Dragon Quest IV Chapters of the Chosen is nothing short of epic.
Story: The story starts off rather slow. You pick your hero's gender and name then play through the prologue which pretty much just shows him or her in his or her hometown going through training. It's a very short prologue but it sets the stage. Soon after you begin the chapters of the game. Chapters 1 through 4 are different from the 'bulk' of the game in that you control just one (or 2 or 3 in specific chapters) of the characters that eventually joins your final party.
Ragnar McRyan, a knight hailing from a kingdom resembling Scottland, is your character for chapter one - and just like when you are controlling the hero in the Prologue and Chapter 5, he assumes the role of 'silent protagonist.' The second chapter has you controlling Alena, a monk-type character (in the Final Fantasy sense, not the real world sense) who is a princess, or Tsarevna to be exact, of a Russian-type kingdom. Chapter 3 has you controlling Torneko Taloon, an ambitious salesman from a small Irish type town. Chapter 4 has you controlling 2 sisters, Meena, a fortune teller, and Maya, a dancer, in a French tourist trap of a town, although in this chapter, your protagonists are not silent.
Basically, in all four of these chapters, your characters go on their own little quest in their own little world and each chapter ends with the characters realizing that they need to seek out the legendary hero/heroine - that's you. In Chapter 5, you finally control the hero/heroine and this is the largest portion of the game, a good 20+ hours worth. Basically, Chapter 5 is divided into 3 sections: recruiting all the party members & acuiring the boat, finding all of the Zenithian gear which is needed to be able to reach Zenithia, a kingdom in the skies, and then finally going and hunting down the big baddy of the game.
After you beat the game, you get put on Chapter 6 - where the story takes an interesting twist, and the bonus dungeon opens up. After going through the bonus dungeon you can recruit your final party member, the bonus character - and boy is he a doozy. Chapter 6 can easily add 5-10 more hours to your game play and it is incredibly hard to put the game down once you get there.
All in all, the storyline is very awesome and epic and is refreshingly straight forward - although don't get me wrong, there are sidequests to do and some times the main quest has you taking a small detour to get to a goal of it, but it's not like most RPG's where your main quest continuously gets derailed with asinine sidequests that have little to do with your quest and are often just wild goose chases.
Graphics: The graphics in this game are stunning considering its NES roots. The overworld is a colorfully drawn map, which is also displayed in its entirety on the top screen. The battles have 3D settings with amazingly detailed 2D sprites for the enemies, with character portraits and stats on the top screen - you can really see Akira Toriyama's work shine here. Everywhere else is a seamless 3D rotatable environment with 2D sprites.
Sound: The music is really good, although being an NES game originally, it doesn't have a lot of tracks, as such you generally have some themes reused, such as your generic Castle theme, or your generic Cave theme. The sound effects are really nice. Several weapons have different sound effects when used in battle, as do most of the spells. Pots, when broken, sound like pots being smashed and barrels, when broken, sound like barrels being smashed. Treasure chests sound like old squeaky chests when they are being opened.
Gameplay: The gameplay is good old fashioned top-down RPG goodness with first person, turn based, menu driven battles. There's not a whole lot more to say about it besides that other than my one complaint with it: the game makes you manually scroll text in battle after EVERYTHING. This is a problem that was fixed for the DQ5 remake, but it's there in DQ4, it's a minor annoyance, but one that really comes out when grinding. That brings me to the next point about the gameplay. As is rather standard with DQ games, they have made grinding in the game much less time consuming than most games with the return of the Metal Slime family: a group of realtively easy/weak monsters which very low HP and incredibly high evasion/defense that yield tons of experience. The catch? They tend to run away very quickly, usually on the 2nd or 3rd turn.
All in all, this was a very fun game and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes RPG's. People with a passing interest in RPG's may want to pass on this series as it's definitely one of the more challenging RPG series with little to no flashy eye-candy like Final Fantasy has, it's all about epic story telling and character development.