Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker is like a pocket-sized version of Dragon Quest VIII for the PlayStation 2. It features the same charming cel-shading, 3-D environments and basic role-playing game elements as its larger cousin, but strips away most of the story in favor of emphasizing combat. Though perhaps better-suited to the portability of the DS, the battle-centric gameplay may prove too repetitious for some players.

On a secret mission for your dad and the mysterious CELL organization, you enter the Monster Scout Challenge, which will have you scouring the islands of Green Bays for 10 Darkonium crystals. The crystals aren't terribly hard to find, but if you are to have any hope of getting past the creatures that inhabit Green Bays, you'll need to assemble a crackerjack team of monsters to do your fighting for you.

The plot is almost incidental to the point of Joker, which is to capture and train as many monsters as you possibly can. Imagine a Pok?mon game set in the Dragon Quest universe, and you'll have a basic understanding of how the bulk of your in-game time will be spent. As you wander across the islands of Green Bays, you'll encounter hundreds of strange and fanciful monsters of varying strengths and abilities, including Dragon Quest favorites like Hammerhoods and Slimes. The monsters are plainly visible as you explore the islands, making it easy for you to seek out or avoid fights as your situation demands.

Once in battle, Joker swaps the real-time 3-D environment for the turn-based combat with which Dragon Quest (or RPG fans in general) will be quite familiar. You can bring up to three main party members and three substitutes with you into battle, then issue the usual fight/use-spell/run-away-screaming commands. The animations are kept to a minimum, ensuring that the action stays speedy.

If you think your opponent would make a valuable addition to your roster, you can attempt to 'scout' it by showing off how powerful your current monster team is. Each member of your team puts on a show of force, raising the new monster's meter by a certain percentage based on how impressed it is by your efforts. The higher the meter is at the end of the show, the more likely the new creature is to join your ranks. Monsters weaker than your team will be easier to impress, while those that are stronger will be more difficult to woo.

Although it's possible to get the meter all the way up to 100 percent, it's not necessary in order to recruit a new monster. So long as you make some kind of impression on the prospective recruit, you've got a shot of winning it over, which means that you can try to scout each and every creature you meet, regardless of how strong it is in relation to your team. The likelihood that a monster that can crush you like a bug will join you is slim, but those rare occasions when you beat the odds can be quite exciting.
As your monsters level up, they earn skill points that can be used to beef up their personal stats or allow them to learn useful spells. How you allocate skill points can become particularly important if you decide to start synthesizing the members of your menagerie. Synthesis blends two monsters to create a creature that carries over skills and abilities from both parents. Send too many monsters down the same skill path and you'll find yourself with a decidedly lopsided team.

How much you enjoy Joker will depend largely on your tolerance for the repetitious nature of grinding. Although the islands are conveniently arranged based on the overall strength of their inhabitants, you'll still have to devote a great deal of time to leveling up your team members in order to make any kind of progress. Just taking a few steps past the scouting post -- your home base of operations on each island -- can require an hour or more of grinding to keep your critters from meeting an untimely end.

Even without monster interruption, getting around Joker's 3-D environments can prove a bit frustrating. Although your fellow scouts and the more than 200 monsters you encounter are all very well-designed, the islands themselves are a bit bland and sometimes not very well-defined. The lack of detail can sometimes make it tricky to distinguish where a hill ends and a path begins, for example, leaving you running in place, wondering why you're not getting anywhere. The camera can also be a bit problematic. Pressing the left or right shoulder button will swing it around in the appropriate direction, which is fine when you're standing still, but slightly more awkward when you're on the move. It's not a game-killer, but you will more than likely end up being charged by monsters that you can't actually see.

You can battle other Monster Scouts over Wi-Fi, either in Chance Encounters or in the Wildcard World Cup. A Chance Encounter is a quick match against a nearby DS owner who is also in Chance Encounter mode, while the World Cup lets you try your best against downloadable teams. It's not quite as good as actually being able to battle it out online, but it's better than nothing.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker has a simple premise but an ample amount of depth for those who can get into its gotta-catch-'em-all vibe. Scouting, leveling and synthesizing monsters is an OCD gamer's dream, but the necessary grinding will prove too tedious for some.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by Crispy Gamer.