strange entry that i ended up coming to terms with eventually. the budget was absolutely not evenly applied to this game but unlike most games where this is true there's way more care and effort put in to the latter half of the game than the former. lots of odd narrative choices and callbacks to the previous two games, as well as attempts to spice up the series competitively (4 slot max-slotters are insane, but capable of being overcome with careful party setup, which is neat) and near the end of the main story, which has much tougher bosses than the past couple games' postgames. also gave us multi-palette fusion-transferrable shinies - all this cool stuff lets me look past the wonkiness a little.

The first two Monsters Joker games were some of the few 3D world RPG games on the original DS. This 3DS sequel takes all the best qualities of those games and pumps them up with tons of quality of life changes. Battles are now 4v4 instead of 3v3, assuming you're not using MASSIVE monsters that take up multiple slots. Every single of the 500/700+ (depending on which version of the game you're playing) monsters is ridable. Yes even the ones that are the size of mountains! I love how the story is a bit more sci fi than most other Dragon Quest games are. The original of this world, the tie ins to other games, the islands floating in space setting, and nearly everything about it was interesting. This is one of the greatest Dragon Quest games and monster tamer games ever made.

Read my review of the enhanced Professional version of the game here:
https://www.backloggd.com/games/dragon-quest-monsters-joker-3-professional/