It's no secret that Pokémon appeals mainly to children. While many adults indulge in it (myself included), some gamers shy away from its cutesy characters and repetitive, white-knighting stories. But strangely, the same doesn't hold true for the Dragon Quest franchise.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is a more mature Pokémon-style experience. I don't mean that it's full of blood, nudity, or anything that would change the ESRB rating. Joker 2 seamlessly blends DQ's traditional role-playing mechanics with the addictive monster collecting in Pokémon. This mixture creates something much more strategic and unforgiving than either series.

The Monsters

Capturing Pokémon is fairly simple. You battle your prospective new animal and weaken it to the point it no longer resists being sucked into a Pokéball. That's a rather simplistic view, but many battles go this way. Most times you have to weaken a Pokémon to its last hit point. Otherwise, it's still too strong to catch. The challenge is measuring how much health you deduct each round without completely overpowering your enemy.

Joker 2 is about a show of strength rather than beating down your opponent. Your party must use its abilities to dazzle potential new monsters. The stronger your trained party is, the more chance they have in appealing to others.

Building your party is a slow and deliberate process as opposed to Pokémon's "gotta catch 'em all" tactics and depends on skill rather than persistently chipping away at a monster's health.

The Environment

The DQM: Joker games take place in a vibrant 3D world. Much like Dragon Quest 9, battles aren't random. Enemies roam the world map waiting for weary players to wander into their line of sight. Joker 2 continues this design but adds a heart-pounding twist.

Joker 2 takes place on a tropical island full of monsters, some of which are super-powered giants. At any moment, these behemoths can appear and attack the player. Early on, they are impossible to defeat and must be avoided at all costs. When they appear, the once light-hearted and jaunty music takes on an eerie, industrial quality, and the monsters around you start running for cover.

Pokémon has its fair share of gigantic enemies, but none of them really strike fear in your heart when they appear. The giants in Joker 2 appear at the most inopportune moments and can completely demolish your party if you're unprepared.

In this sense, the hunter becomes the hunted. The title magnifies the idea that you are really dealing with wild beasts. Dragon Quest monsters aren't cuddly creatures most people keep as pets. DQM scouts specialize in communicating with the world's most dangerous animals like real-world zookeepers.

The Strategy

Pokémon does a fairly good job preparing gamers for a world of RPGs. It teaches players how to balance inventories, spell points, and stats. But combat is fairly straightforward once you learn how to play different elemental types off each other and master status-effect attacks.

The DQ Monsters franchise hinges on the idea that players have limited control over their monsters. In a fight, the main character stands behind the party and issues blanket commands. You can control attacks to a point, but the monsters have more say over what they do than the player. Like many Dragon Quest titles, you can set up an attack pattern for NPCs. So if you want a designated healer, you can set a monster to focus on casting support magic rather than attacking. But if no one is gravely injured, that monster is likely to continue smashing away at the enemy until needed.

Dragon Quest Monsters started with the premise that the main character was too weak to fight alone, so he persuaded animals to do it for him. This eventually evolved into the concept that Scouts communicate and appeal to wild creatures to strike up a bargain between them.

If you want to collect, train, and raise a menagerie of dangerous, wild beasts instead of cute, cuddly Pokémon, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 might be for you. It shifts the focus from saving the world to survival and influence. Nothing in the Pokémon universe actively wants to kill you. That doesn't apply to the roaming colossi in Joker 2.