Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (2009)

My partner got mad at me because I said that Jrpgs had been with me longer than they had - which got me thinking, what games got me hooked on JRPGs.

After some brainwracking I remembered what games I had on my DS when I was a kid, which included Pokemon Pearl, DQM Joker and DQ IX. I have so many fond memories of meeting up with my friends so that we could party up and grind our characters levels. Hell yeah, good times.

The first thing I saw about this game was the beautiful Anime intro sequence on Youtube in 2010 . I was immediatly hooked~

In advance, I played the game in 2010, so it's not a fresh review, just some thoughts about it. Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies was the second title in the series I played after VIII. And I have to admit, I never got warm with VIII ... I guess it was mainly due to the character design - and that is one of the main reasons that makes IX so good for me:

1. The character creator - Every Character got created by a friend of mine with exeption of the main character.The variety of designs gave the party a real unique feel. ^^
   
   
2. Visible gear - That goes a little hand in hand with the first point. And I wish that more JRPGs had that feature. The armor looks neat and comes in great variety too. That also motivated me to craft more even after the end of the main storyline.
   
   
3. The story - The whole game was split into little arcs, all of them realy enjoyable. Plot twists, funny characters, nice animated cutscenes cept it fresh and entertaining. The mainstoryline with the name giving Sentinels was quite cool too.
   
   
4. The graphics - For me DQ IX is one of the best looking DS games out there. The 3D models look so good and the 2D NPCs can not belittle that. The monsters look droll as usual and the overworld is realy big and detailed.
   
   
5. The music - As beautiful as you would expect it from a Dragon Quest. It makes you enjoy exploring the world and experiencing adventures even more.

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Dragon Quest is a series that doesn't really push the envelope in any respect for its mechanics at this point, relying on an enthralling story and magnificent production values to push the adventure along. Does this entry deliver?

Eh, not exactly. The story isn't nearly as memorable or expansive as previous entries, choosing instead to include hundreds of hours of MMO-ish content that, while playable in a multiplayer environment, aren't really all that engaging or interesting.

As for the looks, the game does take a hit due to being on a portable console, even resembling Dragon Quest VII's shoddy looks at times.

While this game doesn't necessarily doesn't do anything wrong, it's one of the first in the series to truly disappoint in that it doesn't do pretty much anything out of the ordinary to really improve the experience. The shoes have gotten a little large for something like this game to fill.

Dragon Quest IX tantalized me with many of its aspects. A fully-customizable party, a job system with skills shared between classes, numerous optimal dungeons? What could ruin something like that? I'd say what that thing is here, but given as that's the title of the review, is there really any need?

Well, let's start with the good. The plot intrigued me for the most part, even it's incredibly obvious who the Big Bad is the moment you hear their name. In addition to killing the hell out of monsters, your Celestrian hero is also tasked at performing good deeds and helping people so they can gather benevolessence. These good deeds typically involve killing the hell out of monsters, but there's some nice heart-touching and tear-jerking moments along the way. The game loves its puns, to the point where they become cringe-worthy—yet good because they're so cringe-worthy. The battle system is solid, though watching the animations gets a little tedious and the combo system is kind of luck-based. Each class has its own "Coup de Grace", a Limit Break of sorts that aren't very flashy but quite useful, though when a character becomes "primed" to perform a Coup de Grace is quite random. I do wish the game gave you more party members sooner, as your hero is solo for the first 1-2 hours.

It's a game I would have played through to the end, especially considering the job system...if it weren't for the gripe mentioned in the title. Dragon Quest games are known for being grindy, but Dragon Quest IX takes it up to an absolutely insane degree with its job system, let alone the quests and item crafting.

Let's start with the more minor gripes. Throughout the world, you get quests that typically involve gathering stuff for people. Most quests require random drops, which as you can imagine can be quite...random to drop. These typically result in minor rewards. There's also item crafting, which lets you use gathered items to make stronger items, weapons, and armour. This typically requires you to get a weapon, gather a bunch of components, combine those components, and then several steps later have an upgraded weapon. It's tedious as hell, but given how crafted items are much stronger than what's usually available in shops, you'll be putting in the effort to gather crap in the field (sometimes literally), kill a gazillion slimes, and scour random bookcases just so you can have your entire party look like complete freaking morons in an outfit that looks like three stacked slimes.

The grinding is where the game loses all appeal. It's a grindy game in the first place, simply to get stronger and afford better gear. That's not unusual with Dragon Quest. The catch comes when you finally gain the ability to switch jobs. Every job has its own individual level, and I don't mean the job level as in DQVI. If you switch to a new job, your character starts at Level 1, with baseline stats for that job. Granted, you'll have stronger equipment and (possibly) some stat boosts from levelled skills, but that still equates to "get one-shotted by enemies unless you go back earlier in the game to grind". This might not sound too bad, but there's another element to this: lower-level characters gain less experience than higher-level party members. This makes it take longer for characters who switch jobs to catch up, especially if they take jobs that require more experience to level up.

But let's talk about skills. Each job has its own unique skill, three weapon skills, and either the shield or unarmed skill tree. You gain skill points, and as you put points into each tree (up to 100 points per tree), you unlock new skills or passive abilities at various points along the way. There is no benefit to putting points into a skill until you reach the number of points needed for the next ability, and what abilities do aren't indicated until you unlock a skill (which isn't helped by how most skills have punny, nonsensical names). Levelling a character to the maximum level per job nets a grand total of...200 skills points. You'll hit 100 skill points with a job around Level 40. You probably won't need all of the weapon skills, but that's just more grinding you need to do to get a variety of skills from each job.

Also, out of the 12 jobs in the game, only six are available to you initially. To unlock the other jobs, you need to do quests. These quests task you to kill monsters in infuriatingly tedious ways, with abilities you may not have even unlocked. For example: getting Gladiator requires you to have a character reach maximum Tension (which can only be boosted by a rare few abilities, requires four Tension boosts, and the fourth boost has a chance of failing to raise Tension) and use Dragon Slash to kill a Slime, at a point where slimes will typically run away immediately. The Armamentalist quest requires a character to cast Wizard Ward (which you have to be a Wizard to learn) and landing the killing blow on a Metal Slime (creatures that frequently run away and often have attacks fail to do any damage to them). You don't get evenly-paced access to new jobs either—the Sage job can only be unlocked at the very end of the game and the Luminary can only be unlocked after you beat the final boss and requires finding an enemy in the game's randomly-generated grottos. (I can't say much on the grottos. I only found one during my play-time, wiped up everything in my path to the boss, and then the boss turned out to be absurdly powerful compared to the main-story boss I'd just beaten and proceeded to kick my butt. Fun!)

I have written a lot about how goddamn grindy this game is here...and it has honestly been more enjoyable than actually doing the grinding in the game. It's disappointing, because there's so much potential in the job and gameplay system, yet it's ruined by how grindy getting stronger characters, abilities, and gear is. It's even more annoying given how I enjoyed the job systems of Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest VI. Even if you ignore how much effort would be needed to unlock even a small fraction of the game's abilities for each party member, you still spend as much time grinding as you do advancing in the main quest, which just makes the game unappealing and boring.