Rating of
3/5
Heart Breaker
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/24/18
I was a huge fan of the first two ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ games that hit the Game Boy Color way back in 2000/2001. The combination of classic ‘Dragon Quest’ nostalgia with a ‘Pokemon’-killer monster battling/breeding system managed to push all the right buttons. After sinking over 100 hours into both “Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry’s Wonderland” and “Dragon Quest Monsters 2: Cobi’s Journey” (plus another 25 hours into “Dragon Quest Monsters 2: Tara’s Adventure” so I could do some Link Cable stuff), I was chomping at the bit when “Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart” (“Caravan Heart”) first appeared on the Game Boy Advance (still my one and only favorite handheld) in 2003. I waited, and waited, but it appeared that my anticipation was to be in vain, as Enix opted not to localize the third installment of the series outside of Japan, shortly before merging with Squaresoft.
When “Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker” appeared on the original DS and received localization, I was more or less content to skip over “Caravan Heart” as yet another in a string of exclusionary oddities for which only Japan knew the reasons. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t much enjoy “Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker,” as it seemed a huge step down from the first two titles in every way except the visuals. Thus I found myself thinking back fondly about the Game Boy Advance title I never got to experience. I had come to the obvious conclusion that the DS was a portable N64 (and thus garbage) inasmuch as the Game Boy Advance was a portable SNES (and thus the second coming of GOD).
Once again, fanslators came to the rescue, and in 2008 a group called KaioShin released a full localization for the missing “Caravan Heart.” I was aware of it almost immediately, but didn’t take the opportunity to play it until a decade later, after Square Enix produced “Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2” (which I skipped of my own volition) on the DS and another unlocalized entry, “Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3” on the 3DS. Sadly, it turns out the reason Enix didn’t bring “Caravan Heart” stateside is that the mechanical changes that caused me to find the ‘Joker’ string of games in the ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ franchise to be rather disappointing was turned up to 11 in this very strange transitional entry.
Presentation
“Caravan Heart” looks and sounds amazing… well, that is, ‘amazing’ for a main-line 16-bit ‘Dragon Quest’ title. Japan’s most popular RPG franchise (with an actually sane cult following in the wider world) was never known for the quality of its visuals early on. “Caravan Heart” looks like a typical ‘Dragon Quest’ game at the height of the 16-bit Golden Age. Characters only have two frames of animation and monsters simply zoom-in during the first-person perspective battles to show which one’s attacking (if they cast a spell, they don’t move at all). Despite the limited ambition in the visuals, there is a definite attention to detail. All (minus a significant number of exclusions, consisting of nearly all boss monsters) of Akira Toriyama’s iconic monster designs are present, and look great with the 16-bit color pallet. Even more impressive, every different monster species has its own unique sprite that’s present while the player’s team is traveling. Environments, however, are a bit pared-down, with a claustrophobic field of view. Towns, specifically, have been reduced almost entirely to TRPG-style menus, where the player can choose between a number of shops and important locations instead of actually walking to them (though, with the repetition this game enforces, not having to walk around towns is actually a time saver). The world map is a bit more impressive, with a nice Mode-7 effect and a bunch of incredibly familiar locations for long-time series fans.
Even better, “Caravan Heart” sounds like a traditional ‘Dragon Quest’ game. This is something of a mixed blessing, though, as “Caravan Heart” features a whopping ONE new track that isn’t a remix of a track from one of the first three NES ‘Dragon Quest’ titles. All of the classic sound effects are still in, too. Listening to this game in action is just one big nostalgia bomb after the next… and I loved it.
Technically, I had a few problems with “Caravan Heart.” I don’t know if these glitches are in the fanslation patch or if they’re in the basic game, but I occasionally ran into random crashes during scene transitions, especially when traveling via ship. The game would just freeze up on a gray screen and crash with no way to salvage it. This wouldn’t really be all that annoying in a handheld game with a save anywhere feature (such as the first two ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ titles or any ‘Pokemon’ game… HOWEVER, “Caravan Heart” goes out of its way to be as unlike a handheld game as possible, including its cumbersome one-slot save system that only allows the player to save at a church, per ‘Dragon Quest’ tradition. With emulation and save states, it’s easy to work around this limitation, but holy crap, it is one bass-ackwards setup.
Story
“Caravan Heart” follows the exploits of a young child version of Kiefer, the supporting Jay Leno look-alike character from “Dragon Quest 7.” As a kid, it turns out that Kiefer chafed under his father, the king’s, heavy-handed parenting technique (who can’t relate to that?) and spent as much time as possible trying to escape from the castle to run around outside. After one such escapade, and in order to avoid a thorough beat-down, Kiefer hides in his wardrobe, where he falls asleep and has a dream of a mysterious woman calling herself the Master of Illusions summoning children from all over the world – and even in other worlds – to gather the orbs of Loto (i.e., Erdrick, for those following the original NES localization) in order to have their wishes granted. Waking from the dream, Kiefer finds himself in a rather Narnia-esque situation, where his room has become a midway point between worlds and has a shimmering portal rotating quietly in the middle of it. Finally presented with the chance to get WAY out of the castle, Kiefer jumps through the portal…
…where he encounters a caravan wagon being assaulted by Drakees. The Caravan Leader, a kid named Luin, has fainted, and without his guidance, the remaining members of the caravan, including a slime named Slalon as the Guard Monster, a human Warrior, human Cleric, and kid Mapper, are far too retarded and ineffectual to fight-off the monsters themselves. Kiefer is pressed into service as the temporary Caravan Leader to kill the Drakees. With the enemies defeated, Luin comes-to and invites Kiefer to join the caravan to escort him home. It turns out Luin had the same dream that every other kid in the universe had, and set out with a group of allies to gather the Orbs of Loto in order to wish his ill parents were cured of their disease. Luin quickly realizes that he’s completely worthless as a Caravan Leader, so Kiefer agrees (‘But thou must!’) to lead the caravan until Luin’s parents can be cured.
Traveling across this alternate world – which just so happens to be the same world where the original ‘Dragon Quest’ NES trilogy took place, including iconic locations like Moonbrook and Alefgard – Kiefer and his crew meet a wide range of folk, including those who are willing to join the caravan (sometimes even adding their own wagons, thus expanding the party size), random travelers, unhelpful monsters, and the Four Illusions, each of whom holds on of the Orbs the party seeks.
Upon gathering the Orbs, a villain appears, the party emerges victorious, and the credits roll… but that’s just the first half of the game (and takes about 25 hours to reach). The second half of the game ups the ante further, drags Kiefer back into the other world, and provides the player with the opportunity to crush the villain once and for all… by collecting a bunch of Color Orbs and running through some a bunch of procedurally-generated dungeons. Doing this takes roughly another 25 hours.
In general, the storytelling in “Caravan Heart” comes across as incredibly weak. While there is at least some semblance of a plot, there isn’t really much in the way of character development, nor is the excuse narrative of curing illness particularly interesting. Kiefer had gobs of personality in “Dragon Quest 7,” but in “Caravan Heart,” he’s a typical Mute Hero. Most of the other cast members are completely disposable as well. Indeed, only Luin really has much of a personality… and he’s friggin’ annoying.
Gameplay
“Caravan Heart” deviates quite a bit from the ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ formula presented in the first two games and more closely resembles a traditional ‘Dragon Quest’ title, though with a number of questionable RNG-based mechanics and heavily unbalanced RPG systems that feel skewed against the player.
The basic premise of any ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ title is to breed (or ‘reform’ as is the case in “Caravan Heart” and the ‘Joker’ titles) iconic ‘Dragon Quest’ series monsters into stronger and stronger forms, teaching them powerful skills and magic by breeding/reforming-in a monster that can cast them. These genetically engineered uber-monsters are then assembled into a team of three and used to battle other monsters. In most ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ titles, there’s a monster battling tournament format at the core of the narrative that drives the player to improve their team. In “Caravan Heart,” the structure of the game is simply traveling from town to town in the titular caravan, occasionally collecting a monster’s titular heart, then combining two hearts with one of the handful of recruitable Guard Monsters at the caravan’s base camp in order to grant that monster a new form.
However, “Caravan Heart” makes it very difficult to actually want to reform monsters. Most of the useful base skills and skill upgrades (transforming Heal to HealMore and eventually HealAll, for example) only happen at fairly high levels, and since, as always, breeding/reforming resets the resulting monster’s level to 1 (with a minor stat reduction that still leaves it far more powerful than a normal level 1 monster), the game seems to encourage players to stick with a monster in a sub-par form until it learns at least the basic version of a desired skill. In the early ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ titles, breeding monsters together, leveling them, combining them, and manipulating their stats like a geneticist was a fairly quick and painless process. Sure, the breeding combinations could get really complicated and pretty much required a guide to keep track of them, but it never felt like punishment to breed a new monster. “Caravan Heart,” however, offers such stingy, pitiful experience point rewards for battle through the ENTIRE game that leveling a monster into the mid-30s to learn a skill is a Herculean achievement, and reforming it before it hits the magic level to learn the desired skill forfeits the opportunity to learn that skill at all during the next reformation, as the game no longer keeps track of monster genealogy beyond the two hearts used to create its current form and its actual current form. In general, I find the reformation system that started in “Caravan Heart” and continued into the ‘Joker’ trilogy to be far less flexible and far more tedious than the breeding system from the first two games. Even worse, the player is only allowed to carry a maximum of 30 monster hearts in their inventory, which, combined with the super-slow leveling, means the player will end up throwing away tons of potentially-useful hearts over the course of the game. This is in spite of the fact that the game includes a traditional ‘Dragon Quest’ style bank which can store upwards of 9 million gold and unlimited items… but not monster hearts (it must not be refrigerated).
The inventory system for regular items is just as stifling as the one for hearts. ‘Dragon Quest’ has always had individual inventories for party members. Starting in “Dragon Quest 4,” however, the player was also given the opportunity to store items they couldn’t’ carry in the wagon, then hand those items to individual party members as needed. This concept later evolved into a ‘bag’ the party carries with them, where they throw junk they’ll either use or sell later. In “Caravan Heart,” Kiefer is technically the ‘only’ ‘character,’ so he’s the only one with an inventory that maxes out at 24 items. There’s no bag, and despite the presence of multiple wagons, Kiefer can’t store any of the junk he picks-up in them. Throughout the game, the player will pick up a large number (up to 8 at once) of quest items that can’t even be stored at the bank, so Kiefer’s inventory fills-up quickly, especially when grabbing the randomly-scattered Tiny Medals on the world map.
As the player recruits the three Guard Monsters in the main story, they also acquire a total of three caravan wagons. Each of these wagons can be manned by a team of up to four human NPCs of various iconic ‘Dragon Quest’ jobs. These characters act, in essence, as ‘equipment’ for the Guard Monster pulling their wagon, as they provide various bonus actions and passive abilities to the caravan (and monsters never equip traditional weapons and armor in this series). Each wagon has a starting carrying capacity of 10, but there are ways to upgrade this slightly. Guard Monsters start out with a weight of 2, but eventually become three times as heavy as they reach bigger and better reformations, while human allies can all weigh anywhere from 1-4 (1 = kid, 4 = Homer Simpson). Figuring out optimal monster+ally combinations for both skills and weight limits provides some interesting strategy, but not until the second ‘quest’ of the game. During the first part of the story, the NPCs that join are all hand-placed… and most of them completely suck. The caravan always has a maximum capacity of 20 members, including those not riding in the wagons, but 5 of them (Luin’s friends) can’t be booted out until the second quest starts, making team management more frustrating than it should be. During the second quest, completing a dungeon causes a random assortment of NPCs to appear in the towns scattered all over the world, some of whom can be either Veteran or Master versions of their basic job. It isn’t until this happens that the player really has any meaningful control over the composition of the caravan, as the hand-placed characters are often far too fat to make weight. In general, though, the addition of human party members is quite interesting, as the ability to strategically add a Warrior, Fighter, or Fencer who will hop out of the wagon and clobber an enemy with a bonus attack every few turns, or a Cook who will keep the party’s healing-focused monster’s MP topped-off, or a Merchant that will rake in extra gold every few turns, or a Mapper who allows the player to look at a map of the local area or the world (if a Veteran, or two regular crap Mappers join forces), provides quite a bit of depth.
Of course, “Caravan Heart” also makes seeking out these new allies as cumbersome as possible, as it isn’t until the player has recruited a Master Sage or two Veteran Sages that they’re able to teleport from town to town, but instead must WALK everywhere. And even walking has been ruined in “Caravan Heart” thanks to the misguided idea that the caravan must consume food as it travels. Thus the player is saddled with a food meter that ticks down with every step they take in the overworld or dungeons, with certain terrain tiles like mountains and deserts consuming more food per step than plains or forests. Early in the game, a few mistakes or not quite grasping the way the food system works can completely sink a player, even forcing them to start over, while by mid-game, the food system largely becomes an afterthought, since, inexplicably, monsters drop far more gold than experience, allowing the player to restock their food from merchants with impunity while never running short on funds (I had a quarter million gold sitting in the bank at the end of the game with nothing to spend it on).
Overall
“Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart” is easily the weirdest and most mould-breaking entry in this ‘Dragon Quest’ spinoff series. While it tries to force the square peg of a handheld monster-breeding game into the round hole of traditional ‘Dragon Quest,’ the result is more failure than success. The addition of recruitable human party members to the player’s arsenal is the only interesting new addition to the game, while the monster ‘reformation’ system that replaced breeding is far worse, the amount of grinding – due to pitiful experience payout from battles – is unbearable, and the cumbersome lack of Quality of Life features feels like a huge step backwards for the series as a whole. ‘Dragon Quest’ fanatics will still get at least some small pleasure out of it, though. It won’t blow any minds, but it might break a few hearts.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
