You'd be forgiven if you took one look at the cover of Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime and quickly put it back on the shelf with all the other kid-baiting DS and Game Boy cartridges. A baby blue gumdrop screams towards you with a vacant and slightly insane look of happiness on its round face while cutesy critters flail comically in the cartoon b🏅ackground. By all outside appearances, the game seems too drippingly adorable for anyone past diapers to enjoy.

Let this be a lesson, then, not to judge too hastily. Rocket Slime i🌺s a rare breed- an adventure so charmingly simple and so unabashedly silly that even the hardest of gamers will be forced to crack a smile. It's not groundbr🍸eaking and it's certainly not perfect, but it sure is a lot of fun.

Start with the playful premise, for example. The lowliest, most insignificant monster in the Dragon Quest universe - the gelatinous blob known merely as "slime" - is given a name (Rocket), a family, a house, a community... and a hero's purpose. You see, the kingdom of Boingburg (yes𒀰, Boingburg) has been ransacked by an army of platypuses (yes, platypuses) and its citizenry slimenapped (yes, slimenapped) to parts unknown. It's now up to our champion to stretch and sling his malleable way across dungeons, through enemies and into the 100 treasure chests imprisoning his bouncy brethren.