Dragon Quest Treasures PC Review – A Treasure Worth Uncovering
Dragon Quest Treasures is a brand-new spin-off based on the legendary franchise that is finally available on PC. Originally released on the Nintendo Switch, it proved to be a fun enough stopgap as we wait for the next mainline game. However, it was evident then that the game was held back by the technical constraints of the Nintendo Switch hardware. After the announcement of the PC port, I was excited to see how it has worked out now that the game is not limited in performance.
Dragon Quest Treasures is available on PC at a respectable price. It is also a pretty decent port because visually it is not going to blow you away or challenge your PC hardware. It offers all the capabilities of a good PC port, including support for a wide range of hardware and Steam Deck. It is now possible to run the game at a higher resolution and extract the full quality of its art style. I remember the game looking blurrier on the Nintendo Switch even in docked mode, and the frame rate being limited to 30 FPS, which is no longer the case.
Dragon Quest Treasures is a competent PC port. You get the standard PC graphics customization out of the box, and the game runs on a wide range of hardware, so you don’t need a beefy rig to play it. The support for a higher resolution and frame rate means it is now easily possible to run the game at more than 120 FPS, which helps with the smoothness and flow of the gameplay. All of this is easily togglable in the options menu along with the option of a borderless window, which runs by default on the Steam Deck. While the game doesn’t support widescreen, I am sure mods will be released that will enable it easily.
Performance On Steam Deck
Firstly, I didn’t need to worry about toggling any settings for Dragon Quest Treasures. It comes with Steam Deck support out of the box, so all the options were toggled as such by default. Surprisingly, it runs at 60 FPS on the Steam Deck with the visuals turned to medium and a native resolution of 720p (1280×800 for Deck). It looks miles better to me than it did on the Nintendo Switch, and the performance is just icing on the cake. I did notice that there were some occasional hitches, especially during open-world traversal, but these can likely be ironed out if we spend some time in the settings menu, which I didn’t bother with.
In terms of battery life, I was able to extract over 2 hours of playtime with the game running on Steam Deck without tweaking the TDP. I am sure it is possible to optimize and improve the battery life, but I didn’t mess much here. The controls feel natural on the Steam Deck, and the 60 FPS performance sticks for the most part, save for a few hitches that can occur and mess up the frame time. Again, this can be easily solved if you decide to mess with the settings.
If you want to read the complete review of the game, check out our article that covers the Nintendo Switch version. All of the things that are mentioned for the review should apply to the PC port too. This is a really fun game that will take a while to get into the groove, but once you have a competent team of monsters and explored a good chunk of the map, it can be quite addictive. While Dragon Quest Treasures might not hit the highs of Dragon Quest Monsters, I found this a genuinely fun and charming game that is a lighthearted take on the world of Dragon Quest XI.
Dragon Quest Treasures Game Information
- Price: $49.99
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Developer: Square Enix
- Platform: PC (Reviewed)
- Disclaimer: A review code was given by the publisher
