Since I’ve recently beaten the main story in Dragon Quest IX, I’ve decided to pick up another DQ game for the Nintendo DS – Dragon Quest IV.  Since it’s a remake of an NES game, I’m not that confident that DQ4’s going to be as entertaining an experience as DQ9 was, but let’s see…

Some initial impressions:

Presentation

On starting the game, you definitely see that the graphics are quite a few notches down from what you get in DQ9.  DQ4 on the DS looks a lot like the PS1 game Grandia … 3D backgrounds with sprite-based characters and monsters.   There’s also a very SNES/Genesis-ish 2D overworld.  So, serviceable graphics – but nothing very exciting.  Very retro, though.

The creators of this remake seem to have forgotten something, though.  This is a DS game, and as such – you’d expect them to take more advantage of the DS’s features.  Unlike DQ9, there is no touchscreen support whatsoever.  It’d be nice to be able to navigate menus and move characters with either the stylus or buttons.  The top screen does get used, but I’d have liked to have the option to have the map stay up there when I’m in a town (you have to push a button to show the map, and you can’t walk around while the town map is being displayed.)

Gameplay

The game itself is organized into chapters.  I’ve been through the prologue – where you name “your” character and assign a gender – after which the game abruptly transitions onto some other guy in some other land.  I’ve played Chapter 1, and after Chapter 1 is over the game abruptly transitions again to another character in a completely different land. and the process starts over again.  I’ve been through most of the second chapter as I write this, and I wonder when the game will actually settle down and let me play with an actual party that won’t disappear in a couple of hours.

The problem with this approach is that is maximizes one of the weaknesses of DQ games – combat when you’re at a low level.  So far, in each chapter my characters have started at Level 1.  At level 1, you have very few effective options in combat other than to simply attack.  In chapter 1, for example, the one-character party you start with has literally no other options than to attack, defend, or use an item.  No special attacks, no magic, nothing.  Walk a few steps on the overworld map or a dungeon, and hit “A” about a hundred times.  Walk a few more steps, hit “A” a hundred more times.  Go back to an inn to heal, then repeat.  That’s battling in the early game in DQ4.  It picks up a bit in the second chapter, since you get a party of three characters to start with instead of a single character – but the battling here is largely the same – except you need to hit the “A” button three hundred times for each battle instead of merely one hundred.  True, one of the characters in your second party is a mage and one a cleric, but they will not be able to do much without level grinding … and lots of “A” button pressing.

Pity the poor “A” button.

And one other thing…

What’s with the dialogue in this game?  The character you’re playing in the second chapter appears to be DQ4’s take on Russian – and the designers appear to go out of their way to make pretty well every NPC a parody of “Russians speaking broken English” – to the point of making the dialogue completely unintelligible.  This makes no sense at all – since you’re playing a character that’s a native of the country she’s travelling around in!  The townspeople shouldn’t be speaking to her in gibberish.  Hopefully, the game designers let up on this later in the game.