I love how they lock away an amazing-sounding concept and probably the best part of that game behind a 10000 hour+ grind through some animu bullshit. Instead of making a more accessible game based on the concept, which would probably attract attention from non-weeaboos.
well it's more like a bonus mode in that it's a lot shorter compared to the main game and besides it makes a lot more sense after you go trough the original story
in the original story one of the baddie take someone as a hostage and the heroes are like "*gasp* an hostage? what do we do?"
in the evil side the baddie take someone as a hostage and the hero is like "an hostage? who cares" and then proceed to blast the baddie away which is like "bu... bu... i had an hostage,you can't attack someone who has an hostage!"
anyway bebpo convinced me to give it a try to dragon quest road victory but i'm not going to make a thread about it because it's pretty much as i tought,the moon language really brings me down the enjoyement of the game
basicaly it works like this,at the start of each battle you pick a job between warrior,mage,martial artist and beastmaster,if you pick a job that it's not beastmaster you select 2 monsters,an armor,a weapon and a shield,warrior use swords,wizard uses wands and martial artist use claws,beastmaster uses 3 monster instead,your character have all a single HP value but it's shared between them so the game just keep track of the total (so say if your character has 750 HP monster 1 has 500 and monster 2 has 900 your HP total is 1950) battle are divided in round and at the start of each round you either decide to pick attack A or attack B,the attack have different effect,usualy most monster have a single attack and a group attack or a single attack and a status effect attack (for example the slime has a bash attack or an attack that tries to blind the opponents)
between rounds you can chose to pick a special card depicting a dragon quest hero,you start the game with the dragon quest 8 hero card (which increase your damage) and you get more as you keep playing,i got the moonbroke princess (which i have no idea what she does thanks to the moon language) alena (which i think increase your agility) and ragnar (which i think increase your defense)
pressing the right attack button as the attack hits your opponent ala paper mario increase a gauge (the gauge also fills at the start of each round,the less time you spend making your decision,the quicker it fills) when this gauge is full you can pull off a special attack which is usualy powerfull enough to end the match,before you pull off this attack the game ask you to chose a card but beside's the animation the card you pick doesn't seems to make much of a difference
the animation are all quite cool,in ragnar special attack he teams up with a healslime and he sends the healslime crashing toward the opposing party,kryle special attack consist of him casting whack over and over until he gets pissed off that whack never works

,some team can pull off combination attack,one time i faced a jailcat,a muddy hand and one of those rock that explode,the jailcat started running atop the rock then the muddy hand throwed both of them at the opposing party and then they both exploded

,when you finish the arcade mode you get to fight one of the final boss from a random dragon quest,i fought the dragonlord from dragon quest 1 and he had an attack where a throne would appear behind him,he would sit and then snaps his finger confusing your party member
anyway after picking the card the game is pretty straightforward in what to do (and in fact maybe even a little too simple,most match seems to dictate by whoever dodge/gets a critical hit/fills his special gauge first) but there seems to be a lot of variant when picking what cards to play making it a pain in the ass when considering the moon language as you have no way to discover what are the different property of any attacks and cards beside trial and error

just to make an example some monster seems to change attack depending on what class you pick,is this a secret or does the game tell you behind all those weird letters? nobody knows!
there is also tons of loading before each battle which is somewhat annoying