Many RPG players love the Dragon Quest series for a variety of reasons. Some love Akira Toriyama’s character designs; some enjoy the series’ highly-animated nature and bright tone, while others rather like the music and straightfoward battle mechanics. Another popular quality is Dragon Quest’s menagerie of monsters. Some are cute, others are cool and some might even qualify as scary, but usually the only way to interact with any of them is through combat.

Such is not the case in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince though, as much like in its Monsters series, players will be able to befriend/capture some of those monsters an have them fight on their behalf. This more than likely immediately brings Pokemon to mind, but it’s not as close to Nintendo’s monster-collecting titan as one may think. At TGS 2023, Hardcore Gamer had the chance to speak with Kento Yokota, one of the producers on the project, and we went over what all makes Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince a different kind of animal from Pokemon.

Starting off with the biggest difference between the two games, Yokota-san explained that Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince features a synthesis system not all that dissimilar from the fusion system seen in Persona 5 Royal. For those unfamiliar, in Persona 5, players could at almost anytime take two persona entities they’ve allied with and combine them in to a new, stronger persona. Players can do much the same in this new Dragon Quest game, but with a greater degree of control over the outcome.

See, in Persona 5, players had some control over the new persona’s abilities, but that was it. Fusing the same two personas would always create the same new persona. In Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, however, players have the opportunity to choose what kind of monster will result from each synthesis. The same “parent” monsters can be used to synthesize different “child” monsters, and depending on whether or not one or both of the “parents” were large or small variants of their monster species, players can exert some degree of control over the new monster’s strengths and weaknesses in addition to its skills.

So all in all, it’s looking like players will be able to customize their team of monsters to a greater degree than in Pokemon. This combined with the Dragon Quest’s particular flavor of adventure should be enough to ensure that players get an experience that’s fairly distinct from both the likes of Pokemon and the mainline Dragon Quest games.

We also spent a little time discussing what multiplayer is going to look like in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince. While some general ideas were indeed shared, specifics could not be given at the time of the interview. We were told that fans can look forward to finding out more about the online features fairly soon, however, so interested fans should  keep an eye out for announcements over the next month or so.

There wasn’t a demo of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince available to try at TGS 2023 unfortunately, but based on what we learned here, it’s sounding like a promising project. Those curious would do well to give the game a closer look once it launches on December 1. As for this year’s other new Dragon Quest Game, Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai, make sure to check out our review and see if it holds up like its makers hoped it would.