Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen (2007)

The DQ community's praise for Dragon Quest IV kinda got my hopes up. That might've hurt the process.

To be honest, this 4th game in the series is good.

After the beautiful simplicity of III, IV tried to take a step further here and there. Trying to do things slightly different and giving a bit more character to the franchise. And you can clearly see this in the story.

The best thing about this game is definitely the "chapters of the chosen" approach. You get a bit attached to the characters and you understand their motifs. The fact that this cast is very charismatic, with each chapter presentation and tale filled with charm, just adds more to the experience. Especially if you've played previous entires. It's basic, but it's candid.

The gameplay saw little improvement, but it doesn't mean it's bad. The overworld still feels great to explore, soundtrack is alright, enemy and character designs are still top notch, there are good secrets to find around the world and bosses and dungeons are amazing! Dungeons are short, well designed and sweet. Bosses are challenging and super fun to fight.

And let's not forget that the remake did a fantastic job on giving the game a new look and feel. The experience definitely feels pleasant on the handheld.

And what else? Well, that's the problem. There's not much else.

It comes as no surprise, but be prepared to grind. And I mean REALLY GRIND, because during my 50+ hours with the game, that's what I did the most. And normally I don't even care about that stuff, but this game is just SO SLOW! Around chapter 5, I was pretty much done with it. Progressing through DQIV's final chapters felt like a massive slog. I just wasn't having fun at all anymore. Bosses and story were the only things keeping me going, but even that felt like it wasn't reason enough.

The game just got... boring. Why wouldn't they tone that down on a remake? Even saving is slow!

Besides, I started questioning some design choices around my final hours with the game.

Why is equipment so expensive? Why are most items useless during battles? Is Torneko supposed to be useful? Couldn't they include more songs in the remake? Why does chapter 6 even exist? Will Dragon Quest never get the enemy variety right? And why the hell Zing fails so much in this game?

I've read so many good things about DQIV that I actually thought that I'd feel a major diference from previous games. And while yes, I did feel, it just wasn't enough, I guess. If it wasn't for the story, bosses and characters, I wouldn't even try to reach the end.

By no means this is a bad game. It's got its charms and Dragon Quest still lives in my heart. But I just don't see myself going back to this one.

I played the ds version of the game

dragon quest 4 is a good game, and has some gorgeous animation, and terrible ds 3d chugging areas. any town with water just tanks the speed. It is a great rpg, but with all the annoying rpg parts to it. the game starts off with 4 contained chapters that you play with different character before they all come together. they are all pretty grindy though, i struggled to beat the first bosses of each of them on my first try of each without running back and forth, and one requires you to get loads of money too, which is best gotten from random drops from enemies

characters: Ragnar is a knight with a cool mustache. a physical attacker with the same equipment type as the hero. Alena is a cool tomboy princess who should have gotten the endors princess's hand in marriage for winning the tournament(won't even give you a cheeky option to be like "no, actually i want to marry her" after the king congratulates you), Kiryl is just a boring priest with good buffs, and Borya is a boring old man who has the best magic spells, but is boring, and old, and has no health or defence. they just tag along with Alena and dont have much character beyond that. Torneko is a merchant man who i like all the abilities of, but has random attacks in battle and is less reliable than i would like in my party and also has pretty decent equipables. Meena and Maya have like 2 moments where you can see slightly different personalities from them, but they look identical and have the same coloured clothes which is annoying for menuing, and have both have decent attack magic, with meena being an all arounder with good heals, good attack spells and good physical attack, but no buffs, and maya just being purely damage spells and a few statuses. and then lastly, hero is just a silent protagonist, he gets the best spells in the game, but also is good for just hitting things because he gets the best equipables(it isnt a word still, but i am sticking with it). not much special to get attached to on any of them. I went through most of the game with Hero, Alena, Ragnar, and Meena(the healer twin), who got replaced later on by Kiryl because a defense buff on any of the bosses just wrecked my entire team.

Magic is weird in this game. attack spells are resisted by too many enemies to be viable, and enemies get grouped together, so aoe can only effect all in a group unless stated otherwise. along with that, you can only select different groups of enemies to attack, and the party decide who to go for, always going for the ones they can kill first. it is odd, but you get used to it. either way, i used 3 physical attackers in my party, one healer with buffs, and didnt grind much before the final boss barely making it after using none of my good resources at level 33-35.

also, different parts of the world have their own dialects. Ragnar is from a scottish place, tornkeo is from an irish place, meena and maya are from a french place (fake french place, because the kingdom got taken over by evil french demons and "forced everyone to speak like zis"), alena is from a russian place, where the towns are named russian-y and they have a Tsar, but nothing else. but once you explore the rest of the world it kinda drops this idea

Speaking of the towns, they suck. you get the spell zoom, that lets you travel to a select few, but it doesnt show you on the map where it is until you fly there, and the places themselves dont look distinct and only have like one npc that introduces you to the town and that is sometimes all you get from the name. also you can rotate the camera in towns and dungeons with L and R to see "secret" passages and stuff, but you can never center it again afterwards without excessive fiddling which always bugged me.

Whew, for a series that looked like it barely aged past its first installment, Dragon Quest IV impressively sets out to do what no other Dragon Quest does; make a great story with a variety of characters. Covering mechanically balanced chapters and replacing faceless job classes with in depth characters, Dragon Quest IV's story is impeccable compared to its previous iterations, creating the multi-layered narrative before Final Fantasy VI made it cool.

The gameplay is all the same, with the exception of characters that play themselves. This does sound irritating, but with an impressive variety of tactics and generally manageable AI, one can do fairly well with characters that play themselves. As for balance, unlike the previous games grinding doesn't nearly feel like a slog, as content is spread between chapters so most of the game is spent on Level 1-10 and the endgame levels (40+) gather quickly.

All in all, Dragon Quest IV is where the series truly shines. For a series iterating upon the same simple bag of tricks, Dragon Quest IV creates characters, bosses, and scenes that are quite memorable. If it was to play up to this point, the Dragon Quest series is worth the playthrough to this point.