Here be dragons
Hey, gang, Dragon Quest 9 is out. Here’s what I’m thinking about, ca. four hours in:
You play as a Celestrian, which is a type of winged asshole. They’re basically angels, except they’re more like what angels would be if angels were self-righteous, whiny, arrogant pricks who look down on other people because of their race. So basically like Torii Hunter. The Celestrians spend their days helping humans out, but only because that’s the only way to get "benevolescence" (which word, regrettably, I am not making up), which they need to gather a bunch of so they can finally stop helping humans and spend the rest of their days in indolence and frivolity. Their nights they mainly spend complaining about how much it sucks that they have to do things to get their reward. So, really, they’re like the celestial version of organised labour; My name is Union, for we are lazy.
Naturally, since the game’s more than forty minutes long, there’s a big crisis, which causes me to reflect on the many ways in which Dragon Warrior 7 was different from every other RPG ever. That game didn’t actually open with a big crisis spoiling the foolproof plans of the hero’s buddies (notably unlike Dragon Warriors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9, along with Final Fantasy Everything) and triggering the hero to go on a grand quest to right the wrongsness.
The game uses the same translations for monster names and whatnot as were used in DQ8; this is too bad, since they suck. The old ones were better. "Fireball" was a better spell name than "Frizz," and that’s all there is to it. Especially annoying is that, since "Frizz" sounds not unlike "Freeze," I can never remember if it’s ice magic or fire magic, which sometimes matters. Oh, and, also? "Bubble slime" my aching ass. It’s a goddamn Babble. Get down with that, Square Enix.
It’s so nice being able to see the gear actually reflected on the models. That’s a constant letdown in DQ8; I’d get some awesome new piece of harmour, and the icon would look crazy butch, and I’d put it on and… oh, right. Still in the big yellow Firefly trench coat, huh. Now all I need is to get some gear that doesn’t look like ass, but I suppose that’s what the earlygame is all about.
We seem to be pushing the DS about as hard as it goes, here; there’s noticeable stutter and slowdown at various points. This seems odd to me, since, really, you can’t exactly see all that processing up on the screen. Don’t get me wrong, now; the game looks fine, but it doesn’t look any more fine than many other DS games that don’t stutter. So who knows what that’s all about.
There are emotes, which is wild. You bind them to the B button. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect if you’ve played World of Warcraft — the same emotes, basically. I guess they’re mainly there so you can harass other people in multiplayer, though they are occasionally useful in the game itself.
Hey, you can see the mobs on the map before you go into combat! I think that qualifies Dragon Quest 9 to be the ninth best game of the decade. Unlike Earthbound, however, there doesn’t appear to be any value in approaching the mobs a certain way; you can’t sneak up behind them to get a first strike or anything. And, unlike Lufia 2, there’s no suite of commands you can use to interact with and manipulate the mobs. They’re just there, on the map, where you can see them. It’s nice, though, since they do react to player power, and will start running away from you when you’re much higher-level, so you can travel around lower-level zones and not have to deal with fighting endless trash mobs.
Character generation is pretty fun — you get about eight customisation screens, and lots of choices as to which Dragon Ball Z character you want to look exactly the same as. Sadly, Majin Buu does not appear to be an option.
The class system appears to be very much like the one in DW7, with the skill system from DQ8 grafted on to the top of it. Which is really too bad, since the skills were one of the weakest parts of DQ8. At least this time the game deigns to tell you how many points you need to put into a skill to unlock the actual abilities, and which abilities you’ll be unlocking. On the dim side, it just tells you the names and not what they goddamn do. But still. It’s a start.
And it probably doesn’t matter anyhow, since, as far as I can tell, they’re pretty horrible. I have this skill called… something. I can’t remember; it’s some dippy pun or other. But I can use the thing, spend four magic points, and then attack and defend at the same time! Which is great, I guess, except that I can cast Heal for two magic points, and it heals way more damage than defending would prevent. So I guess I don’t see the purpose for this skill. Maybe it’s useful in the late-game, but it’s three points into the tree. Skills that early should be useful early. And, ideally, not compete for the exact same resource I’m using to heal.
The game is kind enough to grace you with the most annoying NPC companion in recent memory in Stella, the fairy. She looks annoying, says annoying things, does annoying things. She even has annoying background music that plays when she’s around. I wanted to smash her. With my boots.
Thanks to the (comparatively) limited space on a DS game card — or perhaps to the timely intervention by the benevolent hand of God — there is no voice acting. Dragon Quest 8 had perhaps the worst voice acting of any video game ever in all of history; it wasn’t just incompetently done, like in Baten Kaitos — it was designed deliberately to be as awful as possible. Every character had some outrageous accent or other, and they were hammed up well beyond the point of acceptability. Sometimes the characters in DQ9 have accented screen text, which makes me love even more that there are no voices.
