Breeding has never been more fun! (take that, Ultimate Breeding Simulator 2000!)
The year was 1999. It was an exciting year for pretty much every platform out there. Early in the year, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri let players launch into space on their PC's. Silent Hill showed PSOne owners what Los Angeles really looked like after dark. Mario Party on the N64 showed a whole generation that, well, no one really wanted Mario at their birthday parties after all. EverQuest brought mobsters and their victims together in a way that was unheard of before. Near the end of the year, a small game was released for Game Boy that didn't have the hype or fanfare of Unreal Tournament, or Soul Caliber. What it did have though, was a lot of addictive game play. Dragon Warrior Monsters was finally here and it epitomized the monster collecting genre for years to come.
This was a time when heroes in video games didn't have long, fancy names (like Altair), and to be a hero, you only had to be three pixels tall by three pixels wide (and apparently wear a strange blue outfit). The basic plot is simple enough, you start out with a basic, cute and cuddly slime, and wander off to different levels, accessed by spinning portals known as gates, and proceed to catch and level up other monsters (who get less cute and cuddly as the game goes on, sort of like Joan Rivers). Catching monsters is easy early on, but soon enough, you'll have to bribe them with meats like beef jerkys, pork chops and ribs (this was before the Veggie Monster March of 2000). You can have up to three monsters with you, but the ones you don't want to use right away can be safely stored on a monster farm, where they'll get experience and level up as well, but not nearly as fast as the ones who are in your party.
A big part of the game is breeding, of course (just like real life!). The game has over 200 monsters to collect and battle with. Breeding gives you more powerful monsters, with higher stats at lower levels than its parents. Monsters have four main stats, consisting of strength (how hard they whack other monsters), defense (ability to withstand getting whacked), agility (determines the order your team gets whacked), and intelligence (determines how fast monsters learn skills as well as battle tactics). Monsters have to be at least level ten to breed, though waiting until they're much higher is probably a good idea since the stats of the parents affect the starting stats of the baby. The baby will come with stats that are one half of the average of both parents' stats, rounded up. For example, if one parent has a strength of 500 and one has 300, that would total 800, which would average to 400, half of which is 200, so the baby would start with 200 strength.
Aside from being semi-cute, babies also get lots of skills! It learns the three moves its type naturally learns, also learning the three moves each of its parents would naturally get. In addition, it also gets to learn any skills that the parents knew. This makes for some monsters with pretty interesting movesets (those fire breathing unicorns you've always wanted are now a possibility).
Breeding also gives your new monsters a plus after their name, like "slime +2", etc (just like in real life! I think my ex's real name was Chris +3). This has a few advantages; including raising the level cap on a monster as well as slightly raising the stat increases in attack and hp. Those pluses also give monsters a chance to inherit its parents' natural resistances.
In battle, monsters can choose from three options, charge, mixed or cautious. Basically charge is full on attack, mixed is use a defensive spell and cautious is heal or buff the party. How well and what spells/attacks they use depend on their personality (monsters can have over 25 different personality types).
The graphics and sound are appropriately dragon warrior-esque, with monsters looking great overall. Boss monsters look pretty imposing, until they join you, then they're not nearly as scary. The tunes are your standard dragon warrior fare, pretty much.
Controls are as easy as turning on a light switch (if your light switch requires simple d-pad presses to move your lights and "A" button presses to shoot high intensity beams at your neighbors).
In short, Dragon Warrior Monsters may not be the prettiest, most complex, fully featured monster collecting game out there, but its definitely addictive and a whole lot of fun. If you're in the mood for an old school game to tide you over, you could do a lot worse than Dragon Warrior Monsters.