Systems: Nintendo DS
Release Date: July 11, 2009
Publisher: Square Enix, Nintendo
Developer: Level-5, Square Enix
Time Spent: 90 Hours, 35 Minutes
I have mixed feelings about
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinel of the Starry Skies. On one hand, it felt really good to play a down-to-earth JRPG complete with turned-based combat and a party of four characters that I could fully customize both in terms of names, gender, equipment,
jobs/vocations, and abilities. On the other hand, because the game was released on the portable DS, there was an over-emphasis on implementing unique utilities of the DS into core gameplay mechanics with seemingly little thought for the longevity of the gameplay past the lifespan of the system and its online StreetPass function. This is where most of my feelings of "meh" stem from and we will get to that in various aspects throughout this entire article because of how widespread those aspects of gameplay reached into the very depths of the game.
Unlike many of the games in the mainline Dragon Quest series that I have played, I - VI and now IX, this was the first game I believe that you can create your entire party apart from your starting character, who you are able to customize. In some ways, I liked being able to decide on the makeup of my party, that if I wanted to go in with your main character (who starts out as a Minstrel, which is kind of a jack-of-all-trades type vocation) along with three mages I could do that. I went the more traditional route though and created a Mage, a Priest, and a Fighter. Not terribly original I know, but you are also limited in which vocations you can choose from at the start of the game, and not knowing how the game was going to unfold in the early stages, this seemed like the safest and least frustrating option to go with. Plus there was the option of unlocking additional vocations throughout the game or I could just hire a new person to bring along.
Let us now talk about part of the online/StreetPass functionality baked into Dragon Quest IX. One of the core, albeit optional, mechanics was that you could recruit new party members from other people who also played DQIX through StreetPass, although to what extent their characters' skill level and equipment were transferred along with the StreetPass data I am not 100% sure about. I would imagine unfettered "uploading" of end-game characters to players in the early game would essentially break the game's difficulty? But since StreetPass seems all but dead at this point in the life of the 11-year-old system with a 13-year-old game, the likelihood that I would pick up a new DQIX character seemed highly unlikely. I resigned myself to the party that I created towards the beginning of the game being the party that I would finish the game with. Unless of course there were pre-generated NPCs that would join your party along the way, either permanently or temporarily. (We will be coming back to Stornway Inn in a bit).
Once you reach the aptly named
Alltrades Abbey, a recurring location in the series, you are able to change your character's vocation from a growing list throughout the course of the game. For me, I decided about halfway through the game that I thought my main character would better be suited to a Martial Artist, which seemed more in line with their divine Celestrine roots than a Minstrel, and I thought that having a Paladin instead of a Fighter would be a good change. What I was not expecting that was upon changing vocations that it would reset the characters entirely. Their HP, their MP, their stats, and even the character level would reset to Level 1. So my Mage and Priest were Level 30 and now I had a Level 1 Martial Artist and Paladin who died very quickly even against the weaker enemies surrounding Alltrades Abbey. I could have changed the characters back to their higher level jobs, but me being stubborn decided to try out this mechanic and I ended up sticking with this party makeup through the rest of the game.
Why would I do all of the work needed to unlock the Sage vocation for my Mage or Priest if it meant an additional 10+ hours of grinding just to get them back up to an appropriate level to fight in the last quarter of the game? And along with resetting all of your stats, only compatible weapons with your new class would transfer over too, which makes some sense, but why not other aspects of your previous vocation like HP/MP? Maybe there was something that I missed that explained the reasoning behind having your characters essentially reset when switching jobs? On top of this, by the time all of my characters were at level 40+, they were only earning three points to put towards skills every two to three levels they earned, which meant that the buffs and abilities you earned by spending skill points into various attributes required more and more time to grind. Again, it really felt like grinding for the sake of grinding, and not in a fun way.
Since we are talking about another online component of the game, I need to talk about the Alchemy mechanic. On its own, I actually like this mechanic and how it operates to a certain extent. Throughout the world, you find items that the description says "Alchemize it!" and you can eventually create all types of consumable items and even equipment and weapons. The biggest downside to this mechanic is how you actually go about alchemizing objects, which is in one location, that I was able to find, for the entire game. In the castle city of Stornway, the first large city you visit after leaving your starting village, through a series of events that are not important to this particular rant, there is an inn (a merry old inn, one might say) where most, if not all, of the online mechanics, are centered. Any characters you meet through StreetPass are located here if you want to recruit them into your party, with the premise being that you will be frequently returning to this one particular inn throughout the game to adjust your party when new StreetPass NPCs show up. With the state of StreetPass being what it currently is (ie dead), there was no reason for me to return to Stornway to check in on the inn since I never got a StreetPass notification about a new character waiting for me at the inn. It also appears that you can quest with other people who also have the game, likely through an in-person co-op wireless connection but that again was not going to be happening.
With that in mind, I had been wondering how long it was going to be before I could use alchemy with all of the suggestions to "Alchemize it!" in item descriptions. Then one trip back to Stornway to look for quests that I might have missed, maybe 70 hours in, I found out that there was an intelligent and sentient Alchemy pot (called the Krak Pot)at the Stonway Inn that I only just unlocked. How this Alchemy pot was unlocked I will never know (unless I look it up or I replay the game) but upon unlocking this mechanic, I also unlocked the ability to skim bookshelves and pull recipes for items and equipment from books throughout the entire game. I had begun to wonder if the weapon and armor shops in Upover were in fact going to be the last place to buy any upgraded equipment. As it turned out, because I came into the Alchemy game so late, I had missed dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens of recipes to create new and probably better late-game equipment, a lot of which seemed hinged on upgrading previously created as well as the old equipment. This immediately changed how I played the game in regards to my gear because up until that point I would sell my old gear and put that GP towards buying new gear; which is my go-to method for most JRPGs. Now, I was holding onto my old gear out of some feverish hope that it could be used in a recipe for newer and better gear, all the while creating more grind for me to be able to afford the newer expensive gear. Yes, this is me now just being bitter about the whole alchemy mechanic.
I liked that I could create my own party out of blank slates. Names and faces started out as generic fantasy characters that became slightly more developed by the end of the game. It turned out that Dormundr and Markus developed a relationship along the way, partly because they were the two spellcasters in the group who never changed classes the entire time because they knew who they were from the beginning and saw no point in wanting to be anything else. Malexa had likely been in a relationship of some kind before joining the group in Stornway but had decided that she would liver her own life with the skills she had learned being a fighter in her past life. As she journeyed with the group, she found herself taking on a more protective role, wanting to watch over the other members of the party while still maintaining her training, so she became a Paladin, a warrior in her newfound belief and faith in the Celestrines; I also thought that there might be a holy weapon that only a Paladin could wield that would have been beneficial in the final battle, but that ended up not being the case. Although Jaquonæn took on the guise of a human female, that was nearly a form that the humans on the surface could comprehend. They started out as a Minstrel (because that is the default vocation) to both better fit in with the human society and because it would allow them an excuse to travel from town to town without much trouble and assist in the finding of the Golden Fyggs (yeah, there was that whole plotline that I have not touched on). Partway through their journey, Jaquonæn changed vocations to a Monk, one that better suited their outlook on interacting with humans, taking on a more passive and less violent approach. That is what I told myself anyway, but I did have polearms equipped and by the end of the game Jaquonæn was dealing the most damage out of all my characters.
I do not regret at all the 90+ hours I put into Dragon Quest IX and for the most part I did have a lot of fun. If I thought too much about all of the online functions that ended up being limited, then yeah, I would become a little annoyed/sad, but that does not come as close as this article might seem to overtake my enjoyment. I do think that there could be enough changes to the online mechanics to port this to modern consoles, it might just have to be more than an HD Remaster and it would be great to have even more people to be able to play this title.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Unbegun, Undenial, Unforeseen by Thee
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