The latest instalment in the popular Dragon Quest series has sold well, and with the advertising campaign still going strong in the UK, it's interesting to see this as being billed as something for the more casual gamer, with kids and mothers getting together for some four way monster bashing action in the adverts. Taking a good look at the game, it starts to make sense, with its bright colours, and character and monster designs as ever by Akira Toriyama, perhaps better known as the artist behind the Dragonball manga and anime series.
Digging a little deeper into the game uncovers hidden depth. Both the battle system, and a potentially massive quest to level up characters, display little of the character drama we have come to expect from recent japanese RPGs. In fact, apart from your main character, your team barely affects the story of the game, serving merely as a backup to the head guy. From a design perspective, this is initially due to the ability to play wirelessly with friends, with spare slots in your team being taken up by other players, but it also serves to make the quest much more task orientated- kill this monster, fetch this item, learn this skill, and your team acts as a tool for the player to accomplish this. By removing a lot of the theatrics, and worrying less about the motivations of the main characters the game has more room to allow freedom in character development in a different way- levelling them, choosing skills and classes and ultimately it is this which makes Dragon Quest IX a refreshing change of pace for the JRPG genre in general, and adds an old school flavour, with the story hanging on the characters you meet.
The game also takes on on interesting twist when you stumble accross your first few treasure maps. These lead to randomly generated dungeons, each with chests, enemies and a final boss, who upon their defeat pass on a new map for you to conquer. Although it can initially be irritating to find the location of these treasure grottoes on the world map, they allow potentially limitless levelling, and increase in difficulty, scope, and eventually reward as you traverse map after map. Coupling this with a wide range of character classes for each of your warriors to master, and a huge amount of weaponry and armour to collect and create, adds up to a huge adventure, even long after the story has been finished and forgotten. Character levelling possibilities are also immense, with several classes for each of your warriors to master, and the Disgaea-esque ability to 'reset' a class, alowing you to level back through it for extra skill points.
Also worth a mention are the puntastic enemy and character names- the translation job on the game is superb, and encompasses several accents (sure it's text but you can tell!) and a lot of tongue in cheek naming conventions, many of which took me a little while to pick up on. (Swinedimples Academy.... Hogwarts! It's so obvious now!)
The bad then, menus are often clunky, and the half hearted attempt to add touch controls is disappointing. Also, to get the most out of the online mode you will need a few willing friends to play with as it's local co-op only. The battle system is functional but dated, and although it gets the job done it is overdue a rethink, many battles can be easily finished just by jabbing the confirm button to select attack over and over, and setting your team over to AI control has mixed results. Occasional cheap attacks from the enemy can be frustrating also, as the death of one of your characters generally either leads to game over, or having to head back to the nearest town for a priest to patch them up. Also the 'fisticuffs' skill which some classes have seems a bit pointless, as it's unlikely that anyone would choose fists over a weapon, especially when you consider that the classes which don't have it have the shield skill, potentially the most useful skill in the game.
Generally, I am very impressed with this game, and although the sheer depth of the game may be offputting to some, getting through the main quest and 'finishing' the game is a relatively simple task compared to all the possibilities the postgame offers, so if you are just looking for a decent RPG to spend a bit of time on without worrying too much about all the added bonuses, I still highly reccomend it. I am also impressed that the game manages to be so engaging with the focus more on battling and levelling rather than the storyline, something which the surprise success of the recent Demon's Souls has also shown is possible.
4/5 skill points
Thanks for reading! Andrew
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