Everyone in the world must have played Dragon Quest IV by now, so I won’t bother writing too much about it. I killed both Psaro the Manslayer and the bonus boss yesterday and had a great time too. Take that, Pstupid Psaro! That’ll teach you to wipe out the heroine’s village! I was really quite annoyed that the entire bonus chapter consisted of helping him get his girlfriend back so he could be happy. What about my village? Or Maya and Meena’s dad, why couldn’t we resurrect him instead?

The bonus dungeon was kind of fun though. Not the killing Platinum King Jewels part (which is easy enough with Psaro’s Hatchet Man attack and the Sands of Time) but the fighting Chow Mein and Foo Yung part so you can strip the picture naked and get Psaro’s best equipment. I lol’ed my head off when they ripped off the Yggdrasil leaf and left the pic standing there naked, heheh.

Apart from that, I don’t have too much to say about this game. I never played the original NES or the PS remake, and this is only the second DQ game I’m playing after Dragon Quest 9, so I went in with an open mind. And you know, I quite enjoyed it. I’ve played other games where you control different parties and bring them together at the end (most notably Suikoden III and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn) and this was one of the better-executed versions. The overall story with the “chosen heroine” is old school (duh) and overdone, but the different short-term objectives in the early chapters stopped me from getting bored too soon.

Running around the world collecting the Zenithian items didn’t bother me, and neither did the fetchquests. I don’t mind such things in principle, it’s only when they’re boring, or there are too many of them that I start to complain. Something I really liked in Dragon Quest IV, though, chests! I love RPGs with lots and lots of chests to open. I honestly think putting just enough treasures and chests in an RPG must be a science. Too few and dungeon-crawling becomes a painful chore and a tedious crawl. Too many and the player doesn’t appreciate the rewards, especially if half the rewards are potions and the like. I think DQIV got the balance just right.

What didn’t I like? Not much, I thought it was a great game. Not too long, the music was okay, the remade graphics were nice, the difficulty was just right, and grinding was easy if you felt weak (hello 8 liquid metal slimes in a row), once you were strong enough you could cast the ‘Holy Protection’ spell to eliminate weak random encounters, etc etc. It’s a well thought-out system. The three main things that bothered me were:

1. Helping Psaro at the end – I only did it because I felt sorry for Rose, really. Oh, and you know, you never do get to see Rose die or anything. One moment you hear she’s been captured, the next moment she’s in a grave. What happened? Who killed her? Why? That didn’t make any sense. **speaking of which, what happened to the people in Zamoskva castle? They’re all back during the ending sequences (funny thing, they’re back at the end of C5, gone again in C6, and back again in C6 end), but where were they all this while? Mystery!

2. The fact that your party members join and instantly lose all thought and personality. There’s the ‘Talk’ button but you always get the “There’s no one to talk to” response even if there are 3 people directly behind you. I couldn’t figure out why they had the Talk button there, so I went investigating. It turns out you are supposed to be able to talk to your party members, but that option was cut out completely in the localization process and all their dialogue was erased! Seriously! I read a thread blaming the localizers (Plus Alpha or something) for it, but I’m about 99% sure the decision was made by Square-Enix themselves, either to cut costs or to shorten the localization time. I’m really disappointed though, I wanted to hear more of Alena, Borya and Kiryl’s ‘English’ haha.

3. On the topic of broken English, some of the ‘English’ accents were a bit much. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what townspeople were saying most of the time, but sometimes it was just an annoyance. Especially since most of them have nothing important to say, so essentially they’re just wasting your time with semi-undecipherable text. I hear it’s been toned down in subsequent games, so I probably wasn’t the only one who didn’t like it.

So! Since Dragon Quest IV went so well, I’m thinking of trying DQV next. My brother has it and is always talking about his bride and stuff, so I might borrow it and give it a shot. Right now, though, I’ve gone back to Tokimeki Memorial 3 and am working on the Junpei route. You’ll hear from me when I’m done.