Reviewed by: Sirus
Marvel-ous.com
Dragon Quest IV (DQIV) is a DS remake of a NES RPG. The DS version is very similar to the Playstation version that included updated graphics. The game tells the story of multiple characters through five chapters. Each of the first four chapters gives you control of one of the characters who later join you in your fight against the dark one. The DS version includes a bonus sixth chapter that takes place after you defeat the game’s final boss.
While the game does have a story, it is extremely thin in its presentation and not very interesting. The characters aren’t developed well enough to make the player care about anything beyond the basic save the world from evil story we have seen hundreds of times. The story is even harder to enjoy thanks to a translation that feels lazy and unprofessional. I stopped talking to people in towns after a while because the things they said were often filled with grammatical and spelling errors. Even though much of this could have been done to make them sound like they were speaking a different language depending on the region, it seems there are better ways to accomplish that.
To make matters worse, the game rarely tells you outright where you are supposed to go next so if you don’t use a walkthrough or talk to everyone you run into something you won’t want to do because of the translation] you will have a hard time progressing. If these things annoyed me as an experienced RPG player, I can only imagine the frustration that anyone playing this as a first RPG might face.
There are many unspoken rules in the Dragon Quest series. One of those is that it is generally better to hang around the beginning town and level up for a while before you set off on your journey. Largely in part to the chapters system, at the beginning of each of the main chapters you have to do the same annoying early game leveling over and over again. Thankfully though, when you get into playing the main game, most of the combat is fun and rewarding.
In battle you see your characters’ portraits on the top screen along with information on their status. On the bottom screen you see the attack menu and your enemies. The monsters you encounter are wonderfully animated and quite varied. Battles are usually not too challenging and tend to be over quick. Most boss fights aren’t too challenging, although the final boss is considerably harder, as he should be.
Each chapter progresses through numerous dungeons and towns before a scene commences to let you know that the chapter is over. When you finally have all the characters gathered together, the game hits a grove that keeps you interested until you reach the final dungeon. Sadly, the final boss is so challenging that you have to grind for hours to get strong enough to beat him. By the time I beat the final boss, I had tired so much of the battle system and the game in general that I had no interest in the bonus chapter.
The game has a fantastic soundtrack composed by Koichi Sugiyama that sounds great on the DS speakers, at least at first. After a while, the songs become tired because you only get to hear the first few seconds of each song since they restart every time you finish a battle. The more complex and enjoyable second half of all the songs is never heard because of the frequent and short battles. The game has no voice acting but it wasn’t missed because I played the game on mute most of the time anyway.
The game has some nice graphics that remind me of the beauty of 2D sprites and make me wish more companies would stick to beautiful 2d sprites instead of 3D character models. The 3D environments look great and are fun to explore by rotating the camera. The classic DQ save system hasn’t been changed much in this version except for the addition of a quick save feature that I never took advantage of. You can only save the game at a church within a town. To combat this, you are able to zoom between towns from anywhere on the world map and evacuate the dungeon you are exploring with spells when you need to go back to town.
If you die while fighting, you are transported back to town at the cost of half the gold you carry with you. This system encourages players to be careful with how far they explore. To preserve your gold, you can store it in banks you find but they aren’t accessible until late in the game when you have a large amount of gold to store. The game took me 30 hours to beat although that includes a large amount of grinding before the final boss. If you like your RPGs light on the story and don’t mind a little bit of grinding, DQIV is a good addition to the DS’s RPG library. If, however, you prefer to have your hand held while you play, it is highly recommended that you use an online walkthrough to guide you.
