Dragon Quest 4 review.

The Core Video Games Forum
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Just in case the name I used didn’t clear it up: This review is specifically for the DS version - NOT the NES version.

The original Dragon Warrior (the old US name for Dragon Quest) was the first RPG I ever played and finished, at the tender age of four. While it may not be the main compelling reason that I got into the genre (That would be Final Fantasy 2 on the SNES), it’s anyone’s guess as to why I’ve never been interesting in looking at the rest of the series. Sure, I played about halfway through Dragon Warrior 7 (which is actually a good 60 hours of gameplay, mind you), and I played a demo of Dragon Quest 8. But, what about 2-6? I’d always heard that Dragon Warrior 4 was the best of the series, so when it got re-released here (as Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen), I decided to take the plunge and try it out finally. I have to say, it’s a very antiquated game; but, I still enjoyed it pretty thoroughly.

Dragon Quest 4, as stated, is a remake of a game that’s about sixteen years old. As such, a fair amount of things have changed - so I’ve heard. Some are obvious cosmetic things, such as there being 3D backgrounds and more detailed characters and environments. Others are quite grandiose, such as the Quicksave option (which I actually never used, but still), or the ability to control other characters manually in battle. Appearently, in Dragon Warrior 4, once you started playing as the main character, the remaining characters operated on AI, leaving you at their mercy. I could see this being annoying, but it has changed since then, thank god.

“Wait. Did you just say ‘once you start playing as the main character?’” Dragon Quest 4 doesn’t start you out playing as the hero of the story; instead, you play from the perspective of other characters, following their own personal pursuits. They all find out one way or another that they are destined to meet with a Legendary Hero and aid him on his quest to save the world (or they just meet the hero by coincidence), and their chapters end as soon as you guide them through their short adventures. Eventually, you take the role of the nameless hero of the story (I named him Four - an idea I got from playing the Dragon Quest 8 demo which named its main character Eight). Four’s village is wrecked by monsters who come to kill him, but his fellow villagers allow him the chance to escape with his life. He learns shortly before his departure that his destiny is to meet up with seven others, and stop the evil Psaro from destroying all humankind. It’s generic, and antiquated to boot; just like most older games, you have to take the initiative to find out where to go/what to do next in almost every case.

The gameplay isn’t much different in that regard. The game uses random, turn-based battles for its combat. You choose between a physical attack, magic spell, item, or defending yourself in each turn until the fight is over. The only neat gimmick of Dragon Warrior 4 is that, after getting all eight main characters together, you can switch characters in and out of the battle between turns, so long as you’re on the world map. In fact, if all your characters in the main party fall in battle, the remaining four characters will enter the battle in place of your fallen characters. Beyond that, DQ4’s combat is vanilla turn-based RPG.

So, the story and gameplay are anachronistic. I don’t mean to say that this is bad, though. A lot of games try - and fail miserably - to do what DQ4 does, ESPECIALLY in regards to combat. Most RPGs with old-school combat try to make their combat too cinematic, and it takes way too long as a result. To add insult to injury, these games usually don’t require you to think too hard - I beat a few bosses in Golden Sun, for example, by just mashing the attack button and never healing, without anyone dying. What helps Dragon Quest 4 stand out amongst other games of its ilk is that it cuts out all the unnecessary fat. The combat goes incredibly fast, because there isn’t much to look at; it’s almost like playing a text-based RPG with a pretty picture in front of your face. Also, the bosses can be really gnarly if you don’t think about what characters you use, and the random battles near the end of the game will cause you to think a about using a strategy besides ‘mash the fight button’ if you want to get through the dungeon with any MP left for your casters. The game also makes very good use of all eight characters, making none of them completely useless. Even though there’s no new innovations, and the random battles are quite frequent, it never feels bothersome to engage all those countless enemies in combat, because the game never wastes your time. More games should think about trying that out, for a change.

It ain’t perfect, though. In terms of story, you can reach the end without really understanding the intentions of the main villain of the story. It’s understandable to leave certain things for you to find out, as this game does; however, that’s kind of a biggie to leave as a purely optional bit of info.

Something neat about DQ4 is its use of dialects - each different region of the world employs a different accent for its inhabitants. This is a cool touch, but I have to say that the Russian dialect was terrible; it didn’t remind me much of Russian (The only reason I knew was because they called the King ‘Tsar’), and reminded me a lot more of the really old days of video games, where broken English was ubiquitous in every game you played. I took like 2-3 weeks to finish the section of the game where you have to visit the ‘Russian’ towns because it was so painful for me.

Also, what the fuck is up with having no touch screen functionality? I never thought I would be bothered so heavily by something like this, but DQ4 is screaming for it! Part of this is because of another one of this game’s big flaws - a necesity to grind - which would be made nicer if you could just press the screen a few times rather than violently mashing the buttons. Though I will say, to the game’s credit, grinding was not nearly as much of a necesity as I thought it would be, based on the other minimal DW/DQ experiences I’ve had. Once you start playing as the main character, you’ll hardly ever need to grind again.

Lastly, spells. Would it hurt to come up with better names? Sizz? Fizz? Frizz? Sizzle? Kafrizzle? I was positive I’d learn a spell called Foshizzle, but unfortunately, I must have not leveled up high enough. Also, the spell that brings a character back to life (called Zing); why would they give it such an absurdly low success rate? Expect this to happen at least once: Character dies. you use a healer to cast Zing on the dead character, but it fails. You try over and over again until you run out of MP, forcing you to leave the dungeon and go back to a town. Seriously, if you wanted it to fail that damn bad, just don’t give me the goddamn spell!

I’d hate to end this on a bad note, cos I did like the game, so what else can I say? The graphics are nice, they look at lot like Dragon Warrior 7 on the PSX. This is probably because DW4’s first port was to the PSX, and the DS version is probably based on the PSX port. The music, composed by Koichi Sugiyama, is wonderful as always. DQ4 has always been my favorite soundtrack of the series, and I must say, it’ll be a sad day when Sugiyama is no longer writing music for the series.

Dragon Quest is a series that seems to build itself on the principle that less is more, and it’s not too hard to see why they get away with it - they know exactly how to pull it off! However, its best qualities are also its vices, as there are some functions of the series that are too jurassic for me to simply condone. The best thing I can say, though, is that none of these vices are dealbreakers by any stretch. The end result is that Dragon Quest 4 will bring nothing new, but you probably didn’t expect that. It’s a great game because it owns up to what it does. In the recent surge of games presenting themselves as intentionally antiquated experiences, like some sort of Art Noveau pieces, Dragon Quest 4 fits amongst them as a game that turns back the clock and does it right.

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Also, the spell that brings a character back to life (called Zing); why would they give it such an absurdly low success rate? Expect this to happen at least once: Character dies. you use a healer to cast Zing on the dead character, but it fails.

In one battle my Heroine got Whack’ed and died. Meena tried to Zing her four times and failed every time, then finally succeeded, and in that same round the Heroine got Whacked again. Then Zing failed the next round. And then smashing the game.

(Even more Zing fun: if a party member has the capability of reflecting spells, and that member dies, Zing will still reflect off their corpse so they can’t be revived by it in combat.)

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Yeah, ugh. When I finally reached El Forado, I just went through the trouble of bringing in every character one at a time to grab an Yggdrasil Leaf, since those don’t seem to miss, and give all HP back. Zing is such a bullshit spell. It’s really shitty that enemies can target people that you brought back to life that turn.

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In Soviet Russia the dialect speaks you!

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Zing is meant to be used outside of battle where you don’t have to worry about a) the low accuracy and b) the time, effort, and money of having to trek all the way back to a church and paying for revival services there.

If you’re having trouble with revivification during a battle either flee or if you’re far enough use the hourglass of time (or whatever it’s called in this game) to start the battle over (note: hot only works once per battle most of the time, also I was unable to use it during the final battle in the NES version for some reason and other boss fights may be the same).

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Except for that it fails outside of battle, causing the same thing to happen anyways (run out of MP, have to leave dungeon). A spell should be meant to WORK.

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Until I read this I hadn’t ever thought of trying that… darn thinking inside the box. :\

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If I had forgotten that then I really need to go back and play one of these games again.

That said, I still don’t recall Zing/Vivify being too aggravating in many of my playthroughs. And besides if Zing worked all the time then why bother using spells like Kasnooze/Sleepmore, Fuddle/Confuse, and Fizzle/StopSpell? They’re there for a reason (unlike in most RPGs where status spells are a waste of time).

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uhhh that makes no sense. “If you could always bring your characters back to life, why would you ever put an enemy to sleep?” lmao.

I’m pretty sure I get what you’re trying to say - that you should be using such spells to avoid dying in the first place; however:

  1. Status effect spells don’t lose their usefulness in other games because of how easy it is to bring a character back to life; they’re useless because they don’t work on any enemy that makes you think “Man, it would rock if my sleep spell would work on these guys.”

  2. A character dying in battle is always rough, because it means you lose a big fraction of your firepower trying to bring someone back to life. Even though you say “Zing should be used outside of battle,” there are some obvious places where you’re going to want to use in DURING a battle, like say, a boss fight? Which, by the way, I should mention that status effect spells don’t usually work on bosses - debuffs, maybe; however, it doesn’t slow down their offense very much.

  3. You still die, even if you use status effect spells effectively, so your point is moot.

  4. Furthermore, I’m talking about how the spell doesn’t work, both in AND out of battle, so talking about your philosophy on what you should or shouldn’t be doing in battle is irrelevant.

The main point is that Zing doesn’t fucking work. Saying that it’s okay because it makes the game hard, and that you should use it outside of battle is not only an argument that skirts the real issue, but it’s a downright poorly-thought out argument. Games can be difficult even without the necessity of status effect spells, or without the cruel and unusual penalty of having your revive spell not work every time. Look at SaGa Frontier, for example - that game is hard as shit, and not only are status effect spells bogus, but it’s painfully easy to revive someone in that game. You don’t even need a special item or spell; any item/spell that recovers HP will do the trick.

Likewise, Zing being temperamental doesn’t add any strategy to the game, nor would it make the game any less strategic if it worked every time - it only serves to add an unnecessary frustration to an otherwise good game.

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Originally Posted by Skankin’ Garbage
The main point is that Zing doesn’t fucking work. Saying that it’s okay because it makes the game hard, and that you should use it outside of battle is not only an argument that skirts the real issue, but it’s a downright poorly-thought out argument.

You’re right that my last post was a poorly thought out argument, but since I now have the time allow me to restate my point. You’re right that status effect spells are rendered useless in other games for more reasons than just because death’s no problem (another such reason is that instead of wasting time putting a status or debuff effect on an enemy it’s just so much easier to kill them outright), but that doesn’t mean that they’re useless in every battle.

For your second point, taking into account that by the time you acquire Zing the boss fights are still few and far in between. By the time bosses start to appear more frequently though you should already have someone who knows Kazing along with having a few Yggdrasil Leaves leaving Zing as a last resort in case the Kazinger falls. Also some status spells like Fuddle/Confuse have a tendency to work even on lesser bosses (anything that can waste a boss’s turn is essentially the point of my prior advice). That said buffs are more effective during boss fights for buying you time for spells like Zing to work than either status spells or debuffs (at the very least it forces the boss to use one of his turns to debuff you).

Your third point highlights my failure to communicate in my prior post. In most cases I find myself needing on the spot revivification more in random fights than in boss fights due to either miscalculations on my part or a lucky shot made by the enemy. In these cases status spells work to a greater degree than Zing does. Of course in boss battles Zing is a fairly bullshit spell.

To address your fourth point yes Zing sucks and doesn’t hit all the time at least outside of battle you’re not under pressure to get it to work right away and even if your healers run out of MP to cast Zing you could always go back to town (fortunately Evac is a wizard’s spell which should get you out of most tight spots, unless you’ve used up your entire party’s combined MP, in which case it’s probably easier just to get wiped out since you’ll only lose half your gold and everything else that you’ve gained or used will remain gained or used).

Btw, what I said before in my earlier post mostly had games like the NES version of FF III on my mind (where I found that applying the right status effect to Death happy enemies could save a lot of time and trouble). However the example in question was a bit too specific for the topic at hand. Also if I had known you were referring to boss battles in particular then I would agree that Zing sucks, but that’s why you have Kazing, Kerplunk, and Yggdrasil Leaves in those cases.

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SG is right, esp on the part where a revived character can be targeted within the same turn he is revived. That is truly fucked up.

I personally don’t give a shit about the lack of touch screen functionality. I don’t play FF or DQ games to have touch seen functionality. I do it to have a classical RPG experience.

The fact that you can use Kazing instead of Zing doesn’t justify Zing’s shittiness. By the time I beat the final boss, none of my chars had Kazing and even if 1 did, if he was the one to die, then that doesn’t help me much does it? And also, using Zing out of battle doesn’t make it better if you waste half your MP mid way through a given dungeon trying to bring one of your assholes back to life.

I greatly enjoyed DQ4, though I was surprised by how short it was and Zing is the only thing I can REALLY hold against the game. I don’t know if anyone else noticed but you can use the quicksave option as a save anywhere. Very convenient because it doesn’t get erased when you load it.

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Sure, but I’m not even talking about that; you brought up status effect spells, not me.

For your second point, taking into account that by the time you acquire Zing the boss fights are still few and far in between. By the time bosses start to appear more frequently though you should already have someone who knows Kazing along with having a few Yggdrasil Leaves leaving Zing as a last resort in case the Kazinger falls. Also some status spells like Fuddle/Confuse have a tendency to work even on lesser bosses (anything that can waste a boss’s turn is essentially the point of my prior advice). That said buffs are more effective during boss fights for buying you time for spells like Zing to work than either status spells or debuffs (at the very least it forces the boss to use one of his turns to debuff you).

This is wrong. I fought a fair amount of bosses while having Zing. Yggdrasil Leaves should NOT be some sort of main resort; rather, they should be a way of enabling a non-caster to bring someone backto life once. As for Kazing, no, I didn’t have Kazing until the last boss, and I had to grind in order to get it. Also, like Sinistral stated, if the one person that has it dies (and let’s face it, Kiryl is one of the people who dies pretty often), then what good is it? You can’t really rely on it.

To address your fourth point yes Zing sucks and doesn’t hit all the time at least outside of battle you’re not under pressure to get it to work right away and even if your healers run out of MP to cast Zing you could always go back to town (fortunately Evac is a wizard’s spell which should get you out of most tight spots, unless you’ve used up your entire party’s combined MP, in which case it’s probably easier just to get wiped out since you’ll only lose half your gold and everything else that you’ve gained or used will remain gained or used).

Yes, but “you could always to back to town” is part of my gripe. I don’t WANT to have to leave the whole god damn dungeon just because I had to cast Zing seven times. That’s annoying, and it doesn’t make the game fun.

Btw, what I said before in my earlier post mostly had games like the NES version of FF III on my mind (where I found that applying the right status effect to Death happy enemies could save a lot of time and trouble). However the example in question was a bit too specific for the topic at hand. Also if I had known you were referring to boss battles in particular then I would agree that Zing sucks, but that’s why you have Kazing, Kerplunk, and Yggdrasil Leaves in those cases.

I’m not referring to boss battles in particular. Let me re-read my except from the review:

“Also, the spell that brings a character back to life (called Zing); why would they give it such an absurdly low success rate? Expect this to happen at least once: Character dies. you use a healer to cast Zing on the dead character, but it fails. You try over and over again until you run out of MP, forcing you to leave the dungeon and go back to a town. Seriously, if you wanted it to fail that damn bad, just don’t give me the goddamn spell!”

I don’t cite any specific point in time where you have to use Zing. It ALWAYS sucks.

I alwasy mull over whether or not to put something like this in my reviews, cos there are so many people that don’t care. Personally, though, I think games should really err to the side of convenience for controls. Personally, I like to (and am asked to) multitask while playing all the time, so being able to play with one hand - which is what touch screen controls enable me to do - is really important to me. I even have the same gripes with PS2 and XBOX360 games that don’t allow me to control my character with both analog sticks. You never think about how nice that is until you play a game that lets you do that, and I’m willing to bet it’s not hard to do; most RPGs don’t have any function for the right analog stick.

Also, yeah, I noticed that about the Quick Save option (I kind of understated the importance of that in my review), but that’s why I didn’t use it. I kind of wish I had in the end, though; I lost like 15000 gold coins the first time I lost to Psaro, like “Yeah, I don’t need another Liquid Metal Armor, I’ll totally win this shit.” So then I barely lost, and ground four levels, heh.

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Funny story, every time I used Zing it worked >_>

Anyway DQIV has always been my favorite of the series, and one of my all time favorites. A couple of highlights:

-The little enemy animations
Okay, so this is purely cosmetic, but I was really impressed. It made the battles much more interesting then you just staring at the same picture for the whole battle. The final boss (and secret final boss) are really cool in that regard.

-Each character has a little story
I think that this bit adds more characterization then most games achieve with hours of cutscenes glares at FFXII Sure, they pretty standard characters, but having experienced their adventures first hand really got me more attached to them. Plus, Talloon is just awesome.

-AI
Now, I know a lot of people have problems with the AI in various games, and how it doesn’t do what they want it to do, but honestly, it takes out so much button pressing that after playing DQIV on the NES, I turn it on every chance I get. Well, except if it’s absolutely atrocious. In fact, once I got the hero, I turned on the AI and played it like it was the original. Sure, it’s not awesome, but it was pretty good, and made it so much easier to get through the grinding. Not there was too much of that, I thought, but that’s something else entirely. Also, Cristo (Kiryl) STILL has the unhealthy fascination with instant death spells. At least he doesn’t try to Whack bosses anymore…

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Just throwing my name in the hat with the people who like the port. My fiancee enjoyed playing DQVIII so much that she had me pre-order two copies of DQ4 just so we could both play it simultaneously (I got her a DS last Christmas). We’ve both finished it now (she was completely pissed off by the floors with the arrows on them, but enjoyed it thoroughly besides), and are now both looking forward to see what they do with DQV&VI.

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HOLY CRAP IT’S MR. SATURN!

I’m still waiting to pick the game up. It’s mostly an issue of money, but I will get it someday. Hopefully soon.

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Don’t get it at Wal-Mart; they’re charging $10 more than everyone else. :smiley: