Rocket Slime! Not everyone played that little DS masterpiece, but everyone who did has one thing in common: They loved it. (If you somehow managed to dislike Rocket Slime, please let us know; rarely does one have the opportunity to see the living incarnation of misanthropy.) A simple sprite-based game in the style of old-school Zelda adventures, Rocket Slime focused on the exploits of Dragon Quest‘s iconic sprites. You know, those little smiling blue dudes with few enough hit points to count on one hand, whose death is worth all of one EXP and two gold. An unlikely hero for a game to be sure, but it worked: The protagonist, the eponymous Rocket, used his gelatinous elasticity to take on a horde of much more powerful creatures, rescuing his fellow slimes from a gang of Mafioso platypuses, the Plob. This involved reciprocal abductions and occasionally driving a giant slime-shaped tank-fortress into massive pitched battles. The end result wasn’t anything mind-blowing, but it was so fun and earnestly good-natured that no one cared. To know Rocket was to love Rocket.
For the sequel — Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 3 in Japan, which we’ll call Rocket Slime 3DS for convenience — the Dragon Quest crew isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. At first glance, Rocket Slime 3DS doesn’t look particularly different from its previous-generation predecessor. The most notable change is that the backgrounds (but not the characters) are rendered with polygons. These look pretty barfy in still images, but they’re quite nice once you turn the 3D slider up. Besides that, though, Rocket Slime 3DS is pretty much business as usual. Rocket possesses the exactly same repertoire of skills: He snaps into foes and objects to send them flying, and he can snag and carry up to three stunned foes or other kinds of debris at a time. He jumps, floats to a rest, and can perform a super attack by charging up briefly. And that’s about it!
