Dragon Quest Treasures Review – A Tedious Trove

JRPGs often have slow openings. These take time to tell the story, and then familiarize players with the rules before the characters are allowed out into the real world. I figured that was the case after playing an hour of Dragon Quest Treasures, so I said to myself, “It’ll get good soon!” I said it again two hours in, three hours in, and five hours in, until eventually, I was forced to accept that this was as good as the game would get. Dragon Quest Treasures is never short on charm or style, but simple, sub-par combat and loot-hunting mechanics had me scraping the bottom of the treasure chest in hopes there was something I’d missed.

Players of Dragon Quest XI will recognize protagonists Mia and Erik, though they’re much younger in this game. Dragon Quest Treasures is technically a prequel to XI, but there’s hardly any overlap, and the vast majority takes place after the twins jump through a portal into the mysterious world of Draconia. After getting their bearings and making a few friends, they start a treasure-hunting gang and decide to find all seven Dragonstone, magical relics from Draconia’s origin. Although the story is heavy at the beginning, the majority of the 25 hours I played were self-driven. This was something that I really appreciated. The plot isn’t particularly interesting or engaging, but I didn’t need it to be; it’s mainly a vehicle to get the player to explore the islands around them.

Dragon Quest Treasures focuses on exploring open-world islands in search of valuables. These can be found hidden under the ground or in glowing places. Mia and Erik track it down by using magic Dragon Daggers to see “treasure visions,” glimpses of the landscape near the burial site seen through the eyes of the monsters in your party. These images are useful for triangulating the location of the buried box and claiming it as yours. It’s not a terrible mechanic, but it isn’t complex or engaging enough to base the whole game around. I also encountered multiple instances of items spawning in the same areas upon revisiting an island, which suggests that there’s a finite amount of treasure locations to find.

Once you’ve gathered as many valuables as you can, your goal is to return to base unscathed. Your treasure storage space is very limited and your existing spoils are lost when you die. There’s also no fast travel. However, you can return home by pressing a button on the menu. This will result in your losing all your money and effectively cancelling your expedition. You can fast travel without dropping anything if you use a chimera wing, but they’re rare, expendable resources that I kept stashed away for emergencies. Although these mechanics may seem inconvenient in theory, they were more bothersome in my practice. I never died on the field and was forced to use the chimera wings only two or three times before I completed the game.

After you have returned to your hideout to appraise your haul, the item will reveal an exquisite rendering of a Dragon Quest character or other items. Even though I didn’t recognize many of the items I found, I appreciated this detail a lot, and I’m certain that nostalgia for the series would greatly heighten the experience. And as much as I didn’t really care for the treasure vision mechanic, I can’t deny the satisfaction I felt when I returned to base with a full inventory and uncovered an iconic, expensive relic that I got to add to my hoard.

When you’re not hunting treasure, you’re fighting enemy monsters. Dragon Quest Treasures is a seamless action-based game that uses turn-based Dragon Quest. The combat feels awkward and slow. I often took damage and missed shots due to the incontinence of the available attacks. Mia, Erik and others can strike with their daggers, and the enemy will roll to avoid them, but battle movement is slow and tedious. Dodge rolls are helpful when you’re watching an enemy strike from afar, but since rolls don’t interrupt dagger attacks, I didn’t have time to evade when I was up close dealing melee damage. Because of this, I was able to learn how to dodge the dagger when it is most necessary.

The other weapon you can use is a slingshot loaded with different elemental pellets, but I wasn’t a huge fan of this either. Up close, everyone moves around too quickly to get a shot off, and while the reticle is capable of locking onto enemies, it’s finicky, and I often had to fight against the controls to line up shots. Still, the slingshot is the only way to deal elemental damage as the player, so it’s not wise to ignore it. After I could afford to purchase pellets regularly, fights were more interesting for me because I was using my slingshot instead of fighting up close with the rest.

Three monsters fight their enemies automatically to make the team. Outside of commands to attack or retreat, you don’t have any control over what they do or where they go. This is fine, though: It gives each monster a sense of personality, and while I wasn’t in control, I could predict their behavior pretty reliably. One example: My Silver Sabrecat Blanco used a very powerful move to propel himself toward his enemy. But my Red Dragonling Bernie prefers to stay behind and uses magic. While you could build your team around the combat role, it is possible to pick one based on Forte skills: each species’ traversal techniques. Blanco was a mainstay because he could sprint, something I couldn’t do otherwise. A monster who could glide was a plus for me, in the event that I needed to leap from high points without falling.

Whenever you defeat a monster, there’s a chance that you scout it, making it available to recruit. You can add them to the team by paying a small fee for any food or items you find around the globe. If you don’t have the correct items, you can see the list to narrow down your search, but it’s never any more specific than one of the five massive islands. This made my party selection very limited. I didn’t have enough resources to hire certain monsters the entire game. I’m sure I could have found more resources if I took the time to grind out a few trips with that express purpose, but I wasn’t struggling in battle, so it didn’t feel worth it.

The whole reason you’re recruiting monsters and hunting for valuables in the first place is to complete Dragon Quest Treasures’ main objective: finding the seven Dragonstones. Because I assumed that the Dragonstones would be hiding behind boss battles or in dungeons they were, it was a very long process before I finally got my first one. To compete against the monsters near the goal marker, I assumed I would need a team of higher level players. For some Dragonstones early, you can simply run past your enemies, complete an objective, grab the relic, then leave. The stones themselves don’t even take up a treasure slot in your inventory, so you can use the menu to return to base and not worry about dropping it; you don’t need to come up with an escape route. Unfortunately, this isn’t clear in the game and it took me a long time to figure out.

It’s this buildup of minor annoyances that makes it hard to recommend Dragon Quest Treasures. The experience is driven by charm and nostalgia, but if you don’t have an existing appreciation for the series, there isn’t much here that I could recommend over most other open-world role-playing games. It’s an experience that would greatly vary depending on the player; in other words, one player’s Dragon Quest trash is another player’s Dragon Quest Treasure.