A decent remake of a classic Rpg approaches that is now available for a new generation of gamers. Read my review ^-^
Dragon Quest IV:Chapters of the Chosen to a new generation of gamers, who will experience another well executed classic Rpg. You won’t be displeased with this remake as it offers notable new features like the full-face make-over it got and visually improved this game will please almost any Rpg fan. However, having played Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King before, the series was nothing completely new to me and I was hoping to face something similar. I nearly finished the game once and it left me very impressed. The fact that you may enjoy it on the go now and the new graphics are simply great.
Dragon Quest 4 is split into five parts of short adventures providing new characters while you proceed. First of all you may select a female or a male hero you start playing with. As the story unfolds you control an army captain named Ragnar, whos mission is to find children who had gone missing. Furthermore you will get to know more likable characters like Alena, Torneko, Meena and Maya. As a result there isn’t a real core story which you will face from start to end and you won’t see characters evolve that much. It’s more like a string of miniquests played out separately from one another until everything ties together in the end. Anyways, as the storyline continues you will notice that beginning a new chapter and therefore get to know a new character, brings you to level one again.
So it might feel as if you just started the game, whereas you will have to do some level grinding again to progress. Anyhow you must do that if you want to make your way through the story. You will encounter many enemies as the random encounter is high, so that you have always the possibility to level. This is necessary as your foes grow stronger and you need a certain level to kill them. Good news though if you like that sort of thing. Battles are challenging and after some hard bossfights you might feel unbeatable afterwards. And this can be a nice feeling, too. Apart from that you will see many different enemies that are all nicely drawn.
As it is a remake of a classic Rpg the turn based battle system is typical for this genre and you won’t have any problems getting into it. It’s easy to handle unless you never played an Rpg. Being familiar with this genre you won’t have any problems managing the menus and therefore euip your character and so on, either. But you won’t be able to use the stylus for that as this feature was completely left out. It would have made things a lot easier though. So unfortunately Square Enix didn’t make any use of the touch screen, which would have been helpful for navigating through all the menus.
The overall visual design is amazing and reminded me of Grandia on the PS1 somehow, but managed to be more detailed and smooth in movement. However, it’s nice to look at as the upper and the lower screen show ingame graphics. Thus you may see your surroundings on both screens.
Dragon Quest 4 is a 3D game and they replaced the dusty two dimensional style from the original version. Luckily you may even rotate the camera, so that you might enjoy your adventure in any camera angle you like just by using the L and R button. By pressing the Y button you will see a handrawn map which is quite useful to orientate. To that the worldmap is 2D and offers a different map which helps to orientate, too.
One of the notable updates (besides the option to rotate the camera) are the bright graphics that are colorful and are given a fresh paint. If you like the character-design of Dragonball you will rejoice with this game as characters, the environment and monsters are concerned. All are created by famous Akira Toriyama.
The music and sounds are nice to listen to and you will notice that the theme music is simply great. It’s the same old classic soundtrack sounding much better now.
Old game, new shape. Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen is another well executed remake by Square Enix, which delivers traditional Rpg elements and likable characters along with an utterly amazing new visual design. Dragon Quest fans and Rpg fans will love this game alike, although it may quite possibly not appeal to everyone as it shares some oldschool charms and nostalgic feeling. Anyhow, its oldschool design might polarise opinion because it is not a step forward for games in this genre nor does it benefit from the DS’s strenghts. But a very amazing game in total. I highly recommend this game especially for fans of this genre, but it’s also suited to new players.