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Quick Review: Dragon Quest 9

[Note: This Quick Review is very long. It's a "Quick Review" not for the length of the review, but for the amount of time played. Quick Reviews are reviews of games that the reviewer has not yet finished, but has played enough to get a solid impression of the game. At the time of this writing, I had played Dragon Quest 9 for over 30 hours.]

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is a very strange game. Dragon Quest has always been a series that follows a very specific set of rules and maintains a certain style and gameplay pattern, and DQ9 doesn't change that. However, it adds a very bizarre sense of humor and an alien, almost robotic narrative that, after over 30 hours in, I still can't tell if it's intentional.

Mechanically, this game is Dragon Quest. It's the same as Dragon Quest 3, 4, 5, 8, any game in the main series. Turn-based first-person JRPG combat, paint-by-numbers leveling and stat-building, and a full variety of quirky spells like Zing (Life),  Frizz (Fire), Crack (Ice), and Squelch (Antidote). If you've played a Dragon Quest game before, you already know how this goes.

DQ9 distinguishes itself with a few unique features to spice up the game: character classes, wardrobe customization, and the removal of random encounters. Instead of dedicated classes for each character, you can select from six different jobs (expandable to twelve after completing some quests). The progression is very similar to Final Fantasy 3 and 5, where each job has its own level and skill allocation, and while you can carry certain bonuses over between jobs you generally have to start from scratch when you switch. It adds a pleasant bit of variety, and gives you the opportunity to arrange your party and play the game on your terms. If you want nothing but bruisers, you can do that. If you want nothing but magic users, you can do that. If you want a balanced party of fighter, thief, white mage, and black mage, you can do that. It's very freeing in an old-school way.

Each character can be customized, both upon generation with size, hair, and face characteristics, and through the game with wardrobe changes. Unlike in previous Dragon Quests, where you could only change your characters' appearance with specific combinations of equipment, every weapon and piece of armor modifies your appearance. There are hundreds of items, too, ranging from plate mail to jeans to slime-shaped helmets to tridents. Of course, since this is an RPG you'll probably spend most of your time hunting for the gear with the best stats and ignoring the appearance.

Finally, instead of random encounters, enemies appear in the world and you can avoid them or confront them at your leisure. It's a pleasant change, but it's not as big a difference as you might expect. The enemies constantly and rapidly respawn, so you can't simply clear out an area and explore it at your leisure. Just as if they were invisible random encounters, the visible enemies are an ever-present nuisance, and whether you can even avoid combat with them is solely dependent on whether they feel like noticing you.

The storytelling in the game is simply bizarre. It reads like a standard JRPG plot, run through a computer designed to remove every hint of pathos and replace it with puns. You play a Celestrian, an angelic being tasked with protecting a town from danger. Of course, within the first hour of the story everything goes nuts, heaven itself undergoes a catastrophe, and you're thrown to the earth and put on a quest to collect seven magical MacGuffins to restore balance.

It would be a straight-laced, relatively entertaining story if it wasn't for the game's deranged sense of humor. Nearly everything in the game, from enemies to characters to towns, uses some sort of wordplay. You fulfill the wishes of King Aqueous the High Drator. You cure a plague in the town of Coffinwell with the assistance of archeologist Dr. Phlegming. You fight Hell Ninos, Scarewolves, and Cruelcumbers. It never stops. Combine it with borderline-Engrish battle dialogue ("The enemy have been defeated!"), and you have the very strange experience of never being able to tell whether something is a mistranslation, a typo, or the developers' bizarre sense of humor.

The puns, alliteration, rhyming, and other wordplay are only half of the narrative insanity of the game. Characters are detached to the point of autism and the dialogue brings up fond memories of the terrible translations of NES and SNES-era RPGs. In a plot filled with moments that should carry great emotional weight, a constant stream of Narm ensures that you can't take any of it seriously. People die. People get betrayed. Things fall apart. And yet, when a recently-deceased character says, "Oh dear, I seem to be dead," it's very hard to take any of it seriously.

Your party isn't immune to this strangeness, either. Besides your main character, you can recruit up to three people in your party from an Adventurer's Guild-style function in one of the game's inns. However, these three characters might as well be robotic drones or Pokemon for all the personality they display. They have absolutely no dialogue, which ordinarily would give the game an original Final Fantasy feel. However, the story itself has you, as a fallen Celestrian, seeing and interacting with mysterious forces that no one else in the world can see. You talk to ghosts, board heavenly trains, and even walk around the shaken ruins of heaven. And your party just silently follows you without any explanation or question. They're supposedly human adventurers, but once you recruit them into your party they're simply finger puppets.

Outside of the main plot, dozens of side quests and optional dungeons offer plenty of opportunity to set out on your own. NPCs everywhere offer you different tasks, which could be as simple as performing a gesture in front of them or as complex as beating a certain number of enemies in a very specific manner. You can also pick up a number of treasure maps that reveal locations of secret dungeons filled with enemies and treasure, and utterly unrelated to any sort of plot or character development. A simple but broad crafting system lets you shovel different items into a talking pot to turn them into newer, better items through alchemy. You can also work on getting different achievements in the game, and filling up your library of monsters beaten, items collected, and alchemy recipes learned.

The game features a multiplayer function that, at the time of this writing, I have yet to test. I did, however, test the "DQVC" function, which lets you update the game through Wi-Fi to unlock a special store that sells you a daily assortment of rare items. It's a very minor but useful function, especially for alchemical completionists.

For all my complaints about the game, for all the cringe-worthy dialogue and cookie-cutter mechanics, this game is really fun. It hits all the right notes of an old-school JRPG, and provides more than enough content to keep you playing for dozens of hours. It reminds me not only of Dragon Quest, but of Final Fantasys 1, 3, and 5. The relative open-endedness, the customizable party, the focus on gameplay and exploration far more than plot, all make Dragon Quest 9 genuinely entertaining.

Dragon Quest 9 is a great pick for any JRPG fan. Sure, you've done all this before across several different games, but DQ9 manages to bring all of these excellent, if dated, gameplay mechanics together into one enjoyable, portable package. Yes, the story is shallow and strange and utterly lacking in emotion, but it's just there to provide a loose series of guideposts to get you from town to town and dungeon to dungeon. It works well, and it satisfies all the neurotic, stat-building, item-collecting, dungeon-crawling impulses us JRPG lovers carry in spades.