Played through the demo for Dragon Quest Monsters 3: The Dark Prince through an emulator. It's honestly much more fleshed out and beefy than what I expected it to be.
>The Good:
Graphically, it's nowhere as bad as people made it out to be. Some of the screenshots for this game are downright crusty, but the environments are all fine and the monsters and characters are either ripped out of other modern Dragon Quest games or remade to look about as good as they can. The animations of most critters are also really fun, both in the overworld and during the battle scene. This goofy feller is my favorite so far.
Music is mostly good, the usual themes you can expect to see from Dragon Quest, occasionally some new song plays for the briefest of moments but if you have played ANY Dragon Quest, you already know most of them.
Voice Acting is surprisingly competent, some characters clearly put more gusto in their performances than others, Rose sounded like she was going to be annoying at first but she ended up growing on me for how nice she is, the only one that has bad lines or a bad performance is ironically Psaro himself in the five-six things he's allowed to say. One of his jumping lines sounds like he's seen a cockroach on the ground and got startled.
Gameplay loop is the usual for monster-catcher type games, you recruit monsters based on how infamous you and your team are in that region, they join you with up to 4 monsters active on screen and other 4 in your reserve. Additionally, to speed up the grind, all monsters (even those stored in a paddock if you have caught more than 8) gain the same amount of EXP, so you don't have to farm shit for the eventual monster synthesis part of the game.
As for the difficulty, the game so far is extremely easy, which I think is obvious given that it's just a demo of the beginning of the game. Though don't let that fool you, they let you explore a pretty sizable chunk of the overworld before the end of the demo, and you get to catch a respectable amount of monsters (limit is set to 1000 monsters in the paddock).
The underworld areas are surprisingly well thought out, you really feel like you're playing from the perspective of a future villain who sees nothing wrong in dark skies pierced by lighting while monsters roam about talking about shit like what they're gonna eat for dinner or how much of a cheapskate the local shop owner is.
<The Bad:
The world is so irredeemably empty and bland. Somehow the series has regressed from DQ Heroes 2 to DQ11 to DQ Treasures in terms of how lively the world is. There is no real landmark to base your exploration, so I ended up involuntarily backtracking plenty of times because of the changing seasons making places look different all the time. I guess they give you Zoom/Ruura very early on to mitigate this, but it's still annoying that you can only travel by looking at the map and not by remembering this or that place. A lot of hidden loading zones, plus non-hidden loading screens for entering certain areas.
Psaro is nimble, but his mobility is severely limited as he can only jump and run. He can't grab onto ledges, sprint or do any kind of interesting type of movement. Normally this isn't a problem as his walking speed is pretty fast and most monsters are too dumb or slow to catch up to you, but several times you will see a spot you think you can reach by jumping but it's always ever so higher than you think. It doesn't help that a lot of the obstacles are "Season-Specific": you have to wait for a specific season (which pass in a few minutes each) to be able to use specific shit, for example, vines are only climbable during Summer when they're in full bloom, or a waterfall gets frozen in Winter, revealing a hidden cave. In practice this makes every environment a confusing mess and if you miss your chance at getting one monster that only spawns in Spring, too bad, gotta wait like 10 minutes to try again.
While the voice acting is decent, I don't think many of the voices "fit" the characters they've been given to. Some Mewgician sounds more like an old man than a feline monster, Slimes are bizarrely manly, that kinda stuff.
The censorship in the game is also very weird. On the one hand, they keep a healthy dose of hot ladies, as made clear by the absolutely stacked bunny girl in Endor and by letting monsters talk about death, killing and so on. However, the game also censors the weirdest things, everyone has heard about the Maya costume change (super stupid, especially since she's a slut in her own backstory), but there's also several small things, like "Master" and "Slave" being unusable words for monster names, however "Drag Queen" is perfectly acceptable, plus they're no longer Monster Masters or Tamers, they're Monster "Wranglers", which won't stop reminding me of TF2. I heard some monster names were also changed during (((Localization))) , but I honestly can't remember which ones since I am so used to the enemies I ignore the stat screens entirely.
The music comes and goes as it pleases. I don't know if it's an emulator thing, but some areas are dead silent with occasional ambience, while others have music playing. The shadows of several characters are also missing, really disappointing especially after DQ11 spoiled me in that regard.
Overall, I'll probably play with the finished version when it comes out and decide halfway through if the censorship and nitpicks are worth not owning a physical copy of the game. It's unusual to see such a big demo for a game that is just around the corner, though, so that's fun.