Dragon Quest Monsters/YMMV


 * Crowning Moment of Awesome - Your first time catching a Metal Slime. Your first time creating your favorite boss from the original games. Winning your first online tournament match. Capturing your first Size 3 monster in Joker 2 (monsters so big they count as a party in and of themselves).
 * Holy crap, the opening to Dragon Quest Monsters: Battle Road Victory. Every DQ big bad, from 1 to 9. Every Dragon Quest hero, fighting the wrong big bad. The Dragon Quest III hero giving a silent nod to the two kids, who rush up to fight the Dragon Quest version of Satan (Nockturnus) and Beelzebub (Estark), alone. Humanoid!Psaro jumping out of nowhere to take the kids on himself. The whole thing is absolutely nuts and seriously needs a localization.
 * The entire game is this. In order to make the battles more interesting (being that it's an arcade game), instead of staring at a typical DQ battle screen, the battles are more dynamic, similar to Pokémon Stadium, and just about every attack is made very flashy. This is especially true when using the Coup de Graces, which generally involve summoning heroes from the series to kick ass in almost over-the-top ways.
 * Fan Nickname - The ??? Family is often labeled the "Demon Lord" or "Boss" Family, due to the fact that they're all villains from the previous Dragon Quest games.
 * Game Breaker - Metal Slime class monsters. Immune to magic. Immune to most status effects (with the exception of "waste a turn" effects). Utterly disgusting amounts of defense and agility. Great magic casting and mana scores. The only downside is they have jack and squat for hit points, the higher end ones having a single or double digit cap. Oh, and they level up on a level approaching the glacial. Still, make one your healer and not only will your other monsters never die, the enemy AI will constantly cause them to attack your Metal Slime, who will shrug it off.
 * Goddamned Bats - Any monster with a permanent status effect such as poison, or one that drains mana.
 * Nightmare Fuel -
 * The Your Princess Is in Another Castle ending of Caravan Hearts.  There's absolutely no explanation for this until you go back to the old dungeons and research just what in the world is happening, and even then you'll need to spend a few hundred hours grinding your way to a solution.
 * The island sinking in Monsters 2. Every chapter, more and more of the land sinks. Nobody is willing to leave. Eventually you have to cross water just to get in a building...
 * Player Punch - Most strongly seen in Caravan Heart. Only really apt if you played Dragon Quest I and/or Dragon Quest II, especially if you did so as a kid. Nothing comes close to calling the player OLD than seeing the kingdoms you once played through now in ruins.
 * Another example are the ghosts who hope to keep Loto's legend alive, even worse so . He was only doing his job...
 * Tear Jerker: The Darkest Hour ending of Monsters 2, with the island apparently doomed.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks - Caravan Heart's monster breeding system involves you beating up monsters until they drop a soul, then using 2 souls + 1 monster to make a new monster. This is partially because the monsters are characters in their own right in Caravan Heart. It was different, to say the least.
 * Then they went all the way with Joker, vastly lowering the monster count, adding Dragon Quest VIII style skilltrees, and removing all the randomization all in an attempt to make the game work in 3D. Joker 2 undid some of these changes -- the traits and skilltree system remain, but there is much more randomization (although the maps are still static, the monsters in them are incredibly varied) and the reintroduction of palette swaps and the addition of monster size plateaus pleased the fans.
 * Joker 2 Professional added 100 extra monsters to the 300 or so, making about 420.
 * Even worse, Strongers were removed from the main list, since every monster could do it. This made about 1260 monsters - even Battle Road Victory only had 800!
 * Unfortunate Implications