courtesy of gameinformer
the classic wimpy (or super strong) enemy from Square Enix’s Dragon Quest series finally gets its own gig in Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime for DS. The game mixes colorful, cartoony, quirkiness with a SNES era RPG and tactical tank battles. Dragon Quest fans are already sold, but should the average RPG gamer sit up and take notice?
Rocket Slime begins with an army of Plob forces ransacking your hometown of Boingburg. They kidnap all 100 citizens and have left massive spike balls blocking key shops, a save point, a museum, and other vital locations. Rocket must save every abducted slime and take out every evil monster if he hopes to succeed in getting things back to normal.
There are two main gameplay elements to Rocket Slime: a top-down action RPG, and a tank versus mode. On the RPG side of things you will fight monsters, collect tank ammo, and rescue your slime friends. Your main attack will stretch out Rocket and then snap him towards an enemy like a rubber band. Just hold the A button and press the D-pad in the direction you’d like to launch. Once you hit an enemy, item, or friend, move Rocket under the flying object and he will catch it. Rocket can carry up to three objects at once. Hit B to throw them at other enemies, into cannons, or onto mine carts and rafts. The carts and rafts are found throughout every level and manage to form a convenient, yet plausible way for tank ammo and captured enemies to get back to your town. Rocket can even use this himself as a way to get instantly back to town.
Enemies have names like Platypunk, Dracky, Mimic, Jailcat, and Bunicorn. And they look just as cute as they sound. Killing them nets you some gold and sometimes a mystery item bag, but no experience. Rocket’s only apparent growth so far in the game involves collecting seeds that expand his max health. Most of the time you’ll probably just chuck monsters on the train to get them out of the way. Once you send a new monster type back to town, a friendly version of it will prance around the streets with the rest of the happy slimes. And if you collect enough of a certain type, it will be made into a statue in the museum.
As you send materials back to town, only 30 pieces can be actively used so you’ll have to be careful to use only the best. Ammo ranges from standard missiles to boomerangs to spike balls to broadswords. Some ammo can be mixed along with a nice wad of gold to gain health upgrades for your tank. Other times you can mix a few different kinds of ammo to make one powerful piece. For example, if you mix two girders and an iron arrow you’ll get a steel broadsword.
To trigger a tank battle, you must approach one of the many battle pedestals found throughout every stage. Here you’ll toot your little warrior flute and a tank will appear to help out. In the tank fights, you must run around from three different screens collecting ammo that falls out of little chutes. Next you move over to the cannons and toss the ammo in. The two cannons on every tank either shoot forward in a straight line or arc upwards slightly. If two pieces of average ammo collide in midair, both rounds are cancelled out. This means you’ll have to be smart about how you distribute ammo to the upper and lower cannons. Some ammo also needs to be handled very carefully as it will explode or crumble into dust. Just don’t let it crash on the ground and you’ll be fine for the most part.
Draining your opponent’s tank armor to zero is important, but it’s only half the equation. You must physically leave your tank via walking or shooting yourself out of a cannon. Once inside the enemy’s tank you can disable ammo chutes and attack members of the other team. But the main goal is to go towards the heart room and take it out. You’ll have to blast through many barriers to get there, but the heart only takes one hit and everything is over.
At first you have to do all of the shooting and smashing yourself, but eventually your slime buddies will help you out. Only a select few of the 100 slimes can participate in tank combat, but the ones that do always offer something unique. Some can heal party members, others aggressively try to bust into the enemy tank and cause havoc, while others make sure to get rid of any invading monsters. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
But slimes don’t just help out with tank battles. Each slime you rescue will send a thank you note with a special item inside. As you get more and more, they’ll start populating the town and even move away the nasty spike balls blocking new areas. Many of the citizens are relatively useless, but some will help you save, power up your tank, start a monster museum, or even host minigames.
The first minigame will have you surfing around trying to collect as many coins as possible in under a minute. You can make any minigames you unlock available to other DS owners with local download play. Though it’s not really a minigame, players can also paint portraits with the touch screen that will appear throughout the palace (one of the very rare uses of the touch panel in the entire game).
Another slime will let you play a one-on-one tank battle against via local WiFi or download play. Battling against a real human is always more challenging than AI, so it will really keep you on your toes.
Overall, I really like how the game is constantly rewarding you with new items, objectives, and modes. It’s hard to put down simply because you want to know what you’ll unlock next. Plus, the tank battles provide a nice change of pace. Though the game itself isn’t all that difficult at its core, there is plenty of challenge when it comes to crafting your ammo supply and collecting everything you need.
I do have a few minor complaints. There’s no excuse for having only one save slot in this day and age. First Dead Rising and now Rocket Slime. The original Legend of Zelda had three save slots back in the NES days. What’s Square Enix’s justification? What if a couple of siblings both want to play the game? One kid’s going to have to erase his/her hard earned save file. What happens when someone messes up in the game and accidentally saves? How many players are going to be screwed over just because they couldn’t make a backup save? It also sucks that you can only save at the church in town. Granted you can hop a train or take portals to get back easily, but it’s a huge pain to be running back and forth throughout the levels just to make sure that rare item you just picked up is saved forever. Also, it doesn’t seem like the action RPG combat is going to go much deeper than the stretch attack and item toss. That’s one of the very few aspects of the game that actually starts to get old.
Most of Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is a blast through. It really brought me back to the thrills of an SNES RPG, but with enough new elements thrown in to keep things fresh. I just hope that the constant feeling of discovery stays alive throughout the entirety of the quest.
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