Dragon Warrior Monsters (aka Dragon Quest Monsters in Japan) is a spin-off from the famous Dragon Quest series, and this is the first game in the DWM series. It was developed by TOSE Co., Ltd. and published exclusively for the Game Boy Color by Enix (Eidos in North America and Europe), in 1998.

Dragon Warrior Monsters is basically a Pokémon-style JRPG, where you battle and recruit monsters into your party, and train them to become higher-levelled and more powerful. You can have three monsters with you at once, and combat happens randomly when exploring inside Monster Worlds.

You begin the game at bedtime, in your house in the “real world”, and you witness your sister being abducted by a monster who whisks her away into a secret world inside your dresser drawers. You follow and are transported to a fantasy world where monsters exist, and where people live inside giant trees, with castles at the top of them. Inside the castle lives a King who promises to help you find your sister, if you win the “Starry Night Tournament” for him.

What this means is that you must train monsters and use them to battle your way up the ranks, in order to first qualify for the tournament, and eventually participate in it, and try to win it. Which you discover takes a serious amount of time and effort to achieve…

The King gives you your first monster, then directs you to a room inside the castle, from where you can then access a series of Travellers’ Gates, which teleport you to various Monster Worlds.

Each world is randomly-generated (and therefore different each time you visit), and has a number of ‘fields’ connected by portals. As you explore you find random items, experience random battles and can recruit monsters into your party by knocking them out and hoping that they stand back up and offer themselves to you. At the end of your first visit to each world, you’ll be faced with a boss battle. Beat the boss and it will then offer to join you.

Combat is turn-based and revolves around a simple menu system that provides four options: Fight, Item, Plan and Run. “Fight” initiates a straightforward sequence of attacks from your monsters – basically allowing them to do whatever they want. “Item” allows you to dip into your inventory to use one item, and then initiates “Fight” immediately afterwards. “Plan” is most important because it gives you direct control over what happens – you can either choose between three combat styles (Charged, Mixed, or Cautious), or you can issue commands manually via “Command” (that is: if your monsters are tame enough to allow it – if they’re not tame enough they might disobey you). You can feed captured monsters pieces of meat to tame them, and can also throw meat at them during combat to make capturing them more likely. The higher a monster’s “WILD” number, the less tame they are.

Any monsters that you capture, but don’t immediately add to your travelling party, are sent back to a ‘monster farm’ in the castle, and you can swap them out later. You can also breed captured monsters and hatch the resultant eggs at the farm. Bred monsters can become more powerful than wild monsters, and will retain the abilities of their parents, which is an important factor of monster husbandry. Bred monsters also reach their level cap more slowly than wild monsters.

There is, however, a limit to how many monsters you can keep in the monster farm (twenty), but you can put a batch to sleep and collect more if you want to. You can also release any you no longer want to keep, to make room for more.

Dragon Warrior Monsters encourages grinding in order to build the levels of all your different monsters. Revisiting monster worlds also allows you to collect surplus items, which you can sell for money at a shop, or store in The Vault for later retrieval.

If all three of your monsters are knocked-out in battle, you lose half of your money and all of your held items, so this should be avoided at all costs. You can bank money in The Vault too, which secures it from loss in the event that your party is wiped-out.

When you believe your monsters are of sufficient strength, you can attempt to work your way up the qualifying ranks in tournaments. There are four ranks, increasing in difficulty. The first is free to enter, but the rest you have to pay to try. Each rank has three rounds, and you have to beat all three without using items or special abilities, which is not as easy as it sounds. If your party is wiped-out, or you run from battle, you lose, and you are advised to continue training your monsters to become stronger before trying again. If you win, the King will open up a new set of Travellers’ Gates leading to Monster Worlds with tougher monsters. So not only are these rank battles the path to the “Starry Night Tournament” (which is your ultimate goal), but they also act as a gateway to higher levels.

Dragon Warrior Monsters is a decent handheld JRPG with lots of neat touches. Fans of the Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior series will recognise many of the monsters and feel comfortable with the style of gameplay, and it’ll provide many hours of enjoyment. That said: I think that the sequel – Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 – improves on the first game tremendously, and is better in so many ways. A third game in the series – called Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart – was released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan only in 2003, and that too is worth a look, thanks to a fan translation into English.

More: Dragon Warrior Monsters on Wikipedia