Dragon Quest Treasures Review (Pungent Bonfire)
I've been playing Dragon Quest/Warrior since 1, and this is a massive letdown that seems targeted at a younger audience but only accessible to older. If this were some other brand I wouldn't even have heard of the game. Tose has made some other great games like Dragon Quest Monsters, go play those instead. This feels more like a Squeenix cash grab.
So many QoL failures. The dispatches and crafting feel like they intentionally waste time, digging up treasures feels unnecessarily long, waiting for travel abilities to re-pop, various unskippables (especially the special treasures from sidequests), the absolutely persistent voices from the monsters, the 3 annoying alarms for rival invasions... Everything feels absolutely tone-deaf, even for a relatively "look what you found!" series like Dragon Quest that hypes stuff up.
Pushing gripes aside, most of the time spent was on finding crafting ingredients or, sadly, the failure that the main treasure hunting mechanic is. To give you an idea: When you're not in combat (which will get in the way of searching and the ally monster AI is braindead) you follow a compass to a nearby treasure, but the location difficulty has nothing to do with the value of what you dig up, will usually be next to a tree or something, and you can accident across it while going in the general direction and having a shiny spot scream at you from quite a few steps away. And you do this, walking around, occasionally riding, for potentially hundreds of hours to get all of the different treasures, every step feeling like a chore.
And the ally AI... they will walk through lava, poison, stand in AoEs, and basically just go berserk on the enemy, and maybe accidentally heal themselves or teammates every so often when they notice.
And then there's the story that was just thrown together to fit the game into the series. I don't want to go into that.
I can't even recommend this to fans.