Dragon Warrior Monsters

When Pokémon kicked off the craze for catching and training creatures, plenty of developers rushed to copy its success. Yet few managed it as elegantly as the Dragon Quest series, whose monster-collecting spin-off Dragon Warrior Monsters proved that a pocket-sized world full of beasts could also have depth and a character all its own.

The game casts you as young Terry, whose sister has been kidnapped into a parallel world of monsters. Your task is to assemble a team of creatures, journey through randomly generated gates and advance through a series of tournaments. Instead of getting rid of your enemies, you persuade them in battle to join your side, building up your own stable of fighters. The gates into each world have a shifting structure, so no two runs are ever the same and the game keeps luring you back for better specimens.

The heart of the experience, though, is its sophisticated breeding (synthesis) system: you can fuse two creatures and breed offspring that inherit their parents' skills and stats. This creates an almost endless loop of experimentation, encompassing hundreds of monster species and combinations that reach far beyond simply „catch them all“. Advanced players plan entire family trees across generations to obtain a dream beast with the ideal set of attacks, and it is precisely this depth that turns an otherwise simple concept into a time sink lasting dozens of hours.

The game was created by TOSE in collaboration with Enix, then the publisher of the Dragon Quest brand. It arrived toward the end of the Game Boy era and made full use of the Game Boy Color, giving it clean, colorful graphics and a friendly interface. It bet on what Dragon Quest does best: clear turn-based battles and a difficulty curve that guides the player by the hand without underestimating them. The battles stay readable even on the small screen and the pacing is brisk, which counts double on a handheld.

Culturally it was a clever move. Rather than taking on Pokémon head-on, Enix offered an alternative to players who wanted the same addictiveness but with a different mythology and a style all its own. The slime creatures and other iconic Dragon Quest beings, designed by the hand of Akira Toriyama, got the chance to shine outside the main series and reached an audience that had not yet known it.

Dragon Warrior Monsters spawned a sequel and a whole line of spiritual successors in the Dragon Quest Monsters sub-series, which lives on to this day and remains a very popular offshoot of the brand in Japan. For many Western players it was the very first gateway into a world of monster-collecting RPGs bearing the Dragon Quest name, and it is still remembered as one of the finest titles of its kind on a handheld.

Why play it: If you love catching and breeding creatures but want something other than Pokémon, Dragon Warrior Monsters offers a deep breeding system and dozens of hours of experimentation.