I’m not going to lie to you. Dragon Quest and I have history. It goes back some twenty years at this point, but our relationship today isn’t one based on nostalgia. Back in 2005, you could say that Dragon Quest and I were in, to put it delicately, an unhealthily codependent situation. Dragon Quest VIII had just come out in the United States, fresh faced and full of gorgeous cel-shaded graphics, newly minted menus and music, and voice work of unprecedented quality. But Dragon Quest has never had much clout on this side of the Pacific, and this was its first time going by its real name instead of Dragon Warrior. It needed someone, anyone to play it. Me, I was a recovering role-playing addict, coming off of a decade of Squaresoft devotion, trying my best to stay off the ability trees, the melodrama, and the menus. I lapsed occasionally into turn-based adventures to save the world. I’d been doing good up until that November, hadn’t touched a JRPG since Shadow Hearts: Covenant the previous winter, but I could feel myself weakening. I just wasn’t strong enough. So Dragon Quest VIII and I found each other at our weakest.
Between November 15th and December 1st, I clocked just under ninety-six hours playing Dragon Quest VIII. Yeah, that’s right. Four days of my life.
And I loved it.
Each Dragon Quest, since the first game sprung from Yuuji Horii’s succulent brain in 1986, is an exercise in purity, a defining marquee in a genre known today for its decadence, bombast, and tedium. Dragon Quest is more often noted for its resistance to change rather than its consistent quality across the years. It’s true, Dragon Quest has remained, across its sequels, spin-offs, and numerous remakes, largely the same game it was two decades ago. The essential play – explore a large fantasy world, fight monsters in a first person perspective, collect items, talk to every single person you meet – has never changed in the core titles. But every iteration finds its elegant formula incrementally refined, and to great effect. Dragon Quest II introduced multi-character parties, III a job system that went on to become a genre staple, and so on and so forth. Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, a DS remake of a Playstation remake of the NES original, could be viewed as a step back from the lavishly produced (though still familiar) Dragon Quest VIII, a retreat meant to acclimate players to the series’ transition from home consoles to portables. Surprisingly, Chapters of the Chosen isn’t a retreat at all. It is instead a perfect model of the JRPG as Horii envisioned it, immediately accessible, streamlined from the menu-juggling, command-selecting rigor moral, and trimmed of the excess narrative fat that’s typified the genre since Hironobu Sakaguchi began emphasizing drama over play in Final Fantasy.
That said, Chapters of the Chosen’s story shouldn’t be undersold. While it isn’t full of lengthy dialogues, it isn’t without dramatic instance. The original Dragon Quest IV’s variation on the DQ theme was its narrative structure: following a brief prologue wherein you play as the classic silent-protagonist of your choosing, the game is broken into the titular chapters, each one devoted to the seven other party characters that ultimately make up your adventuring party. These chapters allow you to play and experience the inciting incidents that introduce these characters into the game’s arching save-the-world narrative. Despite the limited characterization, this allows you to form deeper attachments to these characters than you would if the game followed the JRPG formula of the protagonist being the inciting incident that draws these characters into the adventure. It’s both a unique take on JRPG storytelling as well as a way to better facilitate play; since you are playing these characters individually during the game’s first half, you aren’t tied to “level grinding” them later (or having their levels superficially bumped up to match your protagonist’s.) Even after entering the game’s fifth chapter and having gathered the disparate characters together, Chapters of the Chosen is never structured to serve the story. The story is developed just enough to encourage more play, more exploration, more fights, more collection. This is why Dragon Quest IV, and its parent series, is the model of Japanese role-playing. It is, first and foremost, a game, rather than an interactive anime or fantasy novel with a lot of fighting thrown on top of it. There aren’t enough kind words to give to its presentation, from Koichi Sugiyama’s re-mastered score to Akira Toriyama’s endearing art, not to mention Square-Enix’s remarkable colloquialism-laden localization. But they’re all just icing on the proverbial cake.
I stopped carrying the Nintendo DS on my morning commute recently, worried that I was becoming illiterate after playing videogames during every literal moment of my free time throughout the day. I knew Dragon Quest was coming though. I’m not a strong man. We fell back into our old routine in the past week since its release. To be honest, it’s remarkable I was even able to stop playing long enough to write this. It’s wrong, really, to let a game, even one as great as Chapters of the Chosen, take you over.
But it feels so, so right.
Grade: A
Previous 61FPS Reviews:
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit