DS Review: Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen

The Nintendo DS has seen a lot of remakes lately, and a lot of them have been really good, especially the Final Fantasy RPGs. But Final Fantasy isn’t the only big RPG franchise out there, Dragon Quest has a strong following too, with games reaching back as far as Final Fantasy, to the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Dragon Quest IV is a remake of the game by the same name (or by the name Dragon Warrior IV in North America) for the NES. This is not a SNES remake, as Mav continually seemed to think, but an old 8-bit classic.

I played the original DW4 a lot on my old NES system. The game was classic JRPG with a neat twist: instead of a single, linear story, the game instead featured five chapters, with each chapter telling the story of a different hero or group of heroes. The final, fifth chapter featured the story of the main hero, who re-encounters all the heroes from the first four chapters in reverse order (IE: the last hero you pick up in chapter 5 is Ragnar from chapter 1). This way of telling the story made each hero seem relevant and forced you to use each hero in their own story without using a convoluted plot twist to force the hero into your party during the main quest line.

The Nintendo DS remake is, by and large, very true to the original game, but a lot has changed. Graphically the game has been completely overhauled, adding 3D backgrounds and a camera you can rotate, but keeping the 2D sprite look to the main characters and the monsters you fight. Monsters, in turn, are now animated, where they were just static pictures in the NES game. The music is still true to the original score, with the same 8-bit feel, but the sounds have also been upgraded so they don’t sound quite as bad. The art has also been re-tooled with the classic Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame) feel to character design.

Game-play wise, there’s been a lot of changes. Most notably is the addition of a ‘bag’ for extra inventory space, allowing players to carry near limitless loot. This has a major impact on chapter 3, where you play a merchant who gathers and sells weapons. In the original NES version, you had only what you could carry; now, with the bag, you can carry everything. It certainly makes that chapter a lot easier to beat. Another major change is that you are no longer bound by the ‘tactics’ combat mode in chapter 5. Originally, in chapter 5, you gave a ‘tactic’ like ‘all out attack’ or ‘save MP’ to your party, and they’d fight on their own. Now you can give them orders directly, like you do in the first four chapters. A welcome change, to say the least.

On the other hand, the game retains a lot of its ‘hard core’ feel, especially in that it does not go out of its way to direct you in how to actually complete the quests. The game depends heavily on players interpreting obscure clues and exploring on their own to work their way through the story. Even I had a hard time getting past a few points, despite having finished the game many times, since I couldn’t remember an obscure clue or step. Players who aren’t interested in talking to every NPC and remembering what they say might find it easier to follow a game guide as they work their way through Dragon Quest IV.

There’s another change I wanted to mention, because it really bugged me. All the regions of the game have been given regional dialogue accents. When you start in Burland, everyone talks with a Scottish accent. In Zamovska, they talk like Russians. This wouldn’t be nearly so irksome if they actually TALKED with the accents, but all you get is text that’s “accented” with misspellings and grammatical butchering. Personally, I dislike that, but others might find it ‘charming.’ Meh!

As with most DS games, a wireless sharing mini-game was added to Dragon Quest IV, in the form of a town you populate by swapping your ‘pioneer’ with other DQIV players. Your pioneer joins their town, their pioneer joins your town, and it’s a fun side game if you have friends to swap townspeople with. Sadly, I don’t have many said friends, so I’m not sure if there’s anything to unlock when you build up the town to a specific size.

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Dragon Quest IV was a classic when it came out, and it’s still a classic. A must have for any RPG fans who own a DS. I don’t think any of the new features really sell the game, but the game already sells itself, so that’s not an issue. If you missed Dragon Warrior IV back in ‘92, give it a try now in ’08!

Score: 9.0/10

Editor's note: Okay, I MAY have originally thought that this project looked much like as SNES port to the DS when it in actuality was an NES. That is just the first thing to go with age. But for the most part, Dragon Quest IV was a LOT of fun even though the graphics looked the same as they did when we first played the Dragon Quest series. The important part is that the fun of the original RPG is there and this is a great game to have. -Mav

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