A grindtastic reminder of why games evolve.
Square Enix has made plenty of remakes on Nintendo's handhelds. They've done Final Fantasy to death, and with the new release of Dragon Quest IV on the DS, they aim to hit the Enix side of the back catalog. This is a straight port of the 1990 original, with locations, weapon and armor prices, and experience rates kept right on point from where they were on the NES. Those expecting a Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls-like speeding up and dumbing down are in for a disappointment and a challenge. The net result is a grind sandwich of Dagwood proportions, a game that will require several DS battery charges just to get to a point where you can afford the weapons and armor required to take down the bosses, who have not been nerfed in the slightest from their NES forebears.
The graphical overhaul is nice. Cartoony character heads, SNES-grade backgrounds and environments, and the ability to rotate the camera in pseudo-3D to see your characters when they would otherwise be stuck behind a wall are all nice improvements. The enemy sprites get some actual animations in their attacks that they didn't have in the 8-bit days, weapon and spell effects are added, and overall the presentation is far nicer than it was nearly two decades ago. It's not the polygonal tour de force that Final Fantasy IV's remake is, but it's a whole lot nicer than sound-effect and flashing enemy for damage on a black background was back in the day.
The music is as catchy and well-done as you remember it. From town to battle, from the casino in Endor to the depths of the game's many dungeons, there is a lot to love and a lot that you will find yourself whistling long after you've put the DS down to charge its battery yet again. While not as well-known among the gaming fandom as Nobuo Uematsu's magnificent Final Fantasy scores, this is nonetheless music that has the considerable weight of nostalgia behind it.
The characters are likable thanks in large part to the overhauled translation mentioned above. Your first experience with the new and improved writing is with Ragnar, the game's first chapter protagonist, who speaks with a Scottish accent cribbed from the village of dwarves and "pyntie-hets" in Final Fantasy IX. From there you move on to a Russian-inspired land right out of a Yakov Smirnoff routine and you expect someone to say "In Zamoksva, monster hunts YOU!!" before the chapter mercifully ends and the game knocks it off. Chapter Four features some of the most outrageous French accents this side of John Cleese on the wall taunting King Arthur, and on those occasions where the NPCs decide to speak normal English there is a thankful lack of the forays into "all your base" that plagued the localization in the original. I have to give credit to the writing team for writing a game script that actually contained some flavor.
The game's relentless faith in its authenticity is, however, its greatest flaw. At no point does the gameplay break away from feeling like an 8-bit game. That's all well and good in a genre that doesn't require flashy graphics to mask the primitive nature of its gameplay. Look at Mega Man 9 for an example of a game that does well by unashamedly acting like an NES title. Dragon Quest IV, however, is a JRPG, one trying to find a playerbase when the rest of the gaming world has moved on. To play the game in 2008 is like a professional novelist going into his archives and finding the angst-ridden poetry he wrote in high school. It looks primitive, unpolished, and quaint when compared against the artistry of modern games, even modern JRPGs. The random encounter rate is very high, sometimes reaching a point where it can be described as step-step-battle-repeat. The story's shallower than a kiddie pool and centers around a very generic young hero saves the world archetype. If anything it only serves to remind us that this stuff was once considered groundbreaking, but clichéd, worn-out tales of "you are the chosen one, now save us before the Lord of Darkness kills us all" only manage to look their age nowadays. Your grandmother was a pretty girl once too, but that doesn't mean your frat brother would date her now.
The game also suffers from a bad case of where-do-I-go-next syndrome. This sort of aimless wandering used to be commonplace in games but there's a very good reason why it isn't anymore. It simply isn't any fun. The world is so static that trying to explore is more likely to get you killed than to find new and exciting places to be. The game reminds you why the monsters are leveled in a game like Oblivion. It's so you don't get stuck wandering a linear path of imaginary freedom. Buying the Brady guide or hitting up GameFAQs is about the only way you'll be able to get through this without a lot of frustrating trial and error. It's more frustrating than fun and unless you're abusing the quicksave to avoid paying the half-your-gold death penalty it will drive you up the wall.
Make no mistake about it. I'm all in favor of classic gaming. Publishers just can't put a fresh coat of paint on an eighteen-year-old game and then charge for it like it's a new AAA title. Mega Man 9 is a ten-dollar download on WiiWare and has the distinction of being all-new material. Bionic Commando Rearmed is ten bucks on XBox Live Arcade. Countless other games in the same vein are sold as budget titles and Nintendo's Virtual Console delivers dozens of NES and SNES titles for ten dollars or less. To charge forty for a straight remake is simply not a very good value, and any boasts by the developer about "dozens of hours of gameplay" serve simply to underscore just how heavily loaded down with grind Dragon Quest IV is. There is a right way and a wrong way to do classic gaming and this is clearly an example of the latter. If it were half (or a quarter) of its asking price I might be more willing to recommend it as a buy.
BOTTOM LINE: Dragon Quest IV is a reminder of the distant past, a relic trying to dress itself up for the modern world but ultimately being undone by its own authenticity. It's not bad, it's just an utterly forgettable old-school dungeon crawler that doesn't have mechanics strong enough to overcome its AAA title price tag.
RECOMMENDATION: Rent it. Or wait until it hits the bargain bin and get it at a more reasonable cost. Dragon Quest IV is not a bad game, so you should find a way to play through it once. Just don't part with forty perfectly good dollars when there are so many good games upcoming this season.
