RPG Diary

Dragon Quest IX

I've been generally disappointed with the Dragon Quest series, but Dragon Quest VIII was a game that I really enjoyed. Dragon Quest IX was made by the same developer, so I'm hoping I'll enjoy this one too.

Title	Dragon Quest IX
Year	2009 (US 2010 )
System	DS
Developer	Level-5 Square Enix
Publisher	Square Enix (US Nintendo )

With Dragon Quest IX, the series made the uncommon jump from consoles to a handheld. While the DS was powerful for a handheld, it was obviously limited in comparison to the PS2. Dragon Quest IX is mostly 3D, though some NPCs use 2D sprites, similar to Dragon Quest VII. This is awkward and clunky, because the 2D sprites cannot rotate smoothly with the camera changes. And while most of the game is in 3D, the DS hardware is more limited than the PS2 hardware, resulting in "uglier" 3D (for lack of a better word). This was a little disappointing because Dragon Quest VIII was such a beautiful game.

Probably the biggest reason that I enjoyed Dragon Quest VIII was its strong central narrative and memorable cast of characters. Unfortunately, Dragon Quest IX is completely the opposite. The main story is once again meager and barebones, barely present after the prologue. The party is once again filled with generic create-a-characters, as in Dragon Quest III, so they are absent from the story. Instead, an NPC named Stella joins the party and provides commentary about what is happening. However, this gyaru fairy seldom had anything important to say and quickly became an annoyance. The main story does finally pick up some steam around 25 hours in, but by that point I was no longer interested and just wanted to move on to something else.

Dragon Quest IX has a lot of side quests. So many, that they are numbered and tracked in a journal. Unfortunately, these are the dull MMO style quests: boring fetch quests and other mundane tasks, requested by disposable NPCs with no significance to anything. Even worse, most the quest rewards did not seem to be worth the effort either. (However, a few quests grant new jobs which are definitely worth doing.) I quickly stopped bothering with these because they felt like filler and a waste of time.

While the story was a huge flop, the core gameplay was good. There are no more random encounters — battles are started by walking into a monster on the map. This makes metal slime hunting a little less painful, since you can avoid the other monsters. The game also felt well balanced because I never really needed to stop and grind for hours to progress.

Dragon Quest IX combines a job system (somewhat similar to Dragon Quest III) with the skill trees of Dragon Quest VIII, which provides a lot of customization and choices for your party. However, because class changing resets the character's level and they don't keep any stat gains, it felt kind of detrimental to class change. Additionally, spells (unlike skills) can only be used in the original class that unlocked them, so class changing spellcasters seemed especially bad.

In the end, Dragon Quest IX was one of the most boring and uninteresting games that I have played in a while. I found myself completely unmotivated to play it, and there were many days that I chose to do something else with my free time instead. If I wasn't trying to finish the entire Dragon Quest series, I would've abandoned the game very early on.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. This is easily one of my least favorite games so far, so the only question is how low it will go. Final Fantasy X-2 also had a bunch of filler side quests, but at least it had a (very awful) central narrative that I wanted to know the resolution to. Meanwhile, the original Dragon Quest barely qualifies as a game by modern expectations, so I'll safely place Dragon Quest IX above that (and only that).