izigame.me

I wish I could still refund this, but that aside, this game is only worth it on a deep sale, like under $20 or for very young children. Even then, it reminds me of the N64/PS era collect-a-thons, but with nothing interesting to keep you going.
Story: It's your typical JRPG MacGuffin quest with some of the goofiness of DQ. Just a pinch. Your not missing anything, other than the vikings are portrayed more as adoptive parents than the cruel slave owners they're made out to be in DQ11. I think most people will be rolling their eyes or not reading anything. Kids under 7 will probably be fine with it.
Visuals/Animation: Fair, nothing great. Animations are sparse, but what is there is okay. The visuals lack variety and look low budget. They're nicely shaded, but there just isn't a lot to see. Granted, this was originally a Swtich game, but this game is on par with games from PS3, like 2015's Dragon Quest Heroes. However, unlike that game, there are only about 20 unique monsters, recolored 5 or more times each (corner cutting is a reoccurring theme with this game).
Gameplay: This is my biggest reason for wanting to return the game. Dragon Quest Heroes, while not my favorite gameplay style is at least fun for most of it's duration. The game is very easy and most of the combat is handled by your 3 party monsters. There is no difference between the games protagonist's Eric and Mia, other than visual and their voice. In addition to dagger attacks, there are slingshot attacks that do all the typical Dragon Quest spells. however it is a pain to use because your monsters and the enemy are running amok and even with a lock on, other monsters will be moving in and out of line of sight, blocking your target or you'll be getting attacked. Add to the ammo being limited and using the slingshot isn't fun. A cool down timer would've made this so much better. The other thing the game wants you to do is farms tons of materials for crafting and recruiting. It's incredibly tedious even though you can buy some. Just managing all the ingredients, realizing your missing one thing and having to go grind it for this or that. I mean this could work if there was less crafting and ingredients. Oh and if combat was fun.
Your monsters have 5 different uses outside of battle depending on their type. The can be a mount, a short trampoline, a hang glider, a resource scanner, or a stealth puddle. There's some very, very obvious little puzzles you solve with some of these. The mount is absolutely needed because Mia/Erik's base move speed is dreadful. Most go on overly long cool downs after using them. Even if you accidentally call the wrong monster, you get a long cool down. Ugh.
There are also random "dungeon" portals you can discover. I use dungeons in quotes because they're just a series of 5-10 fights until you get to the boss. Then you might get a medal, which can be equipped give a stat boost. Not exciting, but that's equipment in this game. These medals can be obtained other ways, but they're relatively rare. They are the one semi exciting thing you can find (not as a treasure in the game's sense though).
Then there's the "treasures". You dig these up (with your knife lol) after finding them in a little hot/cold mini game, often just by walking near their location. The animations is about 2 seconds too long and you will start to dread digging up treasure, especially because it doesn't have any immediate benefit. In fact it's a burden in some ways because your monsters have a chance to drop treasure when attacked, which you can then pick up again. It's not a huge deal, just incredibly tedious (notice a theme?). Treasure will respawn in the same places over and over again, even next to treasure hunting "gangs" (a la One Piece, but not as cool) which will hilariously make you question how these gangs are any threat to winning the treasure contest at all. Maybe they know these treasures suck too.
Now you might be think, surely these treasures give you cool powers, equipment, or items like DQ games tend to do. No, no, and no. Treasure are past object from other DQ franchises, many of them never brought to the West. On top of that, they had the audacity to make generic things into treasures worth millions to whomever is evaluating the treasure. Things like a pointy hat or boxer shorts. There's even pieces of walls from various DQ dungeons for some reason. The only display as 2-D images in stand of sorts and you can only display 3 or so. They might get away with this in Japan, but here it looks like a lazy lack of creativity. Mia had an entire gold fortress in DQ 11. Why is a generic, very common ladder valued at millions to the games characters? There's also a bunch of cards from some DQ Hearthstone knockoff cell phone game with all Japanese text no one bothered to localize (no you can't use them to play a game either, missed opportunity). It's makes the treasures feel pointless and if the story didn't require you to acquire so much arbitrary wealth (that you can't spend, just for points), it would be.
Sound and voice: Music consists of all the Dragon Quest songs you know. There may be some new tracks. There's this one track in a pirate camp with vocals and it's very obnoxious. Thankfully, you're not there long. The voices are good for Mia and Eric (though I think Eric has a different voice actor than in DQ11, sadly), but there is very little dialog outside the first 30 minutes. After that it's one of those games where they only say the first word of a sentence. The monsters are all varying degrees of annoying (looking at you, cute slime) and never shut up (you can't turn this off). The games sound mixing is poor, so mercifully some monsters are tough to hear.
All in all DQ Treasures is a big let down. I'm not sure who this is for, outside of huge DQ Japanese fans who will apparently buy anything DQ branded. It's just painfully mediocre to slightly below average and to top it off, SquareEnix put very little budget other than the absolute bear minimum. They didn't even stop to play the game and ask themselves "Is this fun for more than 10 minutes?" Play Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, Skyrim, God Of War Ragnarok; there are so many better ways to spend your time and money. And no, just because a game is aimed at kids (though I struggle to think of how kids today are even aware of DQ outside of Japan), it doesn't get a free pass to be below average, sorry.