Dragon Warrior IV — A Castle Has Been Kidnapped By Unknown Evil Villains! Is The Princess A Bad Enough Dude To Rescue Them?

Okay, I think I’ve completely worn out that Bad Dudes reference by now.  I’ll stop.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: a merchant, a soldier, and a princess walk into a bar…  Now add a dancer, a fortune teller, and the prophesied hero into the mix, and what you get is too amazing to be a joke.

Oh no!  Evil mathematical implements are going to kill us all!  We’re gonna die!

Pff, Alena’s so tough, she probably has her own pair by now.

Dragon Warrior IV breaks new ground once again: the game makes use of a unique system to introduce the characters you’re going to be traveling with.  Instead of encountering them in their home towns and taking them along with you, they each start a journey independently in each of four chapters, and then you meet up with them in chapter five, having already leveled them up quite a bit during the previous chapters.  The only other game I’ve seen come close to this kind of chapter method to introduce everyone has been Rudra no Hihou for the SNES (and possibly Odin Sphere for the PS2).  This method of storytelling helped to set up the story and introduce the world the characters live in.  When chapter 5 begins, that’s where you come in, and you take control of the character you named at the starting screen.

I will go as far as saying that DW4 was probably one of the first games to bring together a cohesive narrative in an RPG, despite sticking to its roots of free-form exploration and the ability to go anywhere and do anything as long as you don’t die.  However, there are indications that the designers of the Dragon Warrior games were starting to lean more towards using landmarks and features of the world map as a means to guide the player to where he should go, rather than using bridges and monsters like in the first game.  In fact, as early as the second game, there were indications as to where you needed to go, and often times there were mountains in the way, blocking you from truly exploring the world.  In IV, this is especially evident during the first chapter, when an investigation into a strange occurrence is restricted to two small areas surrounded by mountains.

Usually, whenever I listen to a Dragon Warrior game, I enjoy what I hear.  This time around, I don’t know what happened.  Either some of the lesser known old themes have been reused, or they’re just done in such a way that I’ve heard them before.  Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been playing the original Dragon Quest Monsters game on the side, and it’s possible that some of the songs used in that game originated in this one.  But that doesn’t help me reconcile the sailing theme.  A portion of the opening bars sound a lot like the overworld theme from the first game.  Now, I’m not against recycling, depending on the situation and the context.  I smiled in recognition in the second and third game when the Alefgard theme played (as well as in Dragon Quest Monsters).  But when I first heard the sailing theme in this game, I cringed.  Some songs, when you take a sample of them and create a new song with the sample, they work.  Some songs don’t work.  I think in this case, the sailing theme was too close to an already established theme in the series, so it automatically sucked.  Now the composer usually recycles certain themes from past games, but he always has a reason.  This time around, it seems like he dropped the ball just a little bit.  I hope that the DS remake helped to improve his compositions.  I have yet to play it as of this writing.

You hear that, Foxie?  I’ve got my eye on you…

Mintos!  The Freshmaker…

One thing I’ve noticed that I still hate about NES gaming is that you don’t get to see what benefits you’ll get from new equipment until you equip it.  You have to buy it blindly and hope for the best.  I hated when I bought the Stilleto Earrings and found out they  had very low attack power, even though they allow you to hit twice.  Two poor hits don’t quite match one good hit.  Although one character has a high enough attack that it doesn’t matter, the other two characters eligible for the Earrings are better off not upgrading their weapon.

Here’s something that I was going to complain about in my review for III, but thought it was far worse in this game: I thought I hated how temperamental the Vivify spell in III was, but in IV it seemed to have been rendered absolutely useless.  At one point, Nara died and I wasted enough of Cristo’s MP with failed attempt after failed attempt to bring her back that he needed to visit an inn three times to refill his MP.  I think I must’ve failed to revive her at least ten times in a row before the spell took.  Naturally, the next times I lost characters, the game tried to pretend this didn’t happen by making Vivify work all the time.  But it doesn’t change the fact that a revival spell should not operate by random chance both inside and outside of a battle.  Especially outside of a battle.

Albacore! Baltimore! Who’s your friend? Geoff!

I’m sure if you’re nice to her, she’ll be nice to you. … … Okay, I’m done with the bestiality jokes, too.

There’s another thing that III started that wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t stayed in III where it belonged.  When you finally find your father, Ortega, he’s fighting a tough demon and the fight is controlled through AI, although Ortega is pretty much doomed.  Once the developers discovered that they could cause a fight to play out like this, and that they could give characters pre-programmed actions, they went crazy with it.  In IV, every single character other than yourself becomes controlled by AI once chapter five begins.  Not only that, but the tactics you can program them with are very limited in their strategy.  The characters also come up with their own strategy, and seem to know ahead of time what each other is going to do.  It’s up to you to be psychic enough to know whether or not your healer is going to heal you, or whether or not the enemy you want to target will still be there when it’s your turn.  Of course, sometimes you want to praise the AI for handling a battle better than you could ever have, and sometimes you just want to strangle your party members until they’re dead and require a Vivify spell.  I know they fixed this for the DS release, and I look forward to playing it a lot more than I look forward to another AI controlled game like this one.

Two years later, he was busted for illegal trafficking of human organs

Well, that was gay. (Also: Mara has leveled up!)

Still, with a game like this one, if the AI, slightly dodgy music, and a revival spell are the only real complaints you have, then you’ve come out ahead.  Not only is the storytelling top notch, but there are certain aesthetic touches that I particularly enjoyed.  The one thing I noticed the most was that it seemed like certain NPCs were programmed to wander randomly, and some were programmed to walk a certain path, and this impressed me.  I know it’s probably not something that’s difficult to program in, but still, it’s something I enjoyed watching, the simulation of a daily life for characters that had no other importance to the story.

Not a single character was wasted, either.  Each had their own contributions to the party, even the rather squishy characters that accompanied the princess… and speaking of, it was a refreshing change to see a princess in the series that could kick ass. In the first two games, a princess is kidnapped. In the second game, once the kidnapped and transformed princess is found and restored to her normal self, she becomes a healer and promptly dies a lot. In IV, the princess is capable of defending herself (although I definitely won’t begrudge a Healmore spell or two). She might’ve been the first RPG princess to act more like a Xena character rather than a Princess Peach character, but she certainly wasn’t the last. (In fact, Princess Peach herself turned from a damsel in distress into a warrior in her own right in Super Mario RPG.) While Final Fantasy continued to cast male protagonists as the guys with the swords and female protagonists as weak magic users, Dragon Quest chose to break new ground in video games, and I think they did well.

Mal.  Guy killed me, Mal.  He killed me with a sword.  How weird is that?

Wait… the world is going to end, and he’s worried more about his business?!

Naturally, Dragon Quest V and VI broke new ground as well, but were passed over completely by everyone except the Japanese and it wasn’t until VII came out that North Americans got another taste of the series. But, as usual, that is a story for another time…

To be continued…