Dragon Quest is popular in Japan, very popular, and two years ago Dragon Quest IV, this very game you’re reading about, was voted the 14th best game of all time by readers of Famistu, an equally popular Japanese games mag. So, this’ll be great, right? Well, hold up a little. FIFA’s very popular in Britain, and that’s hardly had the best track record. Indeed, apart from a few good editions, it’s been thoroughly terrible most of the time. As for DQIV’s high showing in the readers chart, I’m sorry to say that being the 14th best game of all time still leaves it behind four other Dragon Quest games /and/ four Final Fantasy’s including their number one, Final Fantasy X, not exactly a good game itself, let alone the greatest game of all, which is not good news for something placing way behind it.
But perhaps all this means nothing to you, and you only bought a DS yesterday, and what’s a FIFA, or a Final Fantasy? So let’s start off more simply.
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, is a Japanese RPG, which means you’re given a little band of wizards and warriors to move around towns and dungeons, fighting randomly appearing monsters in turn based combat. Still with me? The plot, like the basic structure of the game is thoroughly similar to anyone whose played a Jap RPG before; it’s the usual tosh about an evil awakening and a young hero having to kick it’s face off, and that young hero is you. So far, so similar to a multitude of other Jap RPGs, but after a few minutes of play, you no longer control the young hero, and for the next four chapters, he’s pretty much out of the picture. Instead, chapter one of your quest puts you in control of a fat Scottish knight with a large blue mustache; aces. Indeed, the first four chapters put you in charge of four different groups of characters, all with odd accents and none of them the usual male teen the genre is populated with, and it’s only in the fifth chapter, when control returns to the hero, that you start to bring them all together and hunt down the big bad.
It’s an interesting twist, but most of the time DQIV doesn’t take advantage of these chapters to offer anything beyond what you’d expect if the hero was around the whole time, it’s still the standard RPG plot lines; revenge the father, save the children type hokum, and the usual grind; kill baddies to get the experience and money to buy better equipment and kill bigger baddies. All except Tokendo’s chapter; he works in a shop.
You wake up, go to work, and start serving customers. You never know when you’re supposed to stop working and collect your pay, and so you wait thinking something’s going to happen, except nothing does, it’s always just another customer, asking to buy and sell; it’s entirely up to you when you decide you’ve earnt enough money and quit for the day, just as it’s up to you when to step out of the daily grind and head out into the wilderness. At this point the game stops telling you what to do and you have to decide alone.
A strange thing happened to me at this point, it was so close to the daily grind of real life that I would rush to work each morning to get there on time, fearful of losing my job. Stranger still, I started feeling for Tokendo’s wife and kid, especially his wife, because she sends you off to work with a packed lunch every morning, and is so sweet when you return, and because Tokendo’s a tubby fellow, and the people in the village look down on him, but she doesn’t, even though she’s a pretty lass and could have anyone, she chose Tokendo. So even though I knew I had to leave the village to get on with the game, I started doing something odd, I would sneak out of the village in the morning, but always rush home with nightfall, so as not to let my family know I’d quit my job and worry about me or where their next meal was coming from. It was an odd moment.
When you do leave the village, Tokendo quickly becomes practically indestructable. In this chapter, and this chapter only, baddies drop loads of expensive items, which you can trade to buy all the best weapons and armour, and ultimately buy shops and take on giant civil service projects. With all the best weapons and armour you become god-like and stride around the countryside ending everything in your way. This invincibility makes Tokendo the lively heart of the game, a change of pace from everything before and after, because it’s no longer about grinding up levels, but trading and investing. The problem is though, when everyone comes back together, you don’t bother putting Tokendo in your party any more. Once everyone gets together, he no longer has the best equipement, and his lack of combat or magic skills means he’s next to useless, and as he’s side lined, so the game reverts back to type and you’re back to the grind.
And this is the problem with DQIV, because for all the nice touches littered throughout the game, underneath it all is one of the most grindy RPGs I’ve played. It’s all about levelling up, which wouldn’t be so bad if the combat was aces, but it’s not, is woeful. I will grant that at times it can be good. When you have your horsie with you (look out for her) it can be splendid, because you can trade in and out characters at will, which lends some tactics to the proceedings, fight someone who resists magic and you change your magicians for combat specialists, nice. Unfortunately, your horsie is not around all the time, so you end up picking four people who have the best spread of skills, which means that if you face someone who resists magic, two of your characters spend the entire fight twiddling their thumbs because they’re the magic guys and can’t help. It’s dull, and there’s nothing you can do, and it’s especially tedious when there are eight baddies to kill and with every one you kill they call in reinforcements so you’re close to tears wondering when it’ll all end as you repeatedly hit X and nothing else. It’s awful, although granted, it doesn’t happen that often, just often enough to make you flinch whenever you think of it.
And that’s without mentioning the random battles, which occur with irritating frequency when you’re trying to find your way through mazes or just backtracking to check something you should have made a note of, and you’d like to escape them but when you press run the baddies have blocked your way and so they get a free turn of hitting you to add to the torture of everything else. Once again, this isn’t always the case, but the scars are still fresh in the mind.
So here we have an RPG, and it’s had a go at being different, but it’s different within a very generic structure, including a traditional story, random battles and weak combat. Everyone should have a chance to live through Tokendo’s chapter, but most of the rest is hit and miss, and no better than the dozens of other similar Jap RPGs released every year, or those voted higher by Famistu readers. You will like this if you’re happy with more of the same, but with a slight twist, or adore fat underdogs and making them rich in the face of adversity. Tokendo is a star.