Dragon Quest Treasures Review – IGN

Unfortunately, Treasures never really mines that rich vein of story potential like it could, doing little to build on any of its themes after first presenting them. Erik and Mia have no character development across the roughly 30-hour campaign, and their relationships with most NPCs outside a small handful are limited to interactions that end along with whatever quest they asked you to complete. How much you get out of Treasures’ story and characters depends on how invested you are in the idea of reinvigorating the hearts and minds of this world, since you never witness much of the results of those efforts. It’s hard not to see Treasures as a missed opportunity in that sense, one that with a bit more depth and detail could’ve been something special and more meaningful.

In between meeting new people and staring at your treasure hoard, you’ll take Erik or Mia on expeditions to one of Draconia’s islands to see what you can find and convince other monsters to join in the hunt. Once you arrive in these wide open areas, you’re pretty much free to decide what you want to do and when. You could rush to a rival treasure hunter’s base and swipe their hoard, seek out ancient monuments, or persuade a Queen Slime to help restore the Cold Shoulder train station, – or just ignore everything and find more treasure.

The main questline is centered on recovering ancient artifacts, but it often takes a backseat to the many extra requests that come your way from friendly monsters and fellow treasure hunters. While it’s easy to get bogged down in the number of objectives – and the horizon does get cluttered with quest markers at times – the benefit of having so many quests is that you’re always accomplishing something, even if those quests are just variations of finding certain resources A local princess’ emissary could need help finding an ancient monument on the other side of the dragon’s belly. It’s a long trudge to get there, but on the way you can grab some soil to craft more pellet ammo to use in your next battle and pick up a few rare stones to help power the next broken-down train station that needs restoring.

Whatever you choose to do, you’re always encouraged to be on the lookout for treasure to help your base grow and unlock new main quests. You have an innate treasure compass that points you in the general direction of rare goods (because of course you do), but it goes haywire when you get too close. That means you have to rely on the treasure vision of your monster companions to track the goods down, with visual clues based on their own line of sight. Slimes only see from ground level, for example, while the vision of a Sham Hatwitch is appropriately obscured by its own hat. It’s a charming, typically Dragon Quest spin on what would otherwise be a repetitive mini-game, and combined with the little ascending jingle that plays when you dig up treasure, it helps keep the routine feeling fun even after dozens of hours.

None of the tasks you’re given are ever very complex, but it helps that Treasures and its treasure hunting appeal to the lizard part of my brain that lights up after finding something shiny, solving an easy puzzle, or checking a task off the list. Does it matter if my base’s value increases to substantially, or if I unravel the mysteries of Draconia? No! But I put a cool piece of Dragon Quest history on a plinth back home and made a fictitious, train-loving robot happy once for a few minutes, and that was enough for me. The low-pressure, low-stakes nature of what you’re doing and the constant drip of accomplishment lends Treasures a sense of coziness that makes it easy and enjoyable to pick up, even if you don’t always see world-changing effects from your labors.

Treasures passively encourages you to take its quests and treasure hunts in small doses by limiting how much treasure you can carry, which means you have to revisit your base at intervals and take a break from questing. While there’s plenty to do back at headquarters, that intentional speedbump can start to feel a little arbitrarily annoying, like perhaps Square Enix had plans for something bigger that never materialized. You have daily quests similar to what you’d expect from a live-service game, but they play little role in your routine and offer paltry rewards. You can also theoretically build and improve your base, though the improvements extend to just a handful of shops you can only access via the company’s reception desk.

Despite drawing inspiration from Dragon Quest Monsters, Treasures is less concerned with you building an unstoppable team of critters and mostly just wants you to explore with them, which is a fitting complement to the emphasis on item gathering. Battles are comparatively simple, too, with the focus firmly on what treasure-finding aptitudes and other skills your companions have. Each monster you take with you has a set of preferred treasures they’re more likely to uncover during expeditions and a species-specific skill called a Forte – abilities such as gliding or sprinting that make travel easier or help you reach difficult places. Each region is fairly simple in structure, with few exciting layouts or well-hidden secrets, and they’re built around using specific abilities to find treasure spots and rare items. Bland as the layouts may seem, the simplicity can be welcome at times as it makes backtracking and avoiding unfriendly monster mobs much more bearable.

When you do pick a fight, you play a passive role, helping deal damage with pellets from your slingshot or heal your monster friends. You have no control over their actions and can only issue basic attack and gather commands, but the monster AI is, mercifully, quite adept at figuring out the best way to tackle enemies. Slimes and Drackys work together to set up elemental combos, tankier monsters such as Restless Armor cast their defensive spells at exactly the right moment, and they all actually balance their attack choices to conserve MP.

Here, too, there’s the potential for something more involved that makes fuller use of these features – deeper battles with emphasis on building combos and finding the right mix of monsters. And here, too, Treasures prioritizes being light and breezy instead, without much need or reward for giving your team composition that sort of thought and care. There’s actively off-putting about that, especially since these fights are still fun enough as is. It’s just jarring to see what looks like so many discarded plans, and that lack of clear direction is noticeably unusual for a Dragon Quest game.