The final piece of content from GameSpite Quarterly 7 is a lengthy expository piece on the design thinking behind Dragon Quest IX, which I have posted online so that the Internet can have another excuse to hold forth at length on my inadequacies as a writer/gamer/human being. Have at it.
I did not realize that all stat boosts carried over to different classes. This may change everything – I never changed classes because I hated the idea of grinding my characters up from level 1.
Yep. If you get, say, the +100 HP Gladiator perk and switch over to Mage, you have yourself a serious tank of a mage. The only things that don’t carry over between classes are spells, or weapon-specific skills (unless you’ve unlocked the equip-with-all-classes perk for said weapon). Obviously you revert to lower stats when you switch classes, but any permanent stat boost you’ve unlocked with your skill points transfers.
that’s silly, tomm. class changing is fundamental in DQ9, and its so easy to power level your characters up that there’s no reason to leave them in their base classes.
Moreover, you get better maps when you revocate.
DQ 9 failed at communicating this to me, so I abandoned it near the end. The way I wanted to play it was to max out each characters’ base class before moving on to different classes, but the game doesn’t allow that without mindless grinding. By the time I gave up my party was around level 90 in their base classes and at the last boss, but I ran out of side quests to boost my experience further. Good game otherwise.
I’m not Tomm, but I assume you were replying to me. Grinding held no interest to me, and I wasn’t given much in-game guidance about classes. I also went through one of the side quests to unlock a class, and I found it frustrating and monotonous – I had to reference a FAQ to figure out what exactly it was I was supposed to do in battle. After that, I basically decided to ignore classes. I liked DQ9, but it was a few design changes away from being just what I wanted.
If it was what you wanted, then, hey, great! I had fun with it, too, but I never reached the level of sublime enjoyment I was hoping for.
Three words: Metal King Slimes.
Been obsessed with collecting rare goodies from the DQVC. I’ll bet next month is when they finally start putting Orbs up on sale. Thank goodness for my Gem Slime only floor map.
One thing that impresses me about the community for this game is whatever crack team that figured out the seed methods for grotto bosses and DQVC shop manipulation, as well as the chart timers. Takes a lot of the chance out of there, but with a game already loaded with so much content, no matter.
i’m sorry, your name looked a lot like tomm’s aim name. i dont know why i made the mistake.
that said, DQ9 is pretty much my perfect game. i’ve put in 500 something hours, and i could pretty much play it forever. then again, i love the grind.
Good job, Jeremy.
Also, love DQIX. Still playing after 150+ hours, which is insane. Though now I wish the tag mode for getting people in your inn worked via SpotPass or StreetPass, as it’s a little too clunky to have to load up a game, zoom to Stornway, go through the dialogue options to ready oneself for tagging, and then…well, tag people who also just did what you did. I dunno. I’ll never expand my inn, and I guess that makes me bitter.
also, great article. makes me want to fire up the game again, but i’m missing the maps and monsters to do the most recent quests, and i think 400 hours is good enough for DQ9.
Great read here. And I thought I was enjoying Dragon Quest IX a little too much.
Great article. I really enjoyed this game, despite my lack of experience in the multiplayer realm. For one thing, I don’t have many friends who play games, much less a traditional DS RPG like this. And the passive mode doesn’t work for me, since I rarely travel with the DS, especially in crowded areas. (Yes, I play portable games because… I like them. Not because I need them.)
This, and DQVIII, were the only DQ games I’ve really enjoyed. Does that make me a bad person? I can’t help that I grew up on FF.
Don’t feel bad, turkish – DQ9 is the *only* main-line DQ game I’ve played (I was an FF kid too), but that didn’t stop me from sinking over 200 hours into it. It’s good stuff.
DQIX is a great game, but it’s stupid beyond belief that I can’t make a new character to send into another player’s game without erasing my game’s only save file and starting over.
DQIX could really use a New Game + mode.
I have to admit, I enjoyed DQIX a lot. But it was still a little too slow-paced for me. I didn’t really enjoy the infusion of MMO-ish elements, and I suspect that is the source of my consternation about the game.
It also doesn’t help that I know almost no one that played the game locally, so all the perceived benefits go out the window. The curse of being in a relatively small town, I suppose.
Anyway, at least one can play traditionally, which I suppose is a bit of genius, but I have to admit that I enjoyed the experience of DQIV, V, and VI a bit more.
Great writeup, though. :)
To some extent I think DQIX doesn’t work for a lot of people because they aren’t familiar with the established tropes of the series. I only knew about speeding up the grind process via metal slimes because I had played DQVIII. I can’t remember if either game has some townsperson offer this advice to you, though perhaps some kind of short cutscene or unavoidable plot element would be a better way of conveying that to the player.
I would definitely never have beaten the game if it didn’t have smart design choices such as metal slimes. Yes, it’s still a grind, but there’s some psychological manipulation (in a good way, like the slot machine/pinata loot mechanic of a Diablo) at play in trying to force metal slimes to spawn and subsequently dealing with the anxiety (again, in a good way) of trying to defeat them before they flee. It’s maddening when you fail yet also highly rewarding when you manage to consistently take them down, shooting characters way up in levels in very little time or effort; it almost feels like cheating.