Dragon Quest Monster joker 1 has great graphics beautiful areas and Animations but lacks in everything else.
The story is cliche you can predict everything that's coming before it happens (darkonium crystal)the soundtrack sucks due to it's repetitive nature the theme is good but i got sick of hearing it.
The game is short and very grindy plus empty, most of the time you Will be just grinding your monsters without any story or character development happening(since the Cast in this game is pretty small and bad).
The lack of post game content is another issue,after beating it there is almost nothing left to do.
If you don't have a whole lot of time on your hands just play joker 2 it's way better than this.

In Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, there's a monster that's only obtainable if you catch all the monsters in the game and fill up your Monster List. Unfortunately, the game includes this special monster in the criteria, meaning it's literally impossible to get this monster - and, in turn, 100% - without hacking.

...although you're going to have to hack the game anyways to get 100% because some of the monsters are also tied to the online multiplayer and well. You're SOL there too since the DS online servers are down.

As for the actual game, it's pretty lackluster as far as a Dragon Quest Monsters game goes because the monster list is essentially Square-Enix looking at Dragon Quest VIII and going "well this game is popular, so most of the monsters you befriend are monsters from this game!" and it honestly feels like major cost-cutting in a game that's already cutting corners by having a good chunk of the monster list being recolors of other monster models. Not the worst monster collecting game but there are far better out there.

Great game, my 2nd Monsters game completed.

Scouting monsters, leveling them up, breeding them, leveling those, breeding, etc. never gets old. One of the best gameplay loops around.

The environments were great, really surprised me how much the DS could do 3D environments. They were varied enough as well.

Music was fine, some bangers but most of the time its the same couple of songs. Almost like the DQ curse.

Story was neat, middle part where I had to collect crystals seemed weird but it ended up paying off.

Unfortunately that fucking slow slow run speed almost completely turned me off the game. Makes everything feel like a chore and why I had to knock off 2 whole stars. I had to use a cheat for 2x run speed to even play this.

This is one of the most graphically appealing 3D environment DS games. It even has monsters running around the overworld which is both a first for the franchise and something extremely uncommon for the genre on DS. Very few RPGs were this ambitious on handhelds in 2006. The combat is standard turn based combat where you control three monsters in a 3v3 format. The way you scout and fuse monsters is moderately akin to the SMT/Persona series. The story isn't anything crazy but it does have a few twists in its relatively short run time.

This game's sequel was one of the first games I've ever played but I never went back to play this one for some reason until now. I played the older Monsters games first. The first two Monsters games were great GameBoy monster tamers but clearly showed their age. I did not enjoy Caravan Heart. That said, this game and its sequel reign supreme when it comes to the genre during this era. They're both quite fun and I'd still recommend them to people today.

I do prefer the sequel for having giant monsters, a more interesting setting, and some QoL changes but it's hard to say I was disappointed in this game in anyway at all. I guess movement speed is a little slow but eh. Overall a wonderful experience. Peak DS monster tamer duology.