izigame.me

I was hoping the game would be similar in quality to Dragon Quest Builders 2 for a DQ spin-off game, but it's not even close. This is an exploration game that does everything in it's power to make exploration less fun. The combat is almost entirely determined by your AI monster companions, who will spend the majority of a battle standing around not doing anything. When they finally do decide to attack you'll be lucky if they actually make contact with anything. In the meantime you can tickle enemies with your dagger or shoot pellets at them, both of which are wildly ineffective compared to the damage your monsters will do.
Every few minutes while out exploring the screen will flash and tell you that you're getting tracked by a rival gang. This is probably the most annoying part of the game because the AI is so utterly braindead that your best bet is just to sit there and make sure you spawn the rival gang in an open and flat location so your monsters have easy access to them. Otherwise they'll spawn clipped through terrain or on uneven surfaces and your monsters won't be able to figure out how to get to them. There isn't much of a story which is a huge let-down especially after playing DQB2 which has a massive storyline to play through.
Every time you return to your base the treasure forecast changes and I think the game expects you to constantly swap out your team to match the forecast, but the system is so annoying that it's best to just completely ignore it. You've got multiple teams of monsters that are sent out on missions that are unavailable to be put in your party and up to 10 equippable medal slots on every monster so changing them all around every time you come back to your base just isn't worth the hassle.
The Forte system is an absolute mess. There are 5 Fortes: Scan, Sprint, Launch, Glide, and Stealth. You can only have 3 of them in your party at a time and Launch, Glide, and Stealth are absolutely necessary to fully explore maps. So if you wanted to bring a Scan monster for locating Recipe/Medal chests, it will be pointless since you'll likely be missing a required Forte to get to the chests anyway.
The map designs are also a disaster. You'll be walking in an area and see a level 10 monster standing next to a level 40 because for whatever reason they designed the game so that you're exploring 1/4th of an island, then 1/4th of the next island, etc. instead of designing it so that you would complete 1 island before moving onto the next. This basically gets rid of any sense of progression in the game, especially combined with the lack of any sort of linear storyline.
Tldr: An exploration game that lacks any sort of fun exploration