Synthesis Has Me Hooked

Even though it was announced to be getting a demo, I got some time to play Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World at PAX West 2026 last weekend. The actual playthrough time was about 40-ish minutes, playing through the beginning of the game, with another 15-ish minutes spent playing through a later section.

The Story of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World

In Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World, you are following Bianca and Nera. In their world, they are both dealing with the same crisis. Their fathers are sick and aren’t getting any better. There is a legend of a legendary moon leaf that can heal any disease or sickness. They want to find this leaf and end up being teleported to a brand-new world called the Withered World after following a beam of light. They follow a new friend of theirs to a castle, where the king supposedly knows where to find these special moon leaves. When they arrive, they find Nera’s sister, Debora, there. Debora also wants the moon leaf.

At the beginning of the game, you are able to choose who you want to play as. You can either play as Nera, who has a specialty with Slime monsters, or Bianca, who has a specialty with Dragon monsters. The irony here is that Nera and Bianca are the two marriage options in Dragon Quest V. In the DS remake, you can also choose Debora. Just like in Dragon Quest V, you have to make a decision about who you like best as a playable option. I chose Nera since I figured I would find more Slime monsters than Dragon monsters in the early stages of the game. You are also given a small personality test to determine which monster you add to your arsenal first. Mine was Buddy Slime.

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Scouting, Battling, and Building Your Team

Once you have your first monster in your arsenal, you are then able to scout other monsters around the Withered World. To scout a monster, you simply use the Scout command during battle. Your monsters all contribute a percentage to the scout bar before it decides whether you persuade the monster to fight on your side or not. If you persuade the monster, combat ends, and the monster joins your party or depot.

When you encounter an enemy in the overworld, you start combat with that monster, or team of monsters, and your own team. Your team includes four main monsters on the front line and three monsters in reserve. I found it helpful to put weaker monsters on the reserve team to help level them up while the stronger monsters are on the front line. You can issue tactics to your team of monsters and let them run wild, or you can issue commands directly. Each monster has a different moveset and a unique talent pool. These talents have passive stat buffs or abilities you can learn as you invest in them. For example, a Buddy Slime has a Slime talent pool. You invest talent points into the talent to gain more HP, MP, or unique moves for a Slime. There are also traits you can learn when you invest in talents.

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You can wander the world and use abilities or a Waterwing Can to unlock more paths to follow. You see, the Withered World wasn’t always withered. It just lost the powers of light that gave it life. This Waterwing Can is used to offer droplets of life to these withered plants and areas to bring more life back to the world. You eventually learn that these moon leaves are in short supply due to the power of life waning in this world.

Synthesis Is Where Things Get Addictive

In the later part of the demo, we got access to a system called Synthesis. This system is pretty self-explanatory. You synthesize one monster with another to create a new monster. When you synthesize one monster with another, you can select from the talent pools to take with you to the new monster. Once this new monster is synthesized, it goes back to level one, and all of its talent points are reset. You will need to level it up once again. I spent a lot of time making new monsters. You can see the rarity of the monsters by the borders around them. The gold and fire-red borders show rarer monsters. After selecting the first monster to synthesize, when you hover over the second monster, it shows you the available options for monsters you can synthesize.

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Afterward, I put my newly synthesized monsters in my reserve party and put the old reserve party into the depot. Then I went around leveling them up, and they leveled up quite quickly due to the monsters in the area being decently powerful. If I could, I probably would have spent another 30 minutes just in this section synthesizing and leveling monsters up. It was an addictive experience.

My Thoughts

Overall, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World was a good time. The time really flew by, and I enjoyed exploring the world and adding more monsters to my arsenal. I might go with Nera in the main game just because of the fun Slime designs for monsters you can find. Fire Slimes, stacks of Slimes, Slimes with tails.

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There is a plethora of fun designs around every corner. Monster Wranglers make for a good groundwork, especially when you mix that with monster taming. I do wonder if there are any narrative changes if you choose Bianca over Nera. I wasn’t able to immediately grasp whether there would be, but I imagine it’s more than just gameplay.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World will be released on December 3, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. You can play the demo right now!

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