(AfroGamers.com) Every few months a new title lands where you snag little critters and raise them up for battle, and like clockwork somebody in the replies calls it a Pokémon knockoff. Reflexive. Kind of lazy, honestly. And almost nobody bothers to check whether that franchise even landed before the competition.
It didn’t.
Keep that in mind, because the newest one is nearly here. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World hits December 3, 2026, a hair under three months out, on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC. More than 500 creatures to round up this time. Synthesis returns as well. Fuse two of your creatures into one meaner beast, sometimes something you had no clue was even in there. Bianca and Nera, the famous brides from Dragon Quest V, headline the entire adventure as children this go-round, wandering a dying land named Witherwood and working to breathe green back into it. It also marks the first numbered Dragon Quest Monsters entry centered on two female co-protagonists, which counts as a quiet milestone.
Good hook. Strong art. But that launch is really just my excuse to say something bigger.
We need to retire the reflex.
Here is the timeline, plain as day. That fifth mainline chapter reached the Super Famicom in 1992, and it let certain defeated monsters join your party after battle. Recruit them. Build a squad out of some of the same beasts you had just been swinging swords at. Now check the calendar on the pocket phenomenon: Red and Green landed on Japanese shelves in 1996. More than three years separate the pair. Enix had folks assembling teams of recruited enemies before Satoshi Tajiri’s brainchild ever reached store shelves.
So the question of who copied who gets murky fast, and the honest answer sits closer to “nobody, exactly.” Pokémon itself had already been in development before Dragon Quest V arrived, so this is not a clean story of one studio stealing from another. A couple of studios were digging in similar soil around the same era. One struck gold worldwide. The other kept quietly refining an idea it had already planted.
By 1998 that concept got a dedicated home. Terry’s Wonderland arrived on Game Boy Color in Japan, then crossed to Western players in 2000 under the clunky label Dragon Warrior Monsters. The game drew heavily from Akira Toriyama’s established Dragon Quest character and monster designs. The blue slime, grinning with that little teardrop shape, became as recognizable to a certain kind of player as any yellow rodent. And underneath the cute surface sat something surprisingly deep: a breeding setup, later reshaped into synthesis, where pedigree and bloodline decided what your next fighter would become.
I’ll give the skeptics one inch. There is no denying that Enix launched that spin-off into a market Pokémon had already transformed. Chasing a hot market isn’t a crime, and pretending the timing meant nothing would be silly. But wanting a slice of the moment and being a hollow imitation are a pair of very different accusations. What arrived in 1998 was an expansion of a system the property already held, dressed up for a hungry market. Not a costume thrown over somebody else’s skeleton.
The differences run all the way through. In these titles you can scout the franchise’s legendary bosses and pull them onto your bench, final villains included. You are not filling a book with fresh designs invented to fuel a fad. You are digging through decades of established lore and drafting your favorites. Combat stays loyal to the mainline saga instead of reinventing the wheel. That fusion engine turns team-building into a genealogy project, where you plot two generations ahead to create the fighter you actually crave. Distinct flavor. Anybody who has sunk a weekend into Joker or The Dark Prince knows the itch it scratches lives in a different corner of the brain.
Why does the “clone” label keep sticking, then? Part of it is plain exposure. For a lot of us on this side of the ocean, the yellow-rat empire came first and came loudest. It shaped the very vocabulary we reach for, so anything shaped along similar lines reads as derivative by default. Understandable instinct. But it also shows how easily our first exposure to something can get mistaken for the place where the whole idea began. The West’s first taste of something gets treated as its birthplace, and everything predating our awareness gets shoved into a footnote.
The past doesn’t owe us that arrangement. The studio was crafting this stuff for a home audience long before most American kids knew the genre existed. Two traditions grew alongside each other. One learned to market itself as a global lifestyle. The other stayed a beloved institution back home while holding devoted cult status abroad. Neither owes the rival its origin story.
And this goes way past one game franchise. Slap the “clone” tag on every creature-catcher that isn’t Pokémon and you wipe out a chunk of real history in one lazy move. You lose the studios chasing the same idea from another direction. You lose the regional wrinkles that gave each series its flavor. What’s left is a flat story where a single name invented everything and the rest borrowed from it. Every debate collapses into who won, and that’s the most boring lens you can put on any art form. I’d rather sit with a game and work out what it was swinging for, then grade it against that instead of somebody else’s scoreboard.
Which loops me back to Witherwood. The Withered World isn’t showing up to challenge anybody’s throne. It is the fourth numbered Monsters entry in Japan, part of a bloodline that has been running this dance since the last century, built on Toriyama designs and a fusion engine sharpened across generations. Judge it by the standard that actually fits. Is the setting charming? Is the roster deep? Does that combining system still spark the “just one more synthesis” compulsion at 2 in the morning?
Bring your memories of Bianca and Nera. Bring your love of the little grinning slime. Leave the tired comparison at the door, because it was never accurate to begin with. This corner of gaming carries a past all its own, a distinct family line, and reasons for existing it never had to borrow. It’s earned the right to headline instead of playing support act.
December 3. Go build a beast you’ve never raised before. Just don’t call it a clone.
Staff Writer; Jay Baker
An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…
He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.