Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
Well… I’ve done it. I have finished all mainline Dragon Quest games that have been officially released in English. It was a fun journey! I started with XI as my first a couple years ago and ended with IX yesterday. It’s odd that I skipped over this series growing up but played all the Final Fantasies. Anyways, let’s talk about it!
There are two types of Dragon Quest games. Ones with pre-set characters, and ones with the “build your own” party mechanism. Each have their positives and negatives. This one is a “build your own.” You create your main character, I made mine look like a Super Saiyan and named him Goku to compliment the Toriyama art style of the games. After that you’re dropped into the game. The main character is one of a race of special beings called Celestrians, decked out with wings and a halo and invisible to mortal human eyes. Their purpose is to watch over mortal life and protect it so that they may flourish. One day there is a huge beam of energy that shoots up to through the Celestrian homeland, known as the Observatory, wreaking havoc and knocking our hero down to the surface of the earth, known as the Protectorate. While losing your ability to fly, and now able to be seen you set out on a quest to figure out what happened and hopefully repair the damage done. You do keep some of your Celstrian abilities, such as the ability to see faeries and ghosts. You do make your way back to your homeland and get a new task to revive Yggdrasil, the great tree of life that resides in the Observatory, by collecting it’s fruit. These fruit are called Fyggs and have been spread about the world due to the disruption from the energy beam. The issue here is when mortals find these fruit, and eat them, bad things happen. I actually quite enjoyed the story a lot, but the lack of any real character interaction and development really held it back, in my opinion.
The vocation, also known as the class or job, system is back as well. However it felt like levels were much slower going here, so I didn’t get to explore as many vocations as I wanted. To open them you also had to do quests, which weren’t so bad, but it just another roadblock in enjoying the mechanics. I ended up with two gladiators, a mage and a priest. The gladiator was the only higher tier class. Again, this was because of the sheer amount of grinding involved. One of the customization options I really liked was how every little piece of armor, and every weapon as well, changed the look of your characters.
Music here was pretty standard, but a few tracks did stand out. That’s pretty typical of a Dragon Quest game. Battle system was your standard turn based. There was the inclusion of something called the Coup de Grace. This was basically a special skill per class that would randomly trigger in battle. Warriors were guaranteed a critical, priests got a free party heal, etc. Honestly it only happened a handful of times the entire game. Some other systems made their way in, such as the skill point system from VIII where every level you get a couple points to distribute. Nothing earth shattering here, but that’s expected.
The saving grace of Dragon Quest IX was it’s charming story. I played after the wi-fi features had long been retired, so maybe I would have gotten some more enjoyment out of the game from that. It’s definitely worth a play through for any classic JRPG fan.
Side note: Unfortunately the only way to acquire this now is either Ebay or emulation.
