Dragon Quest Rocket Slime 3 Review
So I just finished* Dragon Quest Rocket Slime 3, the 3DS, Japan-exclusive sequel (technically threequel, Mother 3 type situation) to one of my favorite games of all time. One of my favorite things regarding Rocket Slime was this in-depth tier list of crew members I made, so I was looking forward to making another one as soon as I learned the game has a bunch of new monsters and crew. Unfortunately, for reasons I'll get into here, I think that would be a pretty boring tier list this time around, but I'll share my thoughts on the game.
Firstly, this time, rather than tank battles, we have ship battles. A good portion of the game takes place on a 9-block overworld sea map with various continents and stops along the way; here, ships are encounters. Beating any given ship type will give you their blueprints and allow you to use, say, their mast on your ship, and you can end up creating some cool designs by mixing and matching these. An example of my ship is shown below.
Like its predecessor, RS3's gameplay also consists of going throughout levels and collecting monsters and materials as the hero. The game has opted this time for 3D rather than sprites for everything except the creatures, which use the same sprites as were in the DS title, with a few new ones.
This was initially jarring to me, especially as a big lover of pixel art, but over time it grew on me to the point where I didn't pay attention and even enjoyed it at times. With how dynamic they wanted the camera angles for the ship battles to be, it only makes sense, and there's another key factor - just like how the DS title makes excellent use of the "two screens" gimmick of the DS, it seems the Rocket Slime developers really wanted to have some "epic 3D moments" in this game, as most of the 3D bosses have one or two moments where they pop out of the screen at you. Side note, I find this to be a flaw with a lot of 3DS titles - seemingly prioritizing engagement with the strange 3D gimmick over gameplay. With the DS touch screen, that kind of made sense; even if not every game utilized it well, it was a different way to play the game. But just "having 3D" does not have the same impact. On a tangent, though. Overall, the graphics were good, although I think I might have preferred if all the slimes were also 3D.
Musically, the game is a bit more disappointing. Every single town and every single dungeon have the exact same music that play when you're in them, save for the final dungeon. The volcano level plays the same music as the ice level, et cetera. The wild west town has the same music as the frozen town, et cetera. In DS Rocket Slime, there were a couple dungeons that used the same music, but for the most part each area had unique themes - and the town thing wasn't an issue because there was only one hub town. The final dungeon's theme was really nice, using the theme I recognize from 11's Hotto Steppe, but I couldn't help thinking as I played through it how nice it would have been to hear various dungeon themes throughout my gameplay experience. As a result of not having unique music, the progression in the game felt weird and almost nonexistent, but that's also a fault of the story.
Rocket Slime DS's story was not mind-blowing by any means; it was simple and comedic, exactly as it intended. But there were clearly moments of importance, especially any time Slival showed up, the atmosphere was tense. In this game, your goal is to recollect the 7 Orbs from across the world that were scattered by your enemy, the Platywags, in the beginning. But there doesn't seem to be any apparent rush to do so. You do encounter the Platywags at each location you visit, but they seem to just be there aimlessly. They never try to stop you from getting Orbs, and their connection to the bosses or what they were there for is never made clear. This culminates in getting the final Orb from Don Clawleone, where he asks his minions "and you just watched?" as we collected the Orbs. After defeating Clawleone, he says he collected the Orbs for his idol daughter, who is not shown, and then runs away, to which Slival remarks, "that was a terrible ending." Which, yes, it was. Don't get me wrong, I'm not even complaining, the game's fun didn't require a story, but it was still a mess. And speaking of Slival, he takes on more of a "friendly rival" role this time, which I can't say I love. His design screams "anti-hero" not friendly rival.
His pirate look is pretty cool though.
So anyways, now it's time to talk crew and core mechanical differences.
Ship battles taking place on the water has caused one VERY important difference between how you play these two games - you cannot just walk across the ground to get into the enemy machine. This means that if you want to use the tactic "Infiltrate and Destroy", or as this game calls it "Board Their Ship", you or whatever monster you assign* MUST fire themselves out of one of the cannons - and should you be hit midway, you will fall into the water and slowwwly float in a life preserver back to your ship. This is incredibly risky and could end up losing a lot of time. In my previous tier list, Dancing Flame and Hammerhood were Top Tier largely thanks to their ability to break down the tank doors quickly and wreak havoc once inside, but this time, they'll rarely even be able to get into the enemy ship. What this means is that the only truly viable crew members for sabotage are those that can warp directly into the enemy tank - but here comes another problem - I can't warp into the enemy tank, which means that I have no real way of knowing, myself, how effectively they are sabotaging.
But infiltrating and destroying was not the only tactic to judge by, so surely I'd be able to rank the remaining monsters by things such as carry speed and capacity, right? Well, no, not really. Yes, for some reason, Hammerhood is still the only monster who has a carrying capacity of two - save for Zombie, who can carry three, but super slowly. And the speed and uniqueness of each monster, from what I can tell, seems to be less - for example, Killing Machine was super fast in the DS title, but here is pretty much as slow as a Dracky. The one exception to this unremarkability amongst the crew is, of course, Slival, who you may have noticed in the above image. Slival, joining us as a potential crewmate this time, is faster than the player and has a carrying capacity of three. Also has some extremely effective attacks against enemies, though it can be annoying when he accidentally hits you while aiming for one. There is also a post-game exclusive slime crew member unique to this game, Princess Lime. I had high hopes for her, but unfortunately her "Become Ammo" tactic requires far too much player engagement for far too little damage to be worth it. I'd happily use her if her damage was 500 or something crazy like that, but the highest damage I saw her dish out was like 157, easily matchable by end-game weaponry.
Speaking of endgame weaponry, let's circle back to the "finished*" at the very beginning. In DQRS3's postgame, the last thing I have yet to do is a 20-Ship-in-a-row battle. 20. These are absurdly difficult, even the first two, even with a maximally upgraded ship - and here's the thing - your ship does NOT heal between battles. I may give this a couple more tries, but this challenge is frankly insane, I haven't gotten past the third ship. I even tried some cheese strategies which didn't work out for me, I even used a cheat code to get myself 997 of each item I already owned, because that's one more thing I haven't mentioned - the amount of resource grinding necessary for this game is ABSURD. Rocket Slime DS had it's fair share of grinding, trust me, I know, I 100%'d that game legitimately. I got 99 of every monster. Don't fuck with me. But this game is another beast entirely. Some of the item farming is just unbelievable, what they expect of the player to get a single Kafrizzle. So yeah, uninterested in wasting probably two weeks of my time just to compete with this ludicrous challenge wasn't something I was interested in doing.
Hence. This was a fun experience and I'm glad it was translated so that I got to play it, but ultimately, it's a messy and unbalanced game. It just goes to show that the lightning of perfection does not strike twice so easily. I highly recommend going and playing the DS title, Dragon Quest Rocket Slime. One of my favorite games of all time.
