TL;DR: Just don't think of it as a Dragon Quest game.

I made it a personal mission to complete this game despite it not being the type of game I generally enjoy.  All things Dragon Quest are my bag (baby), but I'm never a fan of games that rely on monsters to attack, like Blue Dragon.  Fortunately, DQ Treasures is nowhere near that.

Instead, the monsters aid you in battle as AI fighters, and you have total control of your character, whether that be Erik or Mia.

For those that didn't connect the dots, Erik and Mia are not new characters. They're the younger versions of the Erik and Mia that were first introduced in Dragon Quest XI.  Treasures presents itself as basically a prequel to the events of that game in terms of the ages of Erik and Mia, but it's a spinoff; there's no direct connect that I can see.

The point of the game is to collect treasure, but you're also fighting rival treasure pirates and hunters alike. There are different ways you can play; you can focus on the treasure or you can go poaching others.  At times, they will attack your base and you'll need to fight them off.  Sometimes you'll find them out in the field and you can steal their flag.

But understand: this is absolutely NOT a Dragon Quest game.  The best way to describe this game: if you took a former Square Enix employee who recently left but got authorization to make their own "love letter" tribute game, you'd get this.  It's basically a celebration of the history of Dragon Quest that just happens to have a game baked into it.

So, here's what I thought basically.

What I Liked

✅ Music.  Pretty much every track from the series is accounted for in some way, but the vast majority are from the newer ones.  Was pleasantly surprised to hear the legendary tracks from Dragon Quest VIII; unfortunately they're midi and not the orchestrated, but they're well done for what they are.

✅ Difficulty.  While I'm sure there are people who fully expect to get "rekt" and will say the game sucks because they don't, I felt like the balance was nearly perfect.  At no point is there an extreme difficulty spike and pretty much every boss is beatable with what you've got.  Each boss has some sort of weakness, and sometimes you'll get popups with hints as to what that is.

✅ The World Sizes. These are LARGE worlds.  Frankly the exploration is so free and open that it puts "Tales of Aionios" (aka Xenoblade Chronicles 3) to shame and that's crazy, but it's true.  Even verticality is amazing; you can basically go anywhere that you can see if you have the right combination of monsters.

✅ Battle Engine.  It's a simplistic battle engine, but they added a few things that make it much more fun than Dragon Quest Builders series by far.  It feels like they took Builders and Heroes and created a new hybrid, which by mid-game became more enjoyable (but see below).

What I Didn't Like

👎 Treasure Hunting. And you're like "huh??"  The thing is, the early parts are cool and fun.  As you go though, it starts to turn into a slog, and I'm not really sure why.  I think a better mechanic would not have focused SO much on the treasure collecting and instead had it be a means to an end.  You can always focus on the mainline treasure hunts, but then your characters will be grossly underpowered.

👎 "Catapult".  A fancy name for a slingshot, this is your main character's secondary weapon, but as you play, you'll quickly discover that it serves better as your primary as you run-and-gun.  This is the only way you can heal allies and/or apply buffs and for the most part, it's the best way to do damage to just about every enemy you come across.  The problem is that it's not easy to come across money and the farming for supplies for pellets is dry and un-fun.  Yet you will find yourself constantly needing to buy or make pellets just to manage battles unless you're a sadist and want to use the dagger.  The final boss in particular took every pellet I had and that's after I had stocked up - unfortunately, one of the crystals requires you spend almost $800k, which took basically the entire game to build up, so I didn't have a lot left for the pellets needed.

👎 Battle Engine.  Yes, I praised it above.  Here's the main problem though: defense.  See, attacking isn't so bad, it's making sure you don't get hit in return.  The camera isn't really friendly for this especially when navigating the Snarl, an underground dungeon, but more importantly, the timing is not precise.  You'll have your "Catapult" mid draw, doing awesome damage, when you notice some ghost is creeping toward you.  You know what you need to do - dodge roll out of the way, so you time this, but your character is a split second too slow to put the "Catapult" away and thus doesn't dodge.  You get juggled in the air.  It's annoying and it happened a lot.  Builders had a similar issue where it was just too slow for the type of precision you needed.  It's a shame, because it's otherwise fun once you get used to it.

👎 Voice Acting.  It's not that it's bad, it's lacking.  SEVERELY lacking.  It does that nonsense where there are very few voiced lines and instead some characters just say one or two words but the rest is text.  This got old really fast.

👎 Lack of Cutscenes. There are some, but very few. When they're there, they're awesome.  But the sheer lack of them makes me feel like the game is overpriced in comparison.

👎 Graphics.  I'm convinced this game was originally intended for either mobile or possibly even the 3DS.  Everything is muddy and lacks detail, the draw distance isn't that great and you can tell from the interface that it was designed for some sort of touch.  It's simple enough to use it, just saying that overall, I never got the sense that the Switch was truly pushed for a visually great experience and instead someone tried to put out something that was basically acceptable.  What's worse, the interface being apparently perfect for touch yet never using the Switch's touch screen is rather annoying.  It might have actually helped with some of the combat.

👎 Excessive Backtracking.  This got old, REAL fast.  It felt like the last third of the game, you're just being bounced around like a ping-pong ball.  Go here, walk to this place, talk to this lady who tells you to go over here and read something, then walk back to her so she can do it again and send you somewhere else.  Over and over this happened.  Normally this isn't an issue if you have warping, but in this game there's no real warp, just a train that requires walking. You can use one of the monsters to "Sprint" to save some time, but the problem is....

👎 Monster Limitations.  You can only have three monsters in your party.  Monsters can help you move faster, jump higher, glide for a distance, scan for treasure or enter low rock formations.  Notice I gave five skills but said you can only have three in the party.  Which means you're almost guaranteed to be forced to go back to base to switch up the party so you can have the right monster in your team. T he scan skill was mostly useless, but the other four were basically mandatory. Normally wouldn't be an issue, except...

👎 Lack of Map Markers.  This is less of an issue if you use the "Active Quest" system, but some may want to just do the quests without this.  The map will show flags for inactive quests in a lighter color, but you can't make your own map markers.  So if you ran across something cool or some path that you couldn't traverse and wanted to mark its location so you could come back to it, you cannot.

👎 As mentioned the last third of the game felt rushed, like they ran out of ideas for the game.  I never finished the train system because what it required I collect was stupid and the quests annoying; so I focused back on the main story to completion.  The ending was completely dissatisfying, and I can almost guarantee I won't ever play the game again.  Which is unfortunate.

The game isn't "terrible".  But it's not worth the price that was asked for it at launch.