Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, when it first launched on the Nintendo Switch, was plagued by performance issues that hindered the otherwise solid monster-collecting and battling experience. Fast-forward to the present, and The Dark Prince is back, now playable on more capable hardware.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, for the uninitiated takes place in the world of Dragon Quest IV, but told through a slightly different lens, one where the player assumes the role of Psaro. In truth, the story in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince isn’t exactly up to snuff with Dragon Quest IV proper, but this is a DQ Monsters spin-off title, meaning the real joy of the game is the monster collecting and battling aspect.
The basic gameplay loop in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is simple: travel around the dark Kingdom of Nadiria, which is split into five distinct biomes, and then further divided into three Echelons, finding monsters, recruiting them, building out your party and then eventually entering into tournaments that progress the story forward.
The environments themselves in The Dark Prince feature interesting weather and seasonal mechanics that can change the map on the fly, allowing the player to, for example, cross frozen over bodies of water, encounter season-specific monsters or find shortcuts to hidden loot.
Battles in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, as is typical of most Dragon Quest titles, are turn-based in nature, with the option to manually select attacks for your squad or leave it up to the AI, which is surprisingly competent due to relying heavily on the player’s input in forming their team of monsters. On the topic of turn-based battles, one thing to note about the PC version of The Dark Prince that I encountered during its launch window is the inability to play the game using an x-input-based controller, which the game detected but refused actually to register button inputs.
“Battles in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, as is typical of most Dragon Quest titles, are turn-based in nature, with the option to manually select attacks for your squad or leave it up to the AI…”
Thankfully, as Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is largely turn-based, the game is perfectly playable using just a keyboard. The controller issues may be related to my keyboard software getting in the way and likely won’t affect the entire player base. However, I did notice some other players having a similar issue.
Outside of the controller niggle, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a joy to play on PC, with the game easily sustaining 120fps on my rig, something that should also ring true for even the most modest of gaming PCs, making the Dark Prince a perfect fit for Steam Deck and other handheld PC users as well.
The latest release of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince also includes with it all prior DLC content for the game that was released on the Nintendo Switch, making it the definitive way to experience the game. Finally, as far as additional new content goes, the Steam version of the game features 15 achievements, which is a nice touch for those who are into that kind of thing in their games.
Overall, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is a solid port of an underrated game in the long-running series that is now free from performance issues caused by dated hardware, making it a solid choice for fans of the series to jump into.
