I'm hoping for a western release in christmas time for Dragon Quest IX.

A little off-topic here, but was Joker any good? I know it plays different from normal monster catchers and that isn't a problem, but I heard it's very short and isn't up to par with the other DQ games. Was that just trolling or are those valid points?

@ Fossil

It's my least favourite 'Monsters' game by far, though other people love it.

I spent 80 hours on it.  And it brought many great ideas to the table, including intitiating battles through monsters being visable on the map (think Chrono series) and a very broad skill system.  But what I think was the best advancedment was the breeding system, which was made simple for a purpose.  What would take you days to complete in other monster games (like Pokemon as an example) looking at hundreds of select monsters for indavidual stats, you could achieve in a system of select chain monster 'fusion' in Joker and do in leterally hours.

It does have its flaws.  It has less monsters than previous games, there's hardly any 'story' to the game and the more advanced monsters make all the simple fusion process into a nightmare.  But the rest of the game is addicting and well worth it.

Then what's the raitio of monsters compared to say, the second game? Like 40/60 or so?

I donno.  I haven't played the second game.  But there's suppose to be 200 types of monsters to collect in Joker.  I'd say about 20-30 of those are Bosses from past games and the story specific upgrades.

On another note, I just beat DQV.  And it only affirmed my decision that I'm going to send a message to SE on their main website and write them a letter about the horrid localization, after seeing what they did to Grandmaster Nimzo and the Zenithia Dragon....

I just play T'n'T board in Farie Lea today and found 6 Hula Ghoul.

That's become scariest fight i ever against with ,they didn't have heavy hit at all.(only damage 1 or miss on me since my hero lv 35 now.)

But they just keep using Boogie dance(make you keep dancing and unable to do anything)+Sleep kiss+Wired dance(decrease MP) all the time....and mostly it works on me.( -.,-)'

Damn! i hardly do anything but just watch they keep damage 2-3 on me for each turn ,luckily enough i got 2-3 turns to kill'em all finally.But it took 30-40 mins to win this battle.(and HP decrease from 311 to 114 with 0 MP left). ( >_

Oh....about that.  Random bit of advice.  Don't ever cast puff or use the dragon staff on the TnT boards unless you REALLY know what enemies weaknesses are.  I did once and I was sitting there for 10 minutes while a group of enemies resistant to magic kept hitting me for 1 damage each.  And all my guy would do is Inferno.  Every like 15 turns he'd slash one, but they'd just call another helper starting the cycle over....

Slightly OT but the fan translation for the Snes remake of Dragon Quest III is finally out.
Enjoy:
http://www.dqtranslations.com/downlo...tion%20RC1.zip

Is it really done?  Because the fan translation page is still reporting that the menues haven't been finished.

http://ww2.0wnag3.biz:82/mediawiki/index.php/DQIII