CHIBA, Japan – The first Dragon Quest game to hit the Nintendo 3DS won't be a traditional RPG. Instead, we'll be playing Slime Morimori Dragon Quest 3, the third in a series of adventure games starring the series' most famous adorable enemy characters. I tried out a demo version at Tokyo Game Show.
In the Morimori series (called Rocket Slime in the States), you play as a young Slime who must protect his village from a gang of monsters (his co-stars in the Dragon Quest games). As you journey from home to rescue your fellow villagers, you battle the evil gangsters while collecting materials to rebuild your town.
The previous version introduced giant tank battles to the adventure. This new game takes a more nautical approach by replacing the tanks with ships.
Also new are the 3-D graphics, since that is one of the perks of the Nintendo 3DS. While the slimes and other monsters remain 2-D sprites, the backgrounds are now polygons that shift perspective as you move onscreen. It's a good compromise: The characters remain as cute as ever while the world around them shows off the 3DS' unique screen.
Other than that, little appears to have changed in terms of gameplay. The demo featured a desert level to explore and, just as before, I fought enemies by stretching my slime and snapping him forward. Those enemies, along with scattered items, can be sent back to town via an automated system of train cars.
The ship battles are more or less identical to the tank showdowns of Rocket Slime: each vessel has two cannons that must be fed ammo manually. Once your opponent's ship has been thoroughly pummeled, it's up to you to board her and sink her yourself by smashing the "heart" of the engine.
There may be more innovations that are absent from the Tokyo Game Show demo. Early press materials suggest the map is more of an open world rather than a series of stops, and there's clearly a system for personalizing your slime's ship. But for a fan of the series such as myself, I am perfectly content with just another adorable adventure.
Slime Morimori Dragon Quest 3 will be available in Japan on November 2. No U.S. release has been announced, but if Rocket Slime made it across the Pacific then fans can cross their fingers for this sequel to make the journey too.
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