Dragon Quest IV

Originally posted on Facebook on 16 January 2022

Dragon Warrior IV.

So I just played through and finished the NES version of Dragon Quest IV, which is known as Dragon Warrior IV. and...I have very mixed feelings about it.

As an early DQ game, it is of course a huge grind. But it does some interesting things as well.

The story is broken up into five chapters, each of which has its own protagonist. and in the fifth chapter, you play as the main Hero, and all your other party members are the people from the previous four chapters. I find this to be pretty cool and interesting. 

This is the first DQ game that really has a focus on the characters themselves, as rudimentary is it is.

Chapter 1 takes the form of a fun mini-campaign: you play as a knight who starts in a castle, ventures through a cave to a town, gathers clues, goes in one more cave, and then climbs up a tower to rescue a child. And that's the whole chapter. It's the basic fundamentals of a typical JRPG quest, and I found it quite fun. It's a really good and simple introductory chapter.

This chapter also introduces the concept of the NPC party member - you can find an optional friendly Healslime in the cave, who will join your party and help out during the tower climb by occasionally healing you.

Chapter 2 follows a princess and her two retainers, a cleric and a wizard, who go on a rather meandering journey. The player controls all three characters on a journey from town to town to do a bunch of miscellaneous RPG nonsense such as rescuing a village from a monster, finding an artifact in a cave, climbing a tower for an ingredient, and entering a tournament. 

It's longer than Chapter 1 and has more going on, so it's a nice continuation. More characters to control, more quests to do, more towns to visit - chapter 2 is like an expansion of the concepts from chapter 1.

Chapter 3 is rather unique - you are a merchant, who goes on a journey to open their own shop. The main gimmick of this chapter is making money - and the game has some rather interesting mechanics in place just for this chapter. Enemies drop a lot more items than normal, and once you open up the shop, you can sell the enemy drops for much more money than normal. There are also traveling merchants that can appear instead of random encounters that will allow you to empty your inventory even far away from town.

The end goal is to raise enough money to fund the construction of a tunnel that leads to the next continent.

I found this chapter very interesting, because it is one of the only times in a JRPG I've seen where increasing the player's total amount of money is the primary goal. And the thing is, you have to ACTUALLY raise a large sum of money for real. Nowadays in RPGs, the role of money is very well-established, and any story or progression elements that require players to pay a large sum of money to someone are dealt with via special circumstances that make it so you don't REALLY need to get all the money... (for example the bike voucher in Pokémon). But in this old game, they were more willing to experiment with every aspect of the RPG's game systems, including the strategy behind earning money from selling items. And I find that quite cool.

Chapter 4, you play as twin sisters, a dancer and a fortune-teller, who set out on a journey of revenge. The two characters start off rather weak, so this chapter is all about managing to survive with underpowered characters. Eventually you do find an NPC party member who is pretty strong, but since you cannot control him in battle, you have to rely on his whims to get through. It's an interesting dynamic.

And finally, chapter 5.... Chapter 5 is the story of the main Hero. The game's actual protagonist that you named at the start of the game.

They are the Hero who must travel across the whole world, gathering the Chosen Ones, acquiring the legendary Zenithian Armor, and killing the ultimate bad guy. Typical JRPG stuff.

Chapter 5 is supposed to be where the REAL game begins...but unfortunately for me, it's instead where the game immediately fell off a cliff. And it's all due to one extremely unfortunate game design choice....

So you travel around the world gathering up all the characters from the previous four chapters. You'll get your Knight, Princess, Cleric, Wizard, Merchant, Dancer and Fortune-teller. A sizeable ensemble.... however, from this point forward, the only character you have full control of is the main Hero. All of the other characters will behave like NPCs and will perform all moves and actions on their own. And that...is awful.

This is such an awful design decision, because it removes SO MUCH strategising and interesting interactions that are possible within the game's battle system.

Rather than gathering items and distributing them to the characters who could get the most use out of them, you instead  have to make sure everyone isn't holding something that they might keep trying to use when you don't want them to. Since you can't issue out commands any more, you can't combine your spells in interesting ways, and you can't test out new abilities to see what they do.

 My dancer learned how to cast a spell called "Be Dragon", which turns her into a dragon with a breath attack...but she for whatever reason only ever decided to use it versus Metal Slimes. It isn't a bad option for those enemies, but I'd like to have been able to use it on bosses and other stuff too, you know?

My fortune-teller kept trying to cast Sleep spells on enemies that she could have just killed instead, the Cleric guy keeps trying to cast insta-death spells on bosses that are immune to them, and the Knight keeps using his sword as a usable item to activate some useless buff, instead of just attacking with it... It's such an annoying mess of a system.

All chapter 5 battles just amount to "press the FIGHT command and watch". Battles are already ridiculously frequent, but now in addition to being overly-frequent, they have become boring and frustrating too. What an absolute disappointment.

...

It looks like the Nintendo DS version of Dragon Quest IV has added the option to control all party members during chapter 5, thus turning into a normal game that makes sense.

I do have the DS version, so I could have played that one instead, however I don't regret my decision to play the NES version at all. I wanted to see what the 8-bit original version was really like. Even if I have discovered it to be a "flawed" version, it is still the original, and so I think it is important for me to have seen it. 

I'm glad to have found out first-hand how awful the original concept for chapter 5 was, and equally glad to have learned it was fixed in later versions of DQ4.

The campaign of chapter 5 itself is pretty typical Dragon Quest stuff. Explore dungeons, find treasures, find out clues, use items...

 I actually really enjoyed figuring out the clues - they're telegraphed well, but not plainly spelled out. The townsfolk give just enough information to point you in the right direction, so I never really felt lost in this game at all, aside from on one or two occasions.

 There are a couple of puzzles that stood out to me - such as a village that has a high tide at night time and a low tide at day. You have to notice an odd patch of ground that you can't reach at night (due to the tide), but when you go back and check the spot that looks odd at night during the day, you find a key. That was a good, subtle puzzle.

The dungeons are varied and interesting and each have their own mood and presence, which is great. ...But unfortunately, the encounters are just too damn frequent, so they get boring really fast. 

I remember getting a little annoyed at the frequent encounters during Final Fantasies 4, 5, and 6, but it was never, NEVER as bad in those games as it is in the early DQ games. I had forgotten how bad early DQ really was in this regard.

This is a pretty slow-paced game all around. I definitely needed to have YouTube running in the background while traversing through dungeons in order to stay sane. The utter frequency of the random encounters is just...off the charts. There are just too many monster fights in this game, and the complete lack of agency during each one just leads to tedium.

I definitely think DQ4 is the weakest of the four NES games for this reason.

Even DQ1, that was LITERALLY nothing but grinding, I never thought had anything truly badly-designed in it... it was just a game about grinding, simple as. But DQ4 just has such a miserable chapter 5, especially in comparison to the fun and varied four chapters before it.... it's just a let down.

I'm actually pretty eager to play the much-improved Nintendo DS version at some point in the future.

It would be nice to play through a more modern version of this campaign. Better encounters, faster movement, modern interface... and having actual control during chapter 5. Sounds like a really fun game.