Dragon Quest IV
I’ve kind of dug myself into a hole by trying to write some kind of summation of the games I play. It takes time, which was kind of not the point of this thing. But it seems worth doing, for some reason, so I’ll try to say something about Dragon Quest IV. Problem is, not much comes to mind. I totally played it, and I came back to it an awful lot, so I can extrapolate from that data that it was fun.
The premise of DQ4, hinted at in the subtitle “Chapters of the Chosen”, is that instead of starting with one lowly character and taking them all the way to the end of their quest, you meet the game’s eight main characters either one at a time or in small groups as they pursue some sub-saving-the-world goal. In chapter 5 you meet the actual Hero hero, the one you name, and you begin seeking out the other seven characters because hey why not. This chapter ends up being at least half of the game, so basically once all the characters have been introduced the premise goes away.
One of the things I’ve observed on this Dragon Quest quest of mine is that the game is least fun when your characters are at low levels, i.e. at the beginning. With the Chapters setup, Dragon Quest 4 figures out a way to bring you back to that point five times. It’s an uncomfortable truth of RPGs that the core of the experience is just getting your numbers better, and DQ4 kind of screws with that momentum. It’s not until chapter 5 that you get to really start seeking out the better weapons and items that make you feel like you’re a part of the process, but by then you’ve been playing for a pretty long time.
The other unfortunate thing is that, as is traditional for this series, the playable characters almost never talk. That never bugged me in the first three games, since I viewed my characters as named implements of destruction, but (a) now there are eight of them; (b) you get to see their backstory and why they’re all motivated to go out questing; (c) their situations and character designs suggest personalities; and (d) they’re all strangers who gather for a common cause, so you’d think they’d talk to each other a bit in between monster fights. Nope, not really. Although, checking Wikipedia, I see that “the Japanese version’s party talk feature was completely excised from the western versions”. That’s too bad!
For me, and because it was my nutty idea to play through all these games in order, the thing about 4 is that it’s the first Dragon Quest game I didn’t play as a kid. With the first three games I was curious to see what had changed in the remakes, plus it was fun to retrace my steps from years earlier. Dragon Quest 4 is solid even without that, and even taking into account the janky game mechanics that go with the series.
I do wonder how much appetite I have for this sort of gameplay, though. I’ve got five more of these games to play through. They might start to run together.
