Great RPG game that Ichiro Suzuki from the Seattle Mariners played while growing up near Nagoya, Japan.
I enjoyed playing Dragon Quest IV. It is a great old school RPG with an enjoyable storyline. You start out the game playing different characters on little side quests and you get to learn about them. Then after playing through a couple of the characters side quests you start playing as the main character (hero) and meet up with the other playable characters along the way. Your goal is to track down a monster who is trying to resurrect evil back into the world. Some of the world areas are locked out throughout the game. You unlock various areas by getting the right key or vehicle (water and air ships).
The different characters were a lot of fun to play with. They each had their background stories on why they are fighting the good fight. You eventually have more characters than what you can place on your team in battles. These characters trail around with you in the wagon until you get into town or dungeons. Each character had their different strengths and weaknesses and some could use magic while others could not. As you experience, all your character's attributes, even the ones left in the wagon, increase and you earn different magic spells as you progress. I really enjoyed using the healing magic of my characters that were in the wagon, so that I would not have to go into town or waste the magic I wanted to use in battle.
The visual presentation of the game is smooth. The graphics are just sprite based 2D graphics, but they look crisp on the DS. The only time they did not was during the final boss scene when the camera zoomed in on the boss and he looked very pixilated. They did a really good job with laying out the towns and dungeons using both the bottom and top screens. You don't use the stylus pen for anything in this game, but don't forget about the shoulder buttons which are used to rotate the camera.
I did not have any issues with the enemy difficulty levels, but I had some issues figuring out where to go next the further I got into the game. I eventually had to go to game walkthroughs to figure out what to do next after searching for a half an hour. Eventually you get the magic power to warp between areas. This was cool except it was hard to figure out which town you needed to go to next. They should have had the location on the map get highlighted, so you had an idea on where you were going. I did not memorize the names, but I had an idea on where in the world I needed to go to next.
This was an enjoyable game and I recommend it to anyone who is a RPG fan.