Dragon Quest Heroes’ hack and slash gameplay feels almost hypnotic. You’ll experience many different forms of combat and strategy as you slash your way through monsters from the main Dragon Quest series.

The game takes place in a realm where monsters and humans live together in peace and harmony. The monsters turn on the humans when a dark wave comes over them, leaving your character to save all of the realms’ kingdoms from this new evil.

While saving the many kingdoms you will run into characters from the main Dragon Quest series! They do however become nearly irrelevant soon after meeting them. These are also the only characters within the kingdoms that you make a real connection to. The lack of connection with the townsfolk gives you no real sense of accomplishment when saving the kingdoms.

Gameplay consists of switching between characters and using their different fighting styles to either defend, escort, kill enemies, or kill a boss. This Dragon Quest game implements real-time combat, as opposed to the turn-based combat in it’s main series. Through leveling up, learning new spells/abilities, and getting more characters, you will always be feeling growth. The game does an amazing job at giving you something new right before it starts to get boring or repetitive!

The soundtracks that we all know and love make a reappearance! From the main theme in the opening, to the battle music during levels. A reoccurring theme within the Dragon Quest games sadly is to overuse some of the soundtracks, which does get quite boring after some time. This game was no different in this aspect and if anything, it was worse. Every level you went into was playing the exact same battle music because you were always fighting monsters. The only music you’d be hearing throughout a majority of the game would either be the hub music, or battle music.

Seeing our Dragon Quest world in beautiful HD graphics for the first time was one of the greatest experiences this game had to offer. The animations in the cinematics were amazing. It was a little disappointing when I saw that the lip syncing didn’t change when the game was translated to English, but that doesn’t take too much away from the rest of the beauty.

The scenes that weren’t cinematic had text boxes and some text boxes even had voice acting as well. The ones with voice acting were unskippable and would linger for a few seconds after the voice had stopped. This caused the flow of conversation to be completely nonexistent in these scenes.

Playing through this game was very enjoyable for me. I was very content with what the hub world had to offer in terms of replay-ability and grinding. I’d recommend this game to anyone who enjoys real-time combat. If you are a Dragon Quest fan and you haven’t picked this game up yet, I’d definitely say it’s worth giving a try!

– Flaffy