Dragon Quest Monsters - The Caravan Heart Experience

It gets good. Eventually.
English Translation:
www.romhacking.net/translatio...
00:00 Introduction
01:29 The Story
07:04 The Gameplay
14:16 The Post Game
16:11 An Identity Crisis
19:41 Balance Quirks
22:00 Final Thoughts
Twitter: / merrybytes
Patreon: / merrybytes
#DragonQuest #MonsterTaming #gba

[@ChromaSoul]

The game's concept for a Monsters game is amazing.. I love the idea of a little caravan that you can customize. I'd love to see this game get a proper 3D remake.

[@tsuki008]

A new video from you is always good news, i'm hyped waiting for the new dq monsters Game.

[@nesmario123]

this is my favorite marsh video

[@sarasaland4709]

DQM is always somewhat of a slow burn. But Caraven Heart’s burn is like rubbing sticks together to try and make a fire.

[@Ranalcus]

Yes. Yes! YES!!! It is back DQM time!

[@Shenaldrac]

Yay! More Dragon Warrior stuff! :D I played this at some point as an adult, like 8 years ago. I don't remember it too well, though I still have my general impressions. It was a fun enough time but I wasn't a fan of how additional monster slots were locked behind plot points, and how you weren't really breeding new monsters but instead metamorphosing three specific monsters. No it doesn't change much mechanically but it really changed the feel of it for me. And like you say, the ration mechanic is at best pointless and at worst annoying. It was really cool to revisit the world of DW1 though, I appreciated that. I think I'll replay it now.

[@Shenaldrac]

Okay, having played the game for a couple days now with the wonders of emulation speedup, there's definitely some issues. The rations system adds nothing positive to the game as has been said. It just restricts how far you can go before needing to go back to town to restock, which also drains your gold. You get higher ration limits as the game goes on, sure, but it just extends the range of your leash, it doesn't get rid of it. Not a fan at all. The early game is bad. You covered it really well in the video Merry. Not only is it frustrating to have to wait several hours before you can do the breeding in this monster breeding game, but notably while the previous two games also locked that off until you finished the tutorial world you could still catch monsters and get a full team from the very beginning. You can't here, so you're stuck with your starting Slime and nothing else. As if that wasn't bad enough, it doesn't seem to learn any skills until I think level 11, when it learns Sap. A skill that just reduces enemy Defense if it works. This is weird, I remember in other DQM and Joker games Slimes learning an AOE flame attack fairly early, it feels like they nerfed the Slime. So yeah not only are you restricted to a single Slime but you get access to like no moves that allow for any tactics in fights or MP resource management that having a damaging spell would allow for. Things do get better once you have access to breeding and a second monster, though here the changes to the breeding system come to light. There's certainly some upsides to this. You only need to level one monster for breeding, since you're transforming the core guard monster, not actually breeding it and taking the offspring. So you don't have to level up 2 parent monsters. That IS good. And you don't have to worry about monster genders, there are none since you're dealing with soul combination. However I think the downsides outweigh the benefits. Because breeding now requires 3 parts (the guard monster and 2 hearts) this makes it harder to form certain monsters. Normally you can combine two slimes to make a King Slime (assuming the pedigree + is high enough). Now though you need the guard monster to be a slime and two slime monster hearts, effectively 3 slimes instead of 2. That many monster "recipes" require the core monster to already be a certain monster in addition to the hearts you use can mean that you have the hearts needed for a cool monster, but none of your guard monsters are currently in the right form to do it. So you need to figure out how to breed them into the right monster, then get them to level 10 (which in the early to mid game can take a bit) and _then_ you can breed the cool monster. So it just makes breeding and breeding chains more difficult which I'm really not a fan of. I like how if you know what you're doing in pretty much every other DWM game you can break the game over your knee practically as soon as you have access to breeding. In DQM2 you can get 2 Crestpents in world 1 and breed them together to get a Wingsnake. Then do that again and breed the two offspring together. Do that and you get a very high rarity monster you can't find in the wold, the Coatol. In world 2 you can do something similar with Dracokids and get a Greatdrak, an endgame monster. To do something like that in Caravan Hearts would require for each step to also have a third monster, increasing the work. Except it's actually worse, because you only ever actually have 3 monsters (4 later but only 3 are active at a time). And whenever you breed them into something new, they're no longer what they were. OK I realize that sounds confusing and I'm probably not explaining it well. Let me put it like this. In any of the other DQM games I can find the material I need for chain breeding, catch them, and then get to work. I can save work on a long chain of breeding mid-way, just by leaving the monsters I've made so far in the farm and taking more powerful complete monsters out to actually fight. But in Caravan Hearts I can't really do that, since the monsters I'm breeding ARE the ones I'm fighting with. It just makes things significantly more difficult and limits your ability to experiment, since any time you just try out something weird for the sake of it you're throwing away one of your current monsters that you probably want to make sure are actually good. Especially when skills can take a long time to learn and level up, you don't necessarily want to reset your monster's level by breeding them! Oh and as if all that wasn't bad enough, there's no way to actively increase the chance of getting a monster heart after a battle. No throwing meat to make the enemy more likely to join you like in earlier games. No buffing your team and debuffing the enemy to increase join chance like in the Joker games. Just a grind to fight the same monster over and over again (hope you're not looking to get a monster that has a low encounter chance!) and pray the heart drops. It's true that later on there's a caravan member who will increase the drop rate of hearts but this isn't until near the end of the game, once you've gotten 3/4 Loto Orbs. And it's still up to chance, there's nothing you can actively do to improve your chances like in every other game in the franchise. There's just a lot of issues it causes that makes the core appeal, finding and catching monsters to breed new ones and discover cool monster combinations, to be more tedious and difficult. It's no wonder this wasn't retained in the series.

[@MerryBytes]

Agreed with everything you said. Needing 2 hearts + the right guard monster for certain combinations is something I didn't think of since I just messed around with the hearts I had, but you're absolutely right. I've heard that there are some great monster combinations early on you can do, but frankly I just can't care enough about Caravan Heart to actually bother experimenting further, whereas I anytime I boot up Monsters 1 and 2 I end up dumping hours into them. The developers probably intended for the Caravan system to compensate, but most crew members found during the story feel horribly underpowered in combat, especially because they have to compete with the guard monsters for that Weight limit. It's extra silly because some post-game exclusive classes have insanely overpowered abilities, but like with hearts, getting them is basically just dumb luck. According to a guide online, you can use 4 Rebirthers to easily acquire third-tier classes, but to get there still requires a lot of busywork.

[@Shenaldrac]

@@MerryBytes Oh yeah. That's another huge sticking point for me, and admittedly one that not just Caravan Heats is guilty of: The entire game is just a super drawn out tutorial and you don't actually get access to the tools to get into the depth of what the game allows until the post game. This is *distressingly* common in the monster taming genre and I do not understand it. Why do I only get tier 1 caravan members over the course of the 15-20 hour main game? Why do I not get access to certain classes in the same? Wouldn't those being included as the game goes add to a sense of progression? Instead you beat the game and then pretty much everything unlocks which just takes all sense of pacing away. I mean sure you still have to go find those members or grind for them with rebirthers but the fact that you straight up cannot do that until the postgame is so baffling to me. Why do I have to wait until 3/4ths of the way through the game to get a single tier 1 Metal Hunter? Are you assuming I don't want to do any grinding against metal slimes until the post game? Why not? I mean grinding in this series is required to actually make use of the breeding mechanics, and to get skills on your mons since they won't learn them until they hit the level/stat requirement. So is the message that you're literally just not supposed to meaningfully engage with _half of the game's core mechanics,_ the breeding system, for the entire campaign? I just don't know why you'd design a game like that, not if your campaign's gonna be 10+ hours! And that's 10+ hours on 3x speedup with an emulator mind you! Again, it's not just Caravan Hearts that's guilty of this. The Joker series and DWM2 remake also have this issue, as does Pokemon, but I don't understand why it is. Game devs, please make your game the game, don't make me wait until after the game for the game to really start. Don't waste my time like that.

[@lottabee]

Babe, wake up New Merry

[@jaredhendrix7213]

I really enjoy your content, Please keep up the good work! Hopefully we’ll get more DQM stuff from you, your videos are the best reviews of these games.. most people don’t go as InDepth and repeat themselves between reviews!

[@UnknownFlyingPancake]

I am into the series but somehow never heard of this game. The lack of being able to tame the wild monsters makes it immediately not interesting to me unfortunately. From what you've said I can't help but wonder if it was originally conceptualized and designed as its own game/spinoff but they hastily decided to make it a DQM game near the end of development.

[@MerryBytes]

In a lot of ways it does feel like a spinoff from the Loto Trilogy of the mainline Dragon Quest games, even if it still retains a solid chunk of the core mechanics from Monsters 1 and 2. Regardless, since The Dark Prince is explicitly called Dragon Quest Monsters 3 in Japan, it's probably safe to treat Caravan Heart as more of a side game.

[@costcoshill7941]

Recently played thru most of this and it feels slapped together in a lot of ways. I love DQM1+2 but this game had a lot of things dragging it down- although many of the gameplay ideas are interesting, their implementation and execution were either clunky, useless, or downright annoying. In addition, the encounter rate is way too high, and the food system is just frustrating to have in the game at all. It's not horrible but it's nowhere near as addicting as the first two or even the subsequent Joker games and (thankfully) DQM3.

[@coxxycabee]

Your comment is a better review than the damn video. Cheers.

[@matthewsimmons9277]

Surprise 11 was Erdrich all along.

[@레돌이]

Please do Pokemon Altair Sirius series

[@Onigob]

I tried playing this game a few years ago and just couldn't get into it 🥲 it was a cool concept but something about the gameplay loop just felt not fun... Maybe I should give it another shot and see if I can get further into it 🤔

[@MerryBytes]

Thank you very much for the Super Thanks! Yes, Caravan Heart is one of those games with a massive entry barrier. It takes a lot of patience to dig through the boring until you get to the good part.