This review took me days to write, wrote several drafts so I wouldn't forget anything.
While I have been having a lot of fun with the game, there were too many negatives about it for me to ignore and rate Dragon Quest Heroes positively.
I will point out the positives first:
-Very colorfull and pretty, the art is fantastic. The game is beautiful and vibrant.
-Combat is fun and fluid; some strategy is required but not a lot and not for most fights
-Appropriate for everyone
-Plenty of characters, each one with unique abilities and fighting styles; their interactions are also very good and bring extra life to the game.
-Good variety of enemies/monsters and boss fights
-Easy to understand game mechanics
-Completing it takes time; most missions are similar but due to the fun combat and character variety it's possible to experiment with each of 'em and clear everything while maintaining novelty for a while.
In most instances all of these traits would mean that the game is great,
but now I'll explain how its easily fixable flaws ruin it for most people.
Negatives regarding the current state of the game:
-No sale since 2021
Dragon Quest Heroes used to go on sale multiple times a year before 2022.
There hasn't been a sale since 2021 and it was even before the Halloween sale!
They missed the X-Mas sales that year. What happened?
The game is from 2015, it had a regular discount of 50% and then they stopped - why?
It's like either Square Enix or KoeiTecmo forgot the game exists, or they want it dead.
The sales are helpful to older games like this, bringing in new customers - to the game and to the franchise.
It's a shame... I had to buy it full price on X-Mas 2024, that wasn't a problem for me because I like the game - having it bought and played on a different platform before.
But that's it, I am merely a returning customer. And one of the very few because the player count on both Dragon Quest Heroes is... depressing.
The Dragon Quest Heroes games have THE LOWEST player count of ALL the Dragon Quest games. That is impressive!
Very bad, but impressive.
How is it possible? Maybe it is the multitude of negative points I have yet to mention.
And I am sure the mixed reviews don't help it either.
-No support, no Steam Deck
With very simple controls and basic - but very entertaining - gameplay,
the ability to be played in short bursts or in long sessions,
one would think DQH would be one of the best games to have on Steam Deck.
Unfortunately it is unsupported and it is not realistic to expect that it will ever be supported.
People also complain oftenly about crashes and software instability and incompatibility,
which don't seem to have been addressed, nor will they ever be addressed.
Once again, the impression that I get is that this game is meant to be forgotten by will of the publisher, the devs, or both.
-Streaming copyright issues, and music
There's a weird legal warning regarding the streaming of the game, I have never seen any other game do this.
It's right at the start menu of the game: "Notice About Streaming" - which is, ironically, barelly noticeable when you just wanna have fun and play!
The warning states: "Streaming of this game is permitted ONLY in non-commercial contexts." - well damn,
that's one sure way to stop any streamer, specially popular ones, from streaming your game and showing it to a wider audience.
Streaming in any context can be argued to be always commercial, and nobody wants the legal trouble to deal with interpretations.
The warning also states, immediatly afterwards: "(...) using streams of the game to primarily provide or listen to the music is prohibited (...)",
this game constantly has blaring music all the time, I had to turn it off in the options because I couldn't stand it anymore.
Now add a little bit of streaming music copyright legality and you pretty much garantee nobody will stream it. And by extension, nobody will see it.
Negatives regarding gameplay:
-Too loud
The music and sounds and blaringly loud. The music is nearly constant, an incessant torrent of repeated notes that I did not care for.
I had to shut it off, my ears were suffering.
-Healstones are just health potions
The Healstones mechanic was poorly thought out, they are not much different from health potions in other games.
They restore health and only have one use, which can be replenished by spending gold. You can only carry a limited ammount of them, and they have different magnitudes of replenishment.
Selecting a specific Healstone during combat doesn't really fly, so you might as well equip all of one type so you can just use the next one.
This way you know what to expect of each Healstone.
Obviously you would think that this also means that it would be best to equip only the top tier Healstones, but no, the top second is the best one due to the VERY HIGH cost of the top one.
It's just not economically viable to equip the top tier healstone when the top second replenishes nearly full health and costs 4 times less (if I am not mistaken).
-Poor enemy tracking
Enemy tracking is a bit poor, the player character doesn't really follow the enemy that is locked on, only the camera follows the enemy.
This makes it harder to hit with heavy or long leading attacks, as well as special attacks. It's a bummer when you spend MP on a special only to slice the air and not the enemy.
-Greatest flaw: the neverending text
Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below, what a subtitle!
However the real Woe and Blight Below is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ neverending retro-console like text and the [Yes/No] prompts.
The text is SLOW, going letter by letter with an annoying "droot toot droot" sound effect often followed by a [Yes/No] prompt.
This happens for every little thing, saving the game is the worse offender, but there's also for Buying, Selling, Upgrading equipment, replenishing Healstones, enchanting, special menus and whatever the ♥♥♥♥ else there is.
This makes a player desire, above all else, for the text to end, the rest of the game will be overshadowed.
The desire to Skip text will flourish even in a Visual Noveler granny, and grow stronger each play session.
The problem is that to skip the forever text you gotta press the "skip" button, which is the same as the "go back" button, which means when the inevitable [Yes/No] prompt appears, you WILL go back and have to go through all the text AGAIN.
If the game were a 10 this problem alone would drop it to a 4.
The text is the worse boss fight ever: Per encounter it is not the strongest, but it keeps showing up, and it will grind down you down.
Its purpose to defeat your sanity and willpower, you desire to keep keep going, and ultimatelly beating you because you don't want to play anymore.
- Additional notes:
Paid no attention to the story and I didn't miss out on it.
I skipped it like my life depended on it.
