Dragon Quest Rivals

Dragon Quest Rivals Ace
Developer(s)	Tose
Publisher(s)	Square Enix
Artist(s)	Akira Toriyama
Series	Dragon Quest
Platform(s)	Android/iOS; Windows PC; Nintendo Switch
Release date(s)	JP November 2017;
Genre(s)	Collectible card game

Dragon Quest Rivals (ドラゴンクエストライバルズ, Doragon Kuesuto Raibaruzu, Dragon Quest Rivals) was a digital collectible card game published by Square Enix. Its main platforms were smartphones. The game was free with the in-game purchase of "gems". It could be played only in Japan, and the interface was only in Japanese.

The original version was released in November 2017 for Android and iOS. A PC version for "Yahoo! Games Player" was launched in 2018, and the version for the Nintendo Switch was released in February 2019.

It was superseded by Dragon Quest Rivals Ace in August 2020, where a single-player mode, "Solo Battle Adventure," was added to the game. The PC version was then switched to Steam, and the Yahoo! Games Player version was shut down. The latter's players were able to carry their save data to the Steam version.

The game service was stopped on July 5th, 2021. The shutdown was announced on April 2, 2021, stopping gem purchase. Producer Tatsuhiro Futagi cited the business continuation difficulty as an on-line battle game, due to the decreasing number of players.

Gameplay

This mobile game lets players create a deck of cards featuring characters and monsters throughout the Dragon Quest franchise and battle it out in turn-based combat with a variety of different strategies. The gameplay has been described as similar to that of Blizzard Entertainment's card battling game, Hearthstone. Many of the characters that appear in the game have been fully voiced for the first time in the series. Certain characters have special interactions with each other if played on the field, as well.

The player selects a "leader" character to play as and faces off against an enemy leader by summoning monsters, casting spells, or equipping weapons to attack them from their MP pool. The goal is to reduce the other leader's HP to zero. At the beginning of combat, each side has 1 MP and it increases each turn by 1. The playable cards all have their own MP costs, and monster and weapon cards have an attack stat and an HP stat (uses for weapons). Additionally, a leader character can use 1 MP to Psyche Up and build Tension. Once a leader has 3 stacks of Tension, they can use their unique Coup de Grâce. Each leader character also has cards that can be used exclusively by them.