Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (DS)
With Dragon Quest being one of the longest running and most popular role-playing game series, you would think one of the main characters of its adventures would be the face of the franchise. However, many of the heroes across the series were blank slates and never caught on in quite the same way the game’s distinct monster design did. Designed by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest’s creatures have become the real stars, these fantasy monsters having bright and playful designs that feel more like they’re pulled from a children’s book than a serious heroic legend. Among the many appealing monster designs though, none have caught on better than the remarkably simple Slime, the blue teardrop-shaped goo ball having a huge goofy grin that makes him cute despite his basic appearance. While often a fairly weak foe in the games, his species became so important to the franchise that after almost twenty years of being a bad guy, the Slime got a starring role in his own adventure: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime.
Our particular hero is a Slime you get to name, but his default name of Rocket does tell us something that makes him a bit more interesting than your standard monster. Rocket is able to squash and stretch his body, allowing him to do things like flatten himself to float over small gaps and more importantly, stretch his body out like rubber and launch himself around in a dangerous high-speed attack. This rocket maneuver is not only good for knocking away enemies but lets him knock important items up into the air so he can grab them and carry them on his head, Rocket able to collect all kinds of items that play many roles in his adventure. His elastic nature also means he can ricochet off walls to potentially get around terrain, and if something is risky to approach, he can always hurl some of those items he picked up to mix up his fight options.
Rocket’s abilities may make him a flexible protagonist for his little adventure, but he doesn’t start off a hero. Living in the city of Boingburg with all sorts of different species of slime, Rocket ends up playing with an important flute on the very day a group of monsters attack the town to try and steal it. These troublemakers are the Plob, a group of other monsters from the Dragon Quest series lead by the dopey looking Platypunks. These goofy mafia wannabes are delightfully incompetent in a game that very much takes nothing seriously, every item description some joke or pun, the many slimes of the town throwing words like “boing” into any word that it could conceivably fit, and silly accents like those of the Platypunk defector Ducktor Cid help the world feel like a pleasant low stakes cartoon world. Despite how jovial everything is though, the adventure starts with The Plob blowing Boingburg to bits with their towering tank, capturing every slime but Rocket. It’s up to that simple singular slime to get back all 100 of the other Slimes, take down the Plob, and uncover the secrets behind the Warrior Flute and the greater world of Slimenia in the process.
For most of this action adventure you’ll view things from above, Rocket exploring various regions of Slimenia like a desert, forest, and even a flying fortress in his quest to set things right. The game is perhaps a bit too generous even with your starting health and the abundant upgrades and healing opportunities mean exploration isn’t particularly dangerous, but this is not only a good way to make the game inviting to all sorts of players, but it allows you to focus on the joys of exploring these locations. Not only do you need to survive little puzzles to open up the way forward fairly often, but little carts on rails appear frequently through the game’s locations to help you with item collection. Almost everything Rocket can pick up, be it an item, environmental object, or even an enemy, can be hurled onto these little carts and sent back to Boingburg to help with the reconstruction efforts. It can be incredibly addicting to scour an area for everything you can to toss onto the carts, and the fact many of the objects can respawn makes it easier to collect certain items in greater quantities. Cash can be picked up for spending elsewhere too, and while you don’t need to put the coins on the cart, you can put empty treasure chests on board and they, like every other item, can prove useful for other parts of the adventure.
Perhaps the biggest use of all your resources emerges when you uncover the Schleiman Tank, Rocket now having his own castle-sized vehicle to turn against the Plob’s own massive war machines. Some of the resources you collect can be used to upgrade the tank’s health, others can be mixed together through alchemy to become more useful items for your tank, and literally everything you send back to Boingburg that isn’t a living creature can be turned into ammunition for your tank’s two cannons. During a tank battle, both sides will launch whatever item preset they came into the battle with, the objects you find around levels having all sorts of different effects. You can launch simple objects to deal varying amounts of damage, but some like arrows can be combined midbattle or thrown one after the other based on how quickly you need to load new ammo into your guns. You can launch boomerangs out to knock enemy fire out of the air, use shields to block incoming shots, and fire lightning rods that will repeatedly electrocute the enemy tank if they’re not dealt with. You can launch fire water to make the ammo loading room of the other tank hard to navigate, bring an invisibility cloak or sword-wielding doll to use for sabotage missions, and even can get into counter play where you bring holy water to cancel out ghost bombs that can’t be blocked in any other way.
Tank combat is definitely the highlight of the adventure and the big payoff to all the work you do elsewhere, and while the game does sometimes throw a few too many in a row, for the most part these big battles are exciting affairs where you’re constantly checking your refreshing stock of ammunition to keep up with the other side’s firing rate. Ammunition can knock other shots out of the air so you need to pick whether you want your items to launch out of the higher pointing cannon or straight shot to either counter those or get your own attacks through, but enemy tanks can sometimes have incredible tools like a drill you need to make sure you destroy before it blocks your cannons and deals heavy damage. You’re not just going to be loading cannons the whole fight either, the finale involving you entering the enemy tank to destroy the core. However, you can break in to their vehicle earlier, destroying systems to make it harder for them to quickly fire, messing with the crew who are trying to load ammo, and otherwise making yourself a nuisance to try and gain an edge in the fight. However, you being in the tank means you can’t be actually damaging it with fire at the same time, so initially sabotage is not too strong a tactic.
However, as you start saving the Slimes of Boingburg or abducting 30 members of a monster species, you’ll find they’re willing to join your tank crew. Each member has a role or two they excel at and you can command them to switch between them if applicable, so it is possible to recruit some allies to load the cannons while you perform some sabotage or even have them attempt it for you. The game tries to keep any overly powerful crew members from you until you’re doing post-game optional content, which is a wise decisions since you could sabotage other tanks from within too easily if your crew was completely competent and capable. Instead, the optional fights up the difficulty by the time you have the high end items, and while tank battles aren’t hugely difficult during the story, they are constantly involved and do require you to remain attentive and always thinking of what must be done to survive.
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is definitely built around these big tank battles, but it makes sure to give some love to the rest of the adventure too. Rebuilding Boingburg is a satisfying task and having new characters in your town not only serves as a pleasant marker of progress, but each new slime who heads home gives you a free item or alchemy recipe. Some will have optional activities tied to them like one that lets you paint a mural in the palace, another opens a museum for statues to commemorate recruiting monster allies, and the optional content comes from the battle arena that opens to the left of town. Literally every slime is a different type, some admittedly recolors but rescuing one always has that moment of popping open the chest they’re trapped in and wondering what they’ll look like, what item they’ll give, and if they’ll be one of the important residents who open up something new to do in town between excursions.
The actual exploration of areas also makes sure not to settle into a rut either. There is definitely the joy of building up a huge item hoard so you can always upgrade your tank, customize your ammo, or mix up something new with Krak Pot’s alchemy, but these areas also have little boss fights and gimmick to ensure getting around is still an enjoyable task that never gets too samey. You’ll head to the bluff and find ramps Rocket slides down to gain speed and bowl through obstacles, you’ll hop into a Golem mech to break through areas of the flying fortress, and you’ll try to find the safe way to cross water currents while grabbing the goodies on the other side. In fact, many enemies are perhaps not threatening to your life so much as they are to your work, the player needing to figure out how to incapacitate creatures like the dragons with tortoise shells so you can safely carry items to the carts. There are also legitimate boss fights to be found during the Slime portions of play, and while none of them are too tough, they do ask for a different approach to fighting than you’d usually see elsewhere. While it does have a few minigames and busywork sidequests that aren’t much to talk about, so much of the game connects together in a satisfying way that it always feels like you’re working towards a variety of meaningful and rewarding goals.
THE VERDICT: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime takes an innocuous little Slime’s adventure and turns it into an incredible journey of exploration, collection, and bombastic tank battles. Nearly every action can work towards a variety of goals all at once while the constant pay offs to those efforts make the game an addicting play. Even simple actions can end up producing something strategically helpful or just delightfully charming, and in between the resource gathering and management you’ll find fun puzzle solving and strategic tank fights. The low difficulty means the game won’t demand too much out of a player, but everything remains involved and most importantly enjoyable even when divorced from their productive purpose. A silly plot full of goofy characters and puns just makes it charming on top of all of the mechanical excellence.
And so, I give Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime for Nintendo DS…
A GREAT rating. If Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime was just a game where sometimes you adventure around as a slime and other times you pop into a huge tank for combat, it would still be an enjoyable little experience since both of them put enough challenge and variety into their design to keep you entertained. However, by having a huge layer of interconnection on top of those gameplay styles, suddenly it feels like you’re always building towards something that will likely pay off rather soon. Rescuing slimes expand your town and the activities therein, grabbing items give you additional arsenal options or can be used for other purposes like alchemy, and even the enemies who are trying to stop your collection efforts can be thrown on the cart and eventually turned into allies. Every tool in your tank is something you put in the effort to acquire and they come in a wide enough variety that tank battles don’t just boil down to blasting each other with whatever deals the most damage. The game is able to manage all of this without feeling like it’s tedious because it doesn’t require too much work to remain competitive but you always feels the impact of your effort, and certain areas definitely try to make sure to give you breaks from throwing things on carts so you can enjoy a little puzzle or special fight instead. Throw in some of the corny humor, a world devoted to wordplay, and plenty of simple but appealing monster designs and Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is a game that’s hard not to love.
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is actually the sequel to a fairly similar Slime-focused game for the Game Boy Advance, so while technically the little blob got his first starring role three years early, Rocket hit the international stage with a surprisingly excellent action adventure. Charming, rewarding, and hiding a surprising amount of optional but enticing depth, it’s easy to be bummed out that we didn’t get the original GBA game or Rocket Slime’s 3DS sequel, but at least the fates aligned to let this lovely little game make it stateside.