For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. This game, from developers Tose, is set to come out near the end of 2023.
I've never played a game in the Monsters series but i've known about it and seen enough videos to have a general understanding of how it works. I was curious about how much of a DEMO Square Enix was going to release for the game as they have released some big demo's in the past.
This is a great demo. it has an announcement at the very start explaining clearly that there are limits, that not everything will be carried over to the final version of the game but there are things that will be carried over. And yet whilst i played it, i never felt that the restrictions impacted my enjoyment of the demo. i could see some things greyed out, but as it's the start of the game they are things i wasn't really going to interact with anyway.
With these videos, i try to keep them an hour or less and most games in this series have finished before an hour. I didn't finish this demo and i wanted to keep on playing. for me, that's a good sign of a demo in that when it was over i wanted to keep on playing.
Another sign that this is not only a good demo but also mostly likely to be a very accessible game is how good the tutorial is. it came step by step smartly in the story and throughout this video more and more was slowly being revealed at a nice pace that didn't feel overwhelming. the demo came across in such a way that i feel like the game itself will focus more on story telling rather than mechanics and will do so by making the game very approachable.
The demo did have some technical issues that seemed separate from the issues the #Switch was having in general. there were some slight hitches where the framerate and fluidity of gameplay felt noticeably off for a brief moment. there was also a moment where a monster seemingly spawned half into the environment. But it was also clear the Switch was struggling a little to run this game. the fans in my Switch were noticeably going, the pop-in was too close to the camera and very noticeable, and some of the graphics just looked like they had a low level of detail and in some instances they looked copy and pasted together. But the game isn't out yet so i can't say for sure if those issues will carry over to the retail version of the game. But as a demo, i do recommend it. it's a fantastic demo and a great look at a game.
