It's mindless, it's repetitive, and at times the constantly repeating voice lines made me want to pull my hair out, but there's an accessible and sincere experience here for someone who is interested in the Dragon Quest universe but intimidated by the RPG gameplay of the main series titles.

This game is harmless fun. Collecting treasure is addicting and I love finding new monsters to add to my party.

It's the better Zelda compared to BotW or TotK (but still not the Zelda I wanted) but also it isn't that type of game. I can only call it a mix of JRPG, Monster Collection and Action-Adventure. Anyway, it pretty good and looks charming in it's cell-shaded Dragon Quest style. What I don't quiet understand is the enemy scaling system but even if I did, I ALWAYS hated enemy scaling systems. It's just no fun for me if I can never outlevel enemies and I never understand what's the point of using a leveling system, when it doesn't matter in the end since the enemies will still be as strong or as weak compared to the player when you were level 1 as if you were max level. If it is for abilities and such, it's a much less annoying system, if you can just for example buy them. This way it even allows you to customize by deciding instead of getting this ability, I rather save up for that ability and such. The biggest problem with this as well is, that enemies scale to the MC but the monsters you scout do not, when it's the monsters that do most of the fighting. This results in being stuck with low level monsters at times unless you keep on grinding easy to get treasures in the tutorial area just to make them a viable option. I tolerate enemy scaling when I can switch it off or it is limited by area like in area 1 all enemies level with you until 20 and then you start outleveling them, as the game progress while in the last area enemies level with you up to 90 instead but never to 100 which is your max level. The sheer amount of pellets for the slingshot you have is overwhelming.Even early in the game you already have way too many with different effects and it's only a low Tier effect. You have low tier and high tier but even if you have 0 of one kind, it still shows up in the selection needlessly increasing the time to get to the pellet you want. It's way too much. It also doesn't help that it's so tedious to choose them when you only can use the digi pad to scroll through them. At least game is on pause while you do and they are grouped. Quality of life features like custom map markers and the ability to change the party through your menu unfortunately aren't there. Quest requirements cannot be fulfilled retroactively which means the longer you wait in progressing them, the harder, more tedious and annoying you make it for yourself. You can also feed your monsters for temporary buffs but in order to do so, you need to get in close and personal into melee range then you have to press and hold a button for a few seconds and choose the food with the digi-pad. As if that wasn't annoying enough, when you get close enough to start feeding them, they move away from you for some reason and you have to restart the progress. So you can imagine that soonish you don't wanna deal with it anymore. And speaking of food, in order to make food, you need recipes but most recipes can only be found in random chest spread throughout the world and you have no idea, not even a hint where they might be. Now, in order to scout some monsters you also need to offer them a certain meal at times and if you haven't found the recipe for it, well tough luck. At least give me a hint in which area I need to search for a yet undiscovered recipe. It's a bit annoying that you can't run unless you have a monster with you that has that ability (also applies to other traversal options), even then it's still limited for time and needs recharging. It wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't for the Treasure Forecast which means for the highest chance of finding treasures, the main thing of the game, your party needs to have certain passive skills. At least you can send out teams for additional chances on finding treasure while you explore somewhere else. Overall it's a solid game that deserves an 8/10 but the horrible unbalanced level scaling against you and the inconveniences for the player knock it down to 7.