When Square Enix first announced that Dragon Quest IX was heading to the DS instead of an HD console, or at least the Wii, I suspect there was a bit of a furor. The preceding game in the Dragon Quest series was one of the most beautiful cell-shaded games of all time (probably only next to The Wind Waker) and there was this sense that the series would continue on in that vein.
We've made something of the fact that the Nintendo DS is really the place to go for the traditional JRPG experience this generation, mostly because development costs haven't spiralled out of control and the focus can be (or has to, out of necessity) placed back on pure gameplay. I doubt that we'd see anything like The World Ends with You if it wasn't being developed for the DS, for example. Now, Square Enix is a huge company, and it's quite likely that along with Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy, that Dragon Quest is the biggest franchise in Japan. They very easily could have made this into a console game.
Thank god they didn't, though, because Dragon Quest IX is, with only a handful of other games, one of the very few JRPGs where the content is perfect suited to the console form. The changes from previous Dragon Quests, from a gameplay standpoint, have been quite minute, but they've also been completely overhauled for use on the DS. Couple that with the game's focus on ad-hoc multiplayer (that, I'm sad to report, I wasn't able to test out as of this writing, as I only know one other person with this game in my vicinity) and you've got one of the most marvelous JRPG experiences of the last few years. This is quite simply a game I haven't been able to put down.
Dragon Quest IX is different from a few of the Dragon Quests in that none of the main characters in the game have pre-defined personalities – they're all your creations (or if you're playing multiplayer, other people's creations). For the purposes of my review, I'll use the character names and types that I chose to play through with. You start the game as a male or female Celestrian (Frederick, in my case), basically an angel, who is tasked with keeping the people of a particular town safe. Everything is going just fine until a giant earthquake happens and knocks your character down to Earth in mortal form. From there, you have to figure out a way to regain your Celestrian status and save the world from the pervading evil that is encroaching.
On its own, this overarching plot isn't the greatest. While the setup is intriguing, and seems to be setting up an interesting take on religion that is not really seen in gaming very often, it's quickly abandoned, about ten hours into the game. From there, your job is to restore the fruit of the holy tree Yggdrassil to its proper place to create balance in the world (the fruit fell off in the earthquake). Viewed through the lens of this being a straightforward story, the game could be seen as something of a collect-o-thon. Toss in the fact that your party of four have no personalities of their own and for awhile, I was pretty certain that the game was going to be disastrously bad.
I'm quite glad that I was mistaken, however, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, the storytelling in this game becomes pretty subtly wondrous. It's perhaps not entirely fair to treat this game as having a standard, straightforward storyline. True, there are overarching elements that tie everything together, but really, the game is akin to a short story collection with the same protagonist in each one. Basically, for the entire game, you're going from town to town, finding out what is plaguing the people or causing some sort of rift in the royal family, and doing everything in your power to fix it. Some of these stories, such as the one where the people of a fishing town call on a Leviathan to provide their town with endless supplies of fish, or the story of the queen of a desert oasis who wastes the people's water to create a giant bath for herself, work as witty and well-written cautionary tales. One particular story really stands out to me, though, as being particularly haunting: basically, a girl named Marion becomes sick with a life-ending disease, and as she's dying, she prays for her doll (which looks just like her, and is called Marionette) to come to life. Marion dies, but Marionette takes her place, and instead of the cliche where Marionette becomes an evil version of Marion, the story turns it on its head – Marionette, while acting oddly because she's not human, decides to give away Marion's posessions in exchange for friendship. This story is told with a tenderness and subtletly that I certainly didn't expect out of this charming, cheery game.
The writing in the game is particularly sharp. While the dialog can be incredibly punny and groan-worthy, most of it is just really charming. But what impressed me most was how the game pulled off a really daring approach to narrative perspective. Most games demand that you identify with the protagonist, but in this case, the protagonist is really just a collection of all of your personality traits, because, well, s/he is you. That's standard for games with silent protagonists, but by making your entire party of characters silent protagonists, the game puts the focus squarely on the non-player characters (NPCs) in the game. This could have backfired if the writing wasn't so sharp, mainly because I've seen far too many games with uninteresting NPCs. This isn't one of those games.
Oddly for a modern JRPG, Dragon Quest IX is filled to the brim with gameplay. There are people (namely, Tomonobu Itagaki) who have been playing DQIX for over 400 hours, and I can easily see why. This is an absolutely massive game. It'll take you about 50 hours to get through the main storyline, and there are literally hundreds of side quests and places to explore. DQIX's world is massive and you could probably just take an entire day running from one end of it to the other. Now, I've said before that I don't equate length with value, but in the case of DQIX, you really are getting a lot of value for your money. If you consider the game as a short story anthology, you're getting dozens of stories, and the DS's carry-and-go features really hit this home. It feels like watching a season of television. You can tune in any time for an episode or two, or you can hit the whole series if you're feeling ambitious. It's really well suited to the DS's strengths.
So what do you do in this game, exactly? Well, in most respects it's a more-or-less linear JRPG, meaning there's a lot of dungeon crawling, turn based fighting, town exploration and item customization. It's par for the course for Dragon Quest games and JRPGs in general, but Dragon Quest IX really nails the breezy, speedy feeling of SNES JRPGs like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana perfectly. Grinding isn't a chore at all, mostly because the turn based battles actually have an element of strategy to them, and as I said, they go fast. None of this "go make yourself a sandwich and come back and your battle animation will still be going" crap. This is true of most DS RPGs, but it bears repeating – developers, make your battles fast. It's really important for the pacing of a game like this.
One element that I've never gotten into in JRPGs is the customization factor, but DQIX makes this really fun and rewarding. You can stick to buying the progressively better armor and weapons in towns and make it to the end of the game just fine (and having to buy all of your equipment for all four of your characters is challenging, rewarding, and looks cool because hey, you made them!), but for the truly adventurous, you can alchemise your own new weapons and armor using bits of the enemies you defeat. It's an incredibly involving and deep system, and this is coming from a person who couldn't give two shits about customizing weapons in Final Fantasy XIII.
Overall, this is just a game that exudes confidence and polish. It's undoubtedly the prettiest 3D-based game on the DS, and will often leave you astounded with how they pulled off such great visuals on the system (the Akira Toriyama artwork of course doesn't hurt). The environments feel so tactile that you could almost just reach out and touch them. And should you want to reach out and touch them with the stylus, the game controls just as well with that option as it does with the buttons. I'm a traditionalist, so I stuck with the face buttons, but the option is there and it works really well. The music is charming and incredibly catchy, too. Seeing as the game was developed by Level-5, who made the Professor Layton games, I found a lot of overlap between the kind of music in this game and in those games.
Really, though, I'm just trying to say that Dragon Quest IX is one of the best JRPGs I've played in years. Even though I didn't find the overarching story to be all that interesting, it's still so charming and fun that I'm going to keep playing it long after this review has been forgotten about. It's really the perfect antidote to the melodramatic seriousness that seems to be plaguing the genre, and reminds me of the fun I used to have playing these games. Here's hoping that it finds some footing in North America, because this is a game that deserves to be in every DS owner's hands.
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