Smile Slime - PART 1

Smile Slime: My Days in the World of Dragon Warrior
By Suzuri Heinze, aka KawaiiRanChan.
Gabys.girl@yahoo.com

PART ONE: Rediscovering a Lost Love
Started September 28, 2010

With my situation in life as it is right now, I've had a bit of trouble getting a hold of money. Not just for buying new games, but for, y'know, living expenses. Thus, my hobby of gaming has made a new home on my personal laptop computer named Chime - with the internet as a partner in crime, I overloaded myself with emulators and countless ROMs. Why? Even as a broke mother of two, denying myself my hobby when my girls are in bed would be rather stupid. After all, what is a gamer without a game, right? With so many "new" games to play, at first, I found myself digging into my GBA stuff and pulling out Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team. I had a fling with that for about three days, until I went online to look up other good monster raising games. I picked up a Digimon World game, and I enjoyed that. When I didn't want to raise my Patamon, I would just turn off my PSXfin and load up my Visualboy Advance to rescue lost Pokemon as Eevee and vice versa. Neither game was bad, but neither held my attention for long periods of time. Neither game made me want to stay up way after my usual bedtime, causing me to lose vast hours of sleep just because I was compelled to play. I thought that maybe I was losing my gamer's touch.

There's a special feeling you get as a gamer when you have that one game you're into at that moment. The one game that almost drives your entire existence while you play it. You can't help but think about it, it drives you insane as you don't have the time to play it. That one game which cements your soul into the gaming world, the bond that makes you a gamer. Until I realized that it wasn't Patamon or Eevee that really needed my love, I kept with them. They get a lot of love from fans of both of those franchises, myself included - but my monster raising heart felt like something was missing here.

Going over to Zophar's Domain's ROMs, I found myself looking at the Gameboy section. I looked at a few of the Dragon Warrior games there. I had the GBC remake of Dragon Warrior 1 and 2 in high school. It was a fun game, so I got it to add to my pile of GBA stuff. Then I was like, ah, what the hell. I like all the Dragon Warrior/Quest stuff that I've ever played thus far, I'll just get the whole damn stack. I went on GameFAQs to look up some information about the games I hadn't played yet. I was really feeling like diving into the World of Dragon Warrior, but Torneko The Last Hope wasn't really calling out to me. I then found the box covers for both versions of Dragon Warrior Monsters 2.

There's Cobi's Journey and Tara's Adventure versions of DWM2, akin to Pokemon's colored sets Gold and Silver which were released around the same time. Ah. I played some Dragon Quest Monsters before on the DS. DQM: Joker was astonishingly beautiful, had great music, and a nice setting - but it suffered in length and variety of monsters you could have. I thought about playing DWM2, but what I remembered of Joker didn't stick with me. I wanted something I could really sink my teeth into. Joker lasted me at maximum 20 hours, and most of the length was in just level grinding. But I had invested so much time in monster games thus far, and I can't turn down that little slime smile once he's got me.

Here I go. I was booting up my Visualboy Advance with Tara's Adventure, getting introduced to the Island of GreatLog, which is just across the ocean from GreatTree, the country where the first Dragon Warrior Monsters is set... and the first thing I thought was "wow, this town sure is small". Then I found the adventure's hook where the Kingdom's Prince and his partner get into mischief and drag me into it with them. The first little quest that I got from my mama was to go to the Vault and get a package from my grandma. Well, Prince Kameha and his little Watabou decided that they wanted to eat it because it smelled good, and stole it out of my hands! I go chasing' them down a well to watch them fight over the package, when Prince Kameha falls over and knocks the seal off of the GreatLog tree! See, GreatLog is a town built into a huge tree in the middle of a vast ocean, and that seal kept in all the life-force. As the seal came off of it, the life force started pouring out and the land begins to sink. The Prince, scared of being punished for his screw up, runs out - but his partner jumps in the whole and clogs it, proving he's not just a little purple bat shaped prick. Then he comes and asks me to find something, anything, out in the world that can act as the GreatLog's seal again. Me? But I'm just a little bitty girl. I can't go out by myself... well, since my parents run a monster farm and I have the ability to talk to them, I guess I should go and take my monster friends out there. Woot. Thus begins a very interesting adventure.

The plot seems a little juvenile, and it is, starring a barely ten year old girl (or eleven year old boy - Cobi does appear to be older than Tara) that gets to go world hopping with a team of monsters she either convinces to join her by bribing them with food or breeding on her family's farm. Typically, unless you're really into monster raising games, the plot probably wouldn't hook you. But you forget, I am a monster raising game fan, and I don't need much more than an excuse plot to find ultra powerful pets. I downloaded and started my Adventure on a Thursday night. I couldn't put it down. The next day, all I wanted to do was keep playing...

I was hooked from the get-go, and the more keys I found to more worlds, the more I was loving it. The random treasure system found in the other worlds was a nice addition. I realize that all of the maps in the first DWM game were random, as well as the treasures, and there are plenty of random maps to work on in the second games. You will receive keys for doing various things like clearing a dungeon or completing a quest and these keys will react with the Great Door in each world's Door Shrine. The ones that are all ready named will take you to worlds where the story will continue. The Desert, the Pirate, the Ice, and the Sky worlds are the first examples. Unnamed magic keys, once taken to an appraiser, will take you to random worlds based on the name that he assigns it. The names will always give you a hint at where the keys will take you, but those worlds are randomly generated. Trust me, after going through about ten different worlds, you'll notice that the NPCs in those worlds start saying the same things like "You're a little kid that trains monsters! Interesting!" The randomly generated towns there always have a normal item shop and a priest to revive, uncurse, or cure your poison as usual...

But you don't go to the randomly generated worlds to converse with the townsfolk. In fact, one doesn't play a monster raising game to converse with the townsfolk. You go for the monsters! Every Dragon Warrior Monster I've ever known is in this title, from the happy Slime to the elusive Metaly to that very dodgy Dracky and even bosses of previous Dragon Warrior games like Estark, Pizzaro, and Dragonlord. Dragonlord? That name used to make us RPG fans piss our pants, and we get to tame one? Where do I sign up?! Oh, yes. You can sign up, but it'll take a bit of tweaking with the breeding system before you'll be able to find Dragonlord. Boss monsters, of course, are very hard to get a hold of, but as you can expect from a monster game, those bosses are very powerful. I'd venture to say that they are akin to the Legendary Pokemon ala Mewtwo. I'm sure that anyone could beat the game easily with an Estark named Bob on their
team. Just as much as I don't like Legendary Pokemon, I don't like to use the Boss Monsters of Dragon Warrior on my team either. People have asked me time and time again, "Why don't you use the powerful guys? I mean, I beat that creepy ass Demon Lord with my Estark, LOL" and my response is simple. It takes
no skill to win with super-special-awesome critters that have more stats than God himself. I mean, yeah, it takes skill to GET one. And I suppose having it around is nice to show everyone what an awesome breeder you are, but I don't like that. I'd rather beat the final boss with a tricked out WalrusMan, HaloSlime, and a SkyDragon because I like them and I spent hours with the breeding tree to get the exact skills and stats I want on them. To me, the ones you work the hardest with and spend the most time with raising are worth more than random boss monsters that can kill anything without any effort. Oh, wait, I forgot to add something. I like playing with monsters that I like - regardless of how useful or powerful they are or aren't. This is something people have forgotten how to do. I'm looking at you, SMOGON. I don't care if
Dragonlord has great stats. I think he's ugly when compared with a SkyDragon, who looks like an Imperial Chinese Dragon with that cool long mustache and the shaggy mane, you know what I'm talking about. Then I spent upwards of thirty hours of real time playing with him in my team and he saves my team's ass
during hard battles of course I get attached to him! That might make me crazy, not wanting to get rid of a monster that I hand raised and had with me so long, but I don't think it does.

With a great set of monsters and a vast set of worlds, Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Tara's Adventure had me playing so much. The first weekend I had it, I spent 70 hours on it. I didn't even notice when I was hungry or that I needed to sleep at some point. It's longer than Final Fantasy XIII and Kingdom Hearts II
combined. And this comes from an image of a Gameboy Color cart! You want to know the best part of this whole thing? I'm not even finished with the game yet! I haven't done side quests yet! This game has more playtime and flexibility in it than over 75% of games made today for bigger and more powerful console
games.

I finally had a game that was compelling me to play during my free time. But after finishing Sky World, I got kinda curious. The second game in the Dragon Warrior Monsters spin-off set the bar way higher than Joker ever did. My venture into Yuji Horii's wonderful world of Dragon Warrior had not come to a close. I
wanted to see how the series all began! What monsters were there at the start, and what was it like? Where did it all happen, and how did the story unfold?

Well, I’ll get to that next time.

Thanks for reading.
Much love,
-Suzuri