Of Starry Nights and Tournament Fights
A retrospective on Dragon Warrior Monsters, and how it defies the simple label of “Pokemon clone”
One thing that I thankfully retained from graduate school was learning about the idea that the history of games development is not always a straight line. While many games on the surface may appear to be “stealing” ideas from each other, it’s oftentimes serendipity that tends to make two particular games have very similar starting vibes that diverge very wildly beneath the surface.
I bring this up primarily because I want to talk about a game I cleared on my stream earlier this year that perfectly embodies this phenomenon: Dragon Warrior Monsters for the Game Boy Color.
To most people only familiar with Pokemon, Dragon Warrior Monsters (known nowadays as Dragon Quest Monsters) seems like a cheap grab from Enix to cash in on Pokemon’s winning formula while banking off of the power of Akira Toriyama’s visual design chops to push cartridges; you can meet monsters, turn them into your fighting companions, and battle your way through the story with them in hand.
Under that first glance, though, Dragon Warrior Monsters was already rocking with its own style and system, and digging even further than that establishes that the design choices of Dragon Warrior Monsters are less “a variant on Pokemon”, but more an answer to the question “What is Dragon Quest like as a monster-raising game?”
When I played this game as a child, I didn’t realize this, but with my recent clear of the game on my mind, I decided to write this article to bridge that gap (only widened by virtue of the fact that it has taken literal decades for some Dragon Quest games to get international releases and some of them as of this writing STILL haven’t gotten one), and to give anyone that may have heard of this game but isn’t into Pokemon a second perspective on why they shouldn’t quite treat it the same way.
I’ll try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, but given the nature of how Dragon Warrior Monsters relates to the franchise at large we’re inevitably going to wind up spoiling bits of various Dragon Quest games between Dragon Quest I and VI, as well as Dragon Warrior Monsters itself, so please read with that in mind.
We’ve got 3 major topics to cover with Dragon Warrior Monsters: the fundamental rules of Dragon Quest that sets its basic systems up, the wildly different approach to monster management, and how fundamentally, Dragon Warrior Monsters is, at least for the time it was released, a celebration of Dragon Quest to date, not a new path forward for the series like what Pokemon was contending with at the time.
Let’s get into it.
1) Dragon Design DNA
Let’s start with some basic Dragon Quest history for those that are unfamiliar. Though Dragon Quest is much better known outside of Japan now, it has been a mainstay of Japanese video game culture since Dragon Quest I’s 1986 release — Dragon Quest III in particular is considered one of the franchise’s defining games and one of the hallmarks of Japanese RPGs, period, to the point that many Japanese pop culture references to RPGs or videogames thereof have a good chance of being nods to Dragon Quest or especially Dragon Quest III in some form.
Where we have a slight breakdown is the international release cycle of the games. Non-Japanese audiences got releases of the first four Dragon Quest games on the NES (under the title Dragon Warrior due to copyright complications), but did not receive either Dragon Quest V (1992) or Dragon Quest VI (1995), both for the Super Nintendo; the next international release of a “mainline” Dragon Quest game internationally was Dragon Warrior VII for the Sony Playstation in 2001.
This gap in releases (barring Dragon Warrior Monsters’ international 2000 release) winds up causing what is a common point of assumption that Dragon Warrior Monsters is working the “Pokemon Derivative” angle; the time in-between for Western audiences was filled by none other than Pokemon Red and Blue versions in 1996 and the subsequent explosion in popularity of the Pokemon franchise.
However, the real root of Dragon Warrior Monsters lies in both the Dragon Quest franchise writ large and more specifically one of these forgotten (but “recently” re-released) games: Dragon Quest V.
Aside from the usual standards of Dragon Quest’s gameplay (traveling with a full cast of characters, each with distinct roles, and battling against enemies with up to 4 members at a time), Dragon Quest V codified something unique for the franchise: the ability to recruit monsters by defeating them in battle, depending on individual recruitment rates and the player’s general combat strength. This system got a slight update with Dragon Quest VI’s Monster Master vocation, but DWM’s monster recruitment mostly takes in the style from DQV.
With this in mind, it becomes readily apparent that even in its basic form DWM has no interest in being much like Pokemon: the focus on a 3-member party that battles all at once as opposed to Pokemon’s one-on-on elimination style format, with a high focus on dangerous enemies, a de-emphasis on striking “weaknesses” for maximum effect (though having a Metal Slash skill on hand is quite helpful in certain circumstances), and immense risk/reward by exploring big areas with limited recovery and tight resource management is pure Dragon Quest — straightforward and without frills.
DWM takes monster recruitment a bit further than DQV and VI too; you can feed enemy monsters various types of meat to raise recruitment odds when you beat them, though it’s still not a guarantee. In its own way, this further emphasizes one of the general design principles that has guided Dragon Quest for a long time, mostly because lead designer Yuji Horii really likes gambling and that seeps into every facet of Dragon Quest: no matter your pluck, sometimes everything is up to luck (including whether or not a boss monster that attacks twice a turn will use its party-killing move twice in a row for no reason).
The focus on this particular team composition and this specific type of monster capture will become relevant in our next section.
2) Monster Management 101 (& 202, & 303)
Where DWM particularly deviates from Dragon Quest writ large is the nature of its world. Rather than exploring an entire map like in most other RPGs, with towns to rest at or dungeons to explore, DWM is honed down to two major hotspots: the Kingdom of GreatTree, the town where you buy supplies and manage your team, and various explorable fields accessible through Travelers’ Gates. Each Gate has a fixed number of randomly generated floors to go through before encountering a boss, with monsters being encountered on mostly every floor.
This sharp focus on preparation prior to long exploration and very few chances to rest or restock (longer gates do, if rarely, have a random chance of landing you on a floor with a church where you can heal or a store where you can buy items) means that your team is generally expected to be self-reliant for longer and longer periods of time as the fields go from 4 to 6, to 10 to upwards of 20+ floors or more. While you can bring items to make this easier, they can be extremely expensive in the early parts of the game when money is scarce (especially because you’re paying tournament fees to progress through the story); even once you can afford them you can only carry so many at a time, especially because you’re splitting inventory space with treats and other tools.
Developing this self-reliant team may mean various things: trying to come up with a monster that can both heal and support the party with offensive and defensive boosts, or a monster that is capable of using a variety of spells for both attacking and for weakening the enemy team in a variety of ways.
Unfortunately, this being a Dragon Quest game, this is easier said than done, and a fistfight with RNJesus ensues.
In Dragon Warrior Monsters, each species of monster has 3 native skills that they might learn if they reaches certain statistical requirements by certain levels, and certain skills can in fact evolve if another level threshold is reached with specific skills learned & another, skill-specific statistical check passed (for example, needing a certain amount of magic points by a certain level to evolve a healing spell). However, unlike most RPGs, all monsters in Dragon Warrior Monsters have innate level limits (mostly determined by species, plus or minus a level or two for an individual monster). If a monster’s stats don’t grow quickly enough to either learn all their skills or evolve their existing ones before they hit their level limit, they may miss some amazing skills (which is the case for the basic Slime monster; any one you come by naturally will never have the stats needed to learn the powerful MegaMagic/Magic Burst skill).
This is where the second method of obtaining new monsters comes in: monster breeding. By pairing together two monsters of opposite gender, a new monster is born; this monster has a higher level limit than its parents and the potential to learn not only its own native skills, but also the skills that either of its parents learned or could’ve learned, as well as some of their parents’ traits. Monsters with a parent from the Material family, for instance, tend to have higher Defense stats, while monsters with a Bird parent will be much faster.
Utilizing this inheritance system properly to combine unusual traits with a monster that has the right stat growths for what you need lets you pass down skills or spells through multiple generations until it is given to a monster that can utilize the full potential of those skills. On top of that, any given monster can have up to 8 total skills learned, giving a monster with a long pedigree a long list of skills to inherit and/or evolve. Breeding also serves the secondary purpose of helping you manage your monster stable: you can only have 20 monsters (3 of which are your active party monsters) awake at a time, including unhatched eggs in that limit, with another 20 “reserve” slots if you fill your first 20, and breeding will remove both monsters chosen in exchange for giving you an egg.
Dragon Warrior Monsters even goes out of its way to ensure that the player can take advantage of this without necessarily having their own pairs of powerful monsters to breed; as you progress through the story, there are side characters you interact with that are more than willing to let you breed your monsters with theirs once you’ve grown strong enough, and it is always guaranteed that whatever monster you pick will be compatible with their monster. Personally speaking, the majority of my playthrough was carried by these select breeds, and maybe one or two of my own monsters coming in; having favorites in DWM is not a bad thing, but you have to be prepared to let them go when the time comes.
In its way, this is hearkening back to Dragon Quest III, IV, and VI, not so much through skill evolution but more through the nature of those games emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of different party members and how those things need to be considered. DQIII in particular allowed you to flat out recruit different types of characters as needed, and even potentially change their classes with the right preparations; DQIV took a different route by giving you a fixed cast of characters over time, each with their own predefined and unchanging specialties, and DQVI split the difference by giving you a fixed cast over time but allowing those characters to choose their own vocations, letting them learn skills at their liking. Where Dragon Warrior Monsters takes this is something of a condensation of those systems; while you lack distinct jobs or classes for your monsters to have explicitly, you can implicitly “create” those jobs through a combination which monsters you befriend, which ones you breed, and which skills you try to secure for the future.
The final point about what really cements Dragon Warrior Monsters as its own thing kind of continues along this line of retrospective, predecessor-melding thinking — but from a different angle.
3) A Festival to Remember, and for Remembering
I said earlier that unlike Pokemon at around this time, Dragon Warrior Monsters was more focused on celebrating Dragon Quest to date. And, yes, like we just discussed, a lot of that is in the way it chops and mixes previous DQ mechanics together. But the most notable part of where we see Dragon Warrior Monsters as retrospective and celebration both is in the aesthetics of the game and in its storyline.
Part of this significance is unfortunately lost in the context of DWM’s original international release because again, Dragon Quest VI (at the time) was exclusively a Japanese release; however, two of the party members in DQVI, Terry and Milly, are at the core of DWM’s story.
Terry serves as DWM’s protagonist, but instead of being a teenager like he is in DQVI, he and Milly are both children in DWM. One night, while she and Terry are alone at home, Milly is kidnapped by a monster named Warubou to parts unknown. Terry is then enlisted by a similar looking monster named Watabou and the King of GreatTree to participate as GreatTree’s representative for the Starry Night Tournament; the winner of said tournament is allowed to wish for anything they want, and the King is more than happy to let Terry wish for Milly back in exchange for Terry serving as GreatTree’s rep.
From here, the game begins bringing the past of Dragon Quest into DWM in ways just beyond the mechanics: nearly every monster you encounter in game is from a previous Dragon Quest game, every item that isn’t a meat treat hearkens back to classic Dragon Quest items, and all the skills and spells that monsters can learn hail from all different parts of Dragon Quest itself, from the first game to the sixth. You can even get the six final bosses of each major Dragon Quest game as allies if you know which monsters to breed.
On top of that, the bottom floor of each Travelers’ Gate you explore is almost always a scene from a previous Dragon Quest game in turn, accompanied by the world map music of the game corresponding to the scene’s origin (when applicable), and the boss of that gate is whatever antagonist was a part of that original scene (when applicable). Though this weighs closer to Dragon Quest VI’s scenarios after a while, this creates a variety of deeply nostalgic tableaus for players well-versed in Dragon Quest history: the first Dragon Quest’s Princess being guarded by a dragon, encountering a Healslime at the bottom of a well like in Dragon Quest IV, squaring off against dangerous BattleRex that Terry himself would have to face off against one day, and even facing off against a few of the Dread Lords that would later threaten Terry’s future comrades.
Though the Starry Night Tournament is a particular facet of DWM’s story and not from a past game, it too has its place in this reminiscence. The end of the tournament also serves as the start to the Festival of the Starry Night, where new Watabous are born and travel to establish new tree-kingdoms like GreatTree, widening the world in turn. After the tournament ends, Terry is allowed to continue exploring a few more Travelers’ Gates that still call back to the past of Dragon Quest, and his ultimate reward once he’s experienced those gates as well is to befriend Watabou, who is one of those few monsters new to the series via DWM.
To me, at least, this is a pretty apt metaphor. Once you’ve exhausted everything the current game has to offer — gone through all the current history of Dragon Quest, both in worlds that are separated from Terry’s own, worlds that are the past and the future of his world, and potentially his own future staring him in the face — you get to make friends with the monster that, at least in this game, is being used to represent the new kingdoms out there, the new worlds yet to be explored.
When you finally befriend Watabou, that is DWM acknowledging that soon enough the future will be in its players’ hands, to experience themselves, and that to reach that future they had to stop and acknowledge the past.
As we close this out, I do want to bring up a last important tidbit to round things out and reinforce our earlier notion — that whatever it may look like on the surface, Dragon Warrior Monsters is not just a Pokemon clone and shouldn’t be talked about like one.
As it turns out, Dragon Warrior Monsters did well enough that Enix (and later, Square Enix) continued it as a sub-series of Dragon Quest, eventually releasing the games under the Dragon Quest Monsters title once trademarks permitted internationally and iterating on its own rules over time to further emphasize the original quirks of the game system. There are a few missing links internationally though: the Game Boy Color sequels to DWM, Cobi’s Journey and Tara’s Adventure, as well as the first two Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker games for the Nintendo DS, got worldwide releases, but the Playstation remakes of the first two DWM games, the third Joker game, and a GBA title called Caravan Heart were all skipped, as were the most recent Nintendo 3DS remakes in the series: Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry’s Wonderland 3D and Dragon Quest Monsters 2: Iru and Luca’s Marvelous Mysterious Key.
When Terry’s Wonderland 3D was released, several of the design changes from Joker and some of the other skipped games were integrated in: for instance, certain monsters are big enough to take up more than one spot in your party, monsters can have their own passive skills in addition to active abilities that they can use, you “scout” monsters for your team rather than just beating them up, and GreatTree itself, to accommodate its new 3D space and size, has many more shortcuts and you even learn how to fast travel around it early on.
However — and this is the thing that I think is most important — though I haven’t gotten to play a lot of Terry’s Wonderland 3DS, I can feel already that it is still both Dragon Warrior Monsters and Dragon Quest. It very firmly does not have an interest in being Pokemon, and all of its changes have come from changes in Dragon Quest Monsters as a whole, not from things that have happened in Pokemon per se. Terry’s Wonderland 3DS still encourages monster breeding and tracking pedigrees and all sorts of Other DWM Things, but with a broader variety of tools to make your job easier on the battling and raising fronts (pedigree charts so that you know a monster’s ancestors, the scouting system making it easier to befriend the same type of monster multiple times, letting your monsters hold and use equipment of their own, not draining your money with arena entry fees and making your ability to evacuate dungeons a free, infinite use item).
This is especially important to me because it continues to fly in the face of the narrative that a lot of overzealous fans tend to have about series that move in parallel to their own favorites and how features are “stolen” or “copied” from those favorites. Breeding in Dragon Warrior Monsters solves a very different problem and has a very different intention than it does in Pokemon, and one did not “steal” the idea from the other; the games were literally in development at around the same time given their respective release dates. Even in the case of Cobi’s Journey and Tara’s Adventure, where it is fair to say that Pokemon’s influence was the reason to make two versions of the game at all, the gameplay systems otherwise remain uniquely Dragon Warrior Monsters-esque, even choosing to change things up from the first game in terms of how you explore and move around in ways that Pokemon did not (new, non-randomized worlds are accessible via keys and you are no longer simply romping through randomly generated dungeons every time).
Now, by nature, humans draw comparisons between things in order to understand them — that’s a natural part of being human, and I don’t expect that to change. But for games especially, these comparisons cannot and do not alone make up the totality of what an individual game is. That totality is an experiential thing that players have to be willing to engage with on the game’s terms, and not just assume that they know exactly what the game is like without that engagement. It’s a lot to ask, but it matters, and it’s important, even for people that play games “casually”.
And, who knows? Maybe you’ll discover a new favorite from something that looks like a “clone”.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you like hearing me crack jokes, post art, talk about game design, or just be a general goof. If retro (& sometimes current) games analysis & fighting games over streams is your thing instead, come join me on Twitch.
If you’re interested in games I’ve made, Final Spike is available on itch.io right now; if you want to support but aren’t interested in playing games, feel free to drop a tip off in my Ko-Fi.
Thanks for reading!