"I'm making mac and cheese and NOBODY CAN STOP ME!"

It feels so rare to find a game with quite literally nothing to offer. It is a Narrative Puzzle Video Game with a Bad Narrative, Bad Puzzles, Bad Video, and Bad Game. Let's break down these one by one.

The story in this game is QUITE BAD. Not only are almost none of the jokes and comedic antics found throughout this game all that funny, but the pacing of the story is so awful that it makes you get whiplash at multiple moments. One positive I'll give this is that this whiplash pacing can lead to scenes that are unintentionally hilarious (like the aforementioned Mac and Cheese scene) but it just reeks of laziness, not helped by the fact that the characters love to blatantly shout all of the metaphors and comparisons in the story out of fear for people not getting it. At least the Voice Acting is okay..?

This game was very clearly designed as a baby's first detective game so I was not expecting puzzles on the level of Ace Attorney, Return of the Obra Dinn, LA Noire, or even Danganronpa, but what I was expecting was.. any actual gameplay. The puzzles in this game are so brain-dead easy that you might not even RECOGNIZE THEM as puzzles until they're over. Again, this game was very clearly made for very young kids, so I'm not expecting too difficult puzzles, but the E-rated Pikmin 4, Luigi's Mansion 3, and Origami King are all on this console as well, so considering this is a $50 GAME you could definitely do a little more than this.

All of this would already put this game pretty low for me, like a 5 or something, but the real Achilles heel of this game is the fact that despite the sheer lack of gameplay or narrative substance, this game looks DIABOLICALLY BAD. These are the guys who made the Pokepark games on Wii AND the first Detective Pikachu on 3DS and, for those system's graphical capabilities, they didn't look bad. But this game looks absolutely HORRID. Not just in comparison to other switch games, but even compared to almost ALL of the other pokemon games on THIS SAME SYSTEM. The Lighting in this game is just straight-up nonexistent, the character models feel like they're plucked straight off the 3DS with very minimal upscaling, and the colors look incredibly washed out and drab. There are mobile games that look better than this. This might actually be the second-ugliest game I played this year behind Gollum because AT LEAST GARTEN OF BANBAN HAS LIGHTING. A lot of reviews that are a little softer on the game, criticize this game's graphics but praise its overall art direction with pokemon being seen as more alive than just animals. And to that, I say, go play Pokepark 2 on the wii.

Now, if this game was just a $20-$40 e-shop title that was thrown on switch after a tumultuous development period, then this review wouldn't be as long. I wouldn't even really care that much. But, and I must reiterate, this game is $50. And for $50, you get an incredibly short game with basically no gameplay, a poorly paced and unengaging story, puzzles so easy that even a baby could solve them, and, quite possibly, the worst visuals from any Nintendo Published game.... ever? (at least by the standards of when they were released) This game signals to me as direct proof, that the poor technical states of the Pokemon series have NOTHING to do with the individual developers of these games but with how Nintendo and The Pokemon Company keep imposing incredibly strict deadlines on these devs to keep pumping out games all the time, which is something Game Freak itself has acknowledged and is saying they're trying to move away from.

So I really hope that this game ages a lot worse in the future.

The idea of an RPG collectathon is pretty neat and I liked how you used your monsters to traverse the world, but the game just falls flat in so many places. Combat is dull since most of the damage is done by AI controlled monsters, there are only like 15 different varieties of monster to recruit in a game about exploring with a custom party of monsters (there are like 70 total monsters but most of them are just recolors), and some of the super important legendary story treasures you need to beat the game are just laying around in the overworld with no plot attached to them. It kind of feels like the game was rushed out to meet some kind of deadline, which is really weird since Square Enix released a bunch of other low-budget JRPGs (Valkyrie Elysium, Star Ocean 6, Harvestella, DioField Chronicle, etc) within a few months of this game. It hurts to rate a DQ game this low since it still oozes charm and I enjoyed playing it, but it's by far the weakest DQ game I've played, spin-off or otherwise. It's not a bad game and I'd still say it's worth checking out if you like the idea of it, but don't go in expecting too much.

Definitely see why it was so beloved back when the original came out : the atmosphere is on point, the visuals are really impressive both for a 2002 game and for a switch remaster, and building such a non-linear metroidvania in 3D sure is a feat. Unfortunately the combat is pretty bad, the backtracking required is ridiculous and never in a Metroid did I ask myself "where tf do I go now" so often.
While I really liked it, all of those faults prevent it from being one of my favourite metroids, and prevent me from seeing it as the intemporal masterpiece like so many do.