Through some careful bargain hunting I recently snagged myself a copy of a game that really ought to be right up my alley: Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker for the Nintendo DS. Except, somehow, it just isn’t.

Seeing as I just spent a year’s worth of free time assiduously cross stitching each and every monster in the first game in the series, you might think a game that actually stars a wide range of these monsters would be perfect for me. I thought so too. But there’s just something off about this one.

The devil’s in the details, and I think that’s what is killing me about Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. The art style is as close to that of Dragon Quest VIII as one can get on the Nintendo DS. All of the townspeople look just like those in the PS2 game. Most of the environments are quite similar too, and there’s where the first little niggling issue appears. The interior environments of Joker have many of the same elements from DQ VIII, yet you cannot interact with them.

In (nearly) every other game in the Dragon Quest series there are cabinets, wardrobes, bookshelves, and hanging sacks that can be examined for potential items. These same things are in Joker, but they’re only window dressing. I’ve only been playing for a few hours and yet I still cannot get it through my head that no matter how enticing that cabinet might look, there’s absolutely no way it will have anything or that my character will even be able to pretend to search it. I don’t know why this is so aggravating, yet it is.

The 3D nature of the game doesn’t lend itself so well to the Nintendo DS’s control scheme either. With only four cardinal directions and no sensitivity moving from place to place isn’t as easy as it ought to be. I certainly hope that Dragon Quest IX, which I assume to be developed by a different team, will do something to make 3D movement a bit less irritating. I’d have preferred the 2-and-a-half-dimension style of Dragon Quest IV for DS to this.

But, it does still have many of the monsters I’ve come to love and what promises to be a very aggravating yet intriguing monster synthesis option. Unless I get distracted—quite likely with Retro Game Challenge and Dragon Quest V both out, to say nothing of my as-yet-incomplete game of Dragon Quest IV—I might still putter around with it. I feel I owe it to the Slimes and Drakees.