Dragon Quest Wars

Genre: Board Game / Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Alternating / Local Wireless)

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Review:

Dragon Quest Wars is a simple Turn-Based Strategy game that’s comparable to a Board Game, taking place on a grid-like board almost like Chess. This game was released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2009, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. In this game, players take a team of four iconic monsters from the Dragon Quest franchise, and pit them against 1-3 opposing squads of four monsters, with the goal being to either take out more opposing units than your enemies do, or to cross the entire board first.

This is a surprisingly original concept for a spin-off of a JRPG franchise that tends to play it safe, and what’s even more surprising is how deep and nuanced it is despite the game’s extreme simplicity. Players can form a team of four using any combination of four monsters from six different types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a unique selection of moves. If you wanted, you could form a team of three golems and a healslime, taking advantage of the golems’ high amount of health and powerful attacks while using the healslime to patch up the damage they take. Conversely, you could fill your team with hammerhoods and chimeras, who each have attacks that can target multiple enemies at a time. Personally, I preferred the batlike drackies, who are weak, but can cover two spaces per turn and can either strengthen ally attacks or use pushing attacks to move around the battlefield in a way that suits your strategy.

Learning the ins and outs of the six characters takes a bit of trial and error. The game does put players through a 9-stage tutorial before letting them loose, but even this doesn’t quite cover the nuances of all of the different moves and how they interact. There’s also a bit of a learning curve to using the game’s touchscreen-only interface. I really wish this game gave players some ability to supplement these touchscreen controls with more traditional gamepad controls, as the reliance on using only the touchscreen does make things awkward at times.

The other issue here is the lack of structured content. Once you’re out of the tutorial, you’re free to play single-player and multiplayer battles as you please, but there’s no campaign, no puzzle mode, no challenges. Just choose one of two game modes (the standard two-team mode and the four-team survival mode), choose your map, choose your team, choose the opposing team(s) (or randomize it), and jump into the gameplay. While this works, I feel like giving players a little something more would have really propelled this experience.

Thankfully, Dragon Quest Wars makes up for this lack of single-player content by giving players plenty of multiplayer options. Up to four players can compete using local wireless play, online, or even local alternating hot-spot mode using one Nintendo 3DS. Really the only thing that’s missing here is download play, but given that this is a $5 game, this is still plenty. Well… and did I say online? Yeah, scratch that – online play doesn’t seem to be working anymore. But at the very least players still have good options for local play.

Given that $5 price tag, the presentation here is surprisingly delightful, using simple, colorful 3D visuals with some nice animation and a lot of personality, backed by a bouncy soundtrack. It’s nothing extraordinary, but it definitely feels like more work was put into this than a game with such a low price tag needed.

Overall, I think that Dragon Quest Wars has its rough areas, places where the game could have used more content, or could have benefitted from more explanation. But once again the low $5 price tag makes it easy to forgive these flaws, and the easy-to-learn hard-to-master Board Game-style strategy within this game is so wonderful that I’d say this is an easy buy for anyone looking for a deep but simple Strategy game.

tl;dr – Dragon Quest Wars is a Board Game-style Strategy game that has players pitting teams of four signature Dragon Quest monsters against one another on a Chess-style board. There are a few issues with a lack of single-player content, awkward controls, and a lack of explanation for some of the game’s mechanics, but it’s hard to complain too much when the gameplay is excellent, the presentation is charming, the multiplayer features are superb, and the $5 price tag practically screams “buy me!”. Despite its flaws, this game is definitely worth that low price.

Grade: B

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