Frogs drop balls in ponds, scorpions flat out sting/destroy the ball. There are a lot, and they suck. But that's the challenge.

Power-Ups - 7/10

You can buy balls that bounce more, ones that fly through obstacles like they aren't there, etc. You can buy a device that shows exactly how your ball will bounce and land, and things that will show how wind or green elevation will change the path of the ball. There's 4 others that are rough to judge how to use, but activated by D-pad buttons. Needed more trial and error as I ignored them until the end course where I couldn't have beat it without them.

Battles - 7/10

Hex-grid is kinda fun! Don't mind this level of tactical combat, and if I'm bored, I just hit the autobattle for a bit. Love having big groups of lower-level monsters to bring with me.

Town Management - 6/10

It's a bit clumsy, and I'm far too often looking for the exact right thing to click on. Wish there was a sidebar with quick actions here instead of trying to remember what building holds what monster.

Exploration - 9/10

My favorite part! Love discovering new places and pushing the black veil back all the time. Always good things out there on the map to find!

Hero - 8/10

There are so so so many options and places for them to equip a super duper amount of things. My biggest problem is I can handle 1 of these heros per mission very well, it's too much to get into multiples of them.

Battles - 8/10

I made the cat a mage and played as the cat 95% of the time. Loved that there was another character along (the dog). Made him a physical fighter and he was powerful. Made for a good pairing for the two. Battles were quite simplistic, sometimes dragged too long, but ARPG hack and slash (spell & dash for cat?). It was OK, and had some good mechanics for casting magic.

Progression/Story - 9/10

I hit level 90 in about 8 hours, so that dopamine hit of leveling up came fast and furious! Even the simplest fetch-quests were earning me good EXP and level-ups and clear numbers of damage could be seen, giving a sense of getting stronger. I enjoyed the story of cats vs. dogs, it was done well and fit the setting and made sense. It veered into WTF later on and whatever, that was fine too!

Exploration - 9/10

So much to do, so much to see. Loved that it counted the sidequests and dungeons for you. There were 60-some of each and I completed exactly 50 of each of them, so I saw most of the game. I loved walking around and seeing everything, zooming out to get a better look at the surroundings, and how it marked where sidequests and dungeons were!

Puns - 8/10

OMG, the number of puns in this game was absolutely bonkers. For the most part, they were great and funny, but a little too often they really forced puns that didn't make sense or made it hard to read. Cutting back to just the good ones and leaving out the forced ones that were so dumb it wasn't even a good-natured groan-worthy would've actually been better.

Battles - 7/10

There were issues forcing this to become a touch-screen game, but that was OK, it worked maybe better that way. I tried grinding at the end, but not sure that helped as much as changing tactics. Was a bit annoyed that you couldn't control who to attack. AI just did it randomly, which meant battles against hordes were tougher than most boss battles with a single enemy as you'd be getting hit by 6 people at once, boss battles were maybe 1 or 2. 

Glitches - 0/10

The Jewelry Shop to upgrade rings was a mess. It'd kick me out, not let me upgrade, and/or text would overrun like in picture above. Battles became an issue immediately with button controls sometimes not working, and me being unable to select healing after moving to something else. Eventually played the entire game with touch controls in battle.

Encounter Rate - 4/10

A lot of the encounters were predetermined. Text at the start of these told you they happened on a set schedule. But they came far too frequently, and the random encounters kept coming too. Overall it was just too much. 

Humor - 9/10

Ultimately this is what the game was all about. From the guy pissing on the wall in the first battle to all the reveals at the end, I smiled and chuckled all the time (maybe not so much the last 20% of time grinding). It got rated R, it got raunchy and even funnier at parts!

Battles - 8/10

I rather liked the battle system. It was fast and furious and I understood what to do quite well. The Necromancer was an integral part and I built mine to summon a couple things, poison enemies and do some damage. If all my spells were on cooldown, I could hit them with my staff for more MP.

Exploration - 7/10

One of the better parts. I liked the little signs like you see above that showed you how to find fun treasure chests. There were signs for treasure paths vs. the way forward to the exit that were easy to follow without area maps, rarely got lost & the encounter rate was such that it wasn't bad exploring all over.

Monster Collecting - 6/10

This was kinda fun, and for the first half of the game I felt like I moved new characters in quite a bit, while discarding old monsters. Did that a couple times in the second half, but not as much as I knew what I was getting out of my party. Some OK customization that I didn't play around with too much, lots more for the main character.

Humor - 5/10

Sadly, this was tuned down from the previous title. No party members meant much less talking = much less humor. It got funny the second half when more characters were around, but the first half felt really empty and boring from a writing standpoint.

Cast - 8/10

They added a couple new characters at the beginning of the game and then later sprinkled in the old ones. The characters are all fine, but with the amount of time I spend doing alchemy in the game, taking one character out and supplementing them for someone new 20-30 hours in just isn't feasible. I stuck with the young girl from the start and the new, masked treasure hunter when he eventually joined and stayed that way all the way.

Gameplay Loop - 10/10

Each main dungeon had specific spots to visit and dialogue and clues to uncover. Then you'd put those clues in something of an investigation book, but you'd have to match the correct clue based on vague hints. This would build the % up and finishing certain things got your new recipes or SP to use to open more alchemy.

Battle System - 9.5/10

I generally really liked the way items worked in this game, since I spent time to make some great ones. In the first game, there was a hard limit to how many times you could use stuff. This did away with that and made it a charge that you built up during battle. After I got tired of starting at zero every battle, I found where to boost this so I could start with a good charge each battle and this is when I really fell in love with the whole new system!

Alchemy - 10/10

I went super deep down the rabbit hole in this game. I'd spend an hour making a new weapon because I'd need to first make better ingredients, and then make the weapon, and then remake the weapon (which often meant I had to trade in extra materials for remake gems), and then finally try to open every part of the dang thing to get maximum results. Then I'd go to blacksmith and max out it's ATK or DEF!

Jobs - 9/10

The Monster Wrangler quickly became my favorite damage-dealing class. They can call in troupes of monsters that rush in and do damage. By the end of the game, it was the #1 highest skill that I had and my Sage had it too! Won a lot of boss battles with them. Wish it wasn't so level-cost prohibitive to switch, it stifles trying things out or late-game switching.

Improvements to OG - 8/10

Liked the changes to the options when you die, make it even more forgiving. The graphics were of course AMAZING. The orchestrated soundtrack sounded lovely and as stated: liked the new job. Finding and recruiting monsters was 50/50 for me. I liked it, but it was far too much, they're every-freaking-where and I spent too long finding them.

OG game - 8/10

It's same old Dragon Quest 3 at its heart, and while not a favorite of mine, it's still a top-tier Dragon Quest. The game is broken into set goals of getting off your island, getting a boat, getting orbs, beating Baramos, and then beating Zoma. It plays pretty well.

Changes to OG - 7/10

While most everything changed is good, there were some things that were a bit nitpicky. Everything was SO SO SO SO far away from each other and the encounter rate seemed a bit high. Wish that could've been variable or lower. They didn't add in the Tn'T boards which are fun. I was appropriately leveled for the game (a bit high for a lot) and had a lot of fun, so nitpicks were minor.

Cast - 9/10

This was a good wrap-up to the series. Loved all the stuff about the various 

Game world - 8/10

First off, this game is by size a good 3-4 times as large as the first game. You keep going to areas that are MASSIVE. Sadly though, there was no reason to explore all of the different areas. It was immensely fun to explore, but was a bit disappointed I didn't need to do or see everything. Still fun, but wanted more of a reason to explore. I didn't clear all the clouds.

Battle System - 10/10

Maybe because I'd learned to master this system and alchemy during Ryza 2, but I felt like I broke this battle system wide open! Could do regular attacks quickly getting to my special attacks ASAP. I had amazing items charged up and would plow though smaller battles fast and keep going with the exploration.

Alchemy - 10/10

I had a little bump at the beginning as this was exactly like Ryza 2 but a tiny graphical change to maybe a more 3D alchemy grid. After a few hours, I was used to it and 100% as enjoyable as Ryza 2. Note: see above. Kinda bumped on the addition of the key stuff, but it wasn't vital.

Puns/Graphics - 9/10

There were 

Exploration - 9/10

blah blah blah

Combat - 3/10

Really hated the combat system. First off, I don't like timed hits and this relied on it a lot. Second, the system barely ever evolved. Characters learned 3-4 skills/spells total, and you've pretty much got them in the first few hours. Combat is slow, there's zero speed-up, and no auto anything. Hated getting in combat.

Characters - 4/10

While B'st and Garl were great, the main 2 characters were crap. They talked, but might as well been silent protagonists that never changed or had any story arc. Was kinda bland because the main people were so meh.