El comienzo de la trilogía de zenithia.

Un buen dq que es el primero en empezar por capítulos para ir descubriendo los personajes y su historia.

El punto negativo es que en la versión de ds quitaron los diálogos que tenían los pj cuando hablabas con ellos, y en el móvil si están pero ahí solo en inglés.

Ojalá un remake/remasted de la trilogía y corrijan ese error.

What a good time that was. I love when narratives switch POV characters around, and it blew my mind that Dragon Quest was doing this as early as the NES. My rating would probably be lower if I wasn't playing the remake with party chat patched in, but I really liked everyone in the crew even if the accents could be a bit much. Honestly, my main complaint on the character front would be that the hero is easily the least interesting of the bunch and I lost steam a little when I got to their part, but I suppose that's often the case with silent protagonists. I did finish it though, bonus chapter and all, and that's more than I can say for a lot of games.
Also, the DS spritework was absolutely delightful. Estark in particular was especially gnarly, I loved it.

Habiendo jugado la versión de Nintendo DS y entendiendo que es un remake de uno de los últimos juegos de la NES, creo que este título es una piedra angular para comprender la genealogía de los JRPG que le sucedieron.

Un elenco de personajes sumamente memorables (aunque quizá discrepo de una mayoría del fandom al no ser muy fan de Torneko) que además son presentados de una manera muy novedosa para como fue planteada originalmente en la NES, una historia que en esencia es simple pero que logra sentirse significativa al interactuar con los diferentes NPC que pueblan cada asentamiento y música que logra sumergirte en la fantasía de este mundo son algunos de los elementos principales que hacen de Dragon Quest IV una obra memorable.

Mi único pero es que al mantener un sistema de batalla básico similar al original de NES y encuentros aleatorios, no lo recomendaría como punto de partida para quienes quieran iniciar en experiencias RPG o JRPG videojueguiles pues puede resultar algo tedioso y monótono.

The DQ community's praise for Dragon Quest IV kinda got my hopes up. That might've hurt the process.

To be honest, this 4th game in the series is good.

After the beautiful simplicity of III, IV tried to take a step further here and there. Trying to do things slightly different and giving a bit more character to the franchise. And you can clearly see this in the story.

The best thing about this game is definitely the "chapters of the chosen" approach. You get a bit attached to the characters and you understand their motifs. The fact that this cast is very charismatic, with each chapter presentation and tale filled with charm, just adds more to the experience. Especially if you've played previous entires. It's basic, but it's candid.

The gameplay saw little improvement, but it doesn't mean it's bad. The overworld still feels great to explore, soundtrack is alright, enemy and character designs are still top notch, there are good secrets to find around the world and bosses and dungeons are amazing! Dungeons are short, well designed and sweet. Bosses are challenging and super fun to fight.

And let's not forget that the remake did a fantastic job on giving the game a new look and feel. The experience definitely feels pleasant on the handheld.

And what else? Well, that's the problem. There's not much else.

It comes as no surprise, but be prepared to grind. And I mean REALLY GRIND, because during my 50+ hours with the game, that's what I did the most. And normally I don't even care about that stuff, but this game is just SO SLOW! Around chapter 5, I was pretty much done with it. Progressing through DQIV's final chapters felt like a massive slog. I just wasn't having fun at all anymore. Bosses and story were the only things keeping me going, but even that felt like it wasn't reason enough.

The game just got... boring. Why wouldn't they tone that down on a remake? Even saving is slow!

Besides, I started questioning some design choices around my final hours with the game.

Why is equipment so expensive? Why are most items useless during battles? Is Torneko supposed to be useful? Couldn't they include more songs in the remake? Why does chapter 6 even exist? Will Dragon Quest never get the enemy variety right? And why the hell Zing fails so much in this game?

I've read so many good things about DQIV that I actually thought that I'd feel a major diference from previous games. And while yes, I did feel, it just wasn't enough, I guess. If it wasn't for the story, bosses and characters, I wouldn't even try to reach the end.

By no means this is a bad game. It's got its charms and Dragon Quest still lives in my heart. But I just don't see myself going back to this one.

I think the game is leagues better than DQ3, at least in my experience. The characters are much more fleshed out, even if they could be even more fleshed out. The story seems to be much more present in the game than in the first three, and there's a lot more music and bosses than those games as well. I like the chapter system introducing characters before they join the main party a lot. It makes the start of chapter 5 cool as you want to hurry and gather up a team of characters you've had before. I do wish they had done a better job with the Hero's story though. I think they should not have shown us the Hero at the start to not just jarringly switch to a whole different character out of nowhere. They could've also shown glimpses of the Hero between chapters to fix this. Combat in DQ4 was generally enjoyable. I really liked the ability to swap your party out freely in certain battles, as that made it feel pretty different from the older games. I like the ease of grinding exp later on in the game from the Metal Slimes, although money is still annoying to grind for. Chapters 2 and 3 can drag a bit in certain sections, but otherwise I enjoyed the pacing. I wish chapter 6 added more stuff to do after getting the 9th chosen, as they expect you to grind a bit too much if you want to see their full potential. I didn't hate fighting any of the bosses like I did in DQ and DQ3 for the annoying final bosses. Overall, a solid entry, and a surprisingly good title to come from the NES, even if the version I played was somewhat reworked.

Random thought: I played Hollow Knight a month ago, and Cornifer and Iselda are basically Torneko and Tessie as bugs. No, I will not elaborate.

Anyways, I've previously played all of what I consider 'classic DQ' (the original versions of the first seven games), and this marks my first foray into the DS remakes. I like the game a lot, but it also solidifies my distaste for the series' combat in general. It's not so much that the game is grindy, but that it boils down to praying hard to RNGesus only to find out that he's RNSatan instead. As an example, an early-game boss can either do a normal attack for 30-40 damage, an AOE attack for around 20, or a different AOE attack for 40plus. He also sometimes gets two actions per round. And if you think about it, him doing an AOE twice at the end of a round, then following it up with the same thing at the start of the next round (which happened to me more than once) is such monumental overkill that it will wipe your party even if you're overlevelled. Random lategame mooks do this as well. Some bosses will instakill a character if they get a critical hit - which would be tolerable in a game where you have ready access to reliable methods of resurrection, but not here! This all adds up to a game which is so random that it kills almost all attempts at strategizing in favor of relying on luck, and simply doesn't come across as fun for me (or maybe it's a skill issue? So many people enjoy the combat so I might be missing something).

The game does have updated graphics and better QoL than the NES original - as expected - but I do need to complain about how they added one of my biggest pet peeves: Xenogears-style camera angles. I feel like controllable camera angles are good for immersion if you have interesting locales that are set up like actual real-world locations, but if your towns and dungeons are set up in a rigid grid and the only thing that separates them from 'traditional' JRPG towns are the fact that the doors of houses are not all facing the same direction, then all you're doing by adding a controllable camera is adding tedium to getting around!

My star rating above should spoil that there are enough things I like about the game to balance out my biggest gripes, and really it's just the fact that... well, this game is Dragon Quest, man. Like every other game in the series I've played, the NPCs are charming, the vibes are cozy, and it really nails the sense of exploration by being nonlinear enough that everyone's journey of discovering the world in Chapter 5 will be uniquely their own. The more modern hardware and more polished translation render the dramatic moments of the original - like your childhood friend's willingness to protect you, and the villain's origin story - far more effective. And as one of the not-many who adores Koichi Sugiyama (the composer, not the person), the updated orchestration does his work a lot more justice; as a purist who writes very much in a traditional classical style, the more 'accurate' instrumental samples represent a huge jump in quality over the tinny midi of the original.

One last thing I need to mention is that the Party Chat function - which adds a ton of characterization to your party (and even the guest members!) - is inexplicably dummied out of the Western release. For a game with such a colorful cast of characters this is a massive miss!

In the end, this is a great way to play one of the strongest entries of the series in a more 'modern' medium. Fittingly for a series which has been often described as 'RPG comfort food', you know exactly what you'll get - if you like the other games in the series, I'd recommend this!

The thing I love the most about Dragon Quest IV is its structure. The story, which concerns the ominously-named Psaro the Manslayer and his efforts to destroy humanity, is broken into chapters, each one focusing on one of the heroes who's paths will eventually all cross to form your adventuring party. It's a really strong way of presenting each character, and cements their personality and their reason for fighting, in an effective way.

As is usual for Dragon Quest, the moment-to-moment gameplay is very traditional. You'll wander around a lush fantasy world, going from town to town solving people's problems and fighting monsters in turn-based combat. The main quest is, as is common in the series, a scavenger hunt for legendary weapons, but here they're woven neatly into the world as national treasures or sealed away in deep caves and tombs. There's less freeform role-playing here than in III, but it's replaced with a strong character-led quest that hits all the right notes for fans of the series.

They tried their best to give this game a modern look, but the archaisms didn't go anywhere. If in 1990 the idea of separate chapters with different characters seemed to be something new and even interesting, now it seems to be a pointless superstructure and time stretching, because local stories are very primitive even by the framework of jrpg of the late 80s, what is the same FF2 on the background of DQ4, which was the first time to try in the story, starting a new era in the DQ series, which was successfully continued by the 5th part, leaving the 4th part behind.

Perhaps I shouldn't devalue the merits of this particular installment of DQ too much given its age, but having played the more modern installments that came out on SNES, PS 1, PS 2, etc I don't really want to go back to this one. Let it just remain a great legacy of an equally great series of games that didn't get a decent remake.

First DQ i clock more than 10 hours on the save, but i don't feel like to finish it. This has an interesting world, the chapters concept is cool, especially the idea of Torneko chapter, but this game has things that shouldn't be in a 2000s JRPG remake. It's very cryptic saying to where you should go in a lot of moments, the menus are very bad, the battles are slow, in chapter 5 i don't know why the hell you can't use zoom to some specific towns, you can only save in town churches, and in chapter 5 the thing becomes very grindy, bosses also start havinf two attacks per turn, and that's bullshit. The battle system is also very simple, this i kinda get it since it's a remake of a 1990 JRPG, but i think a remake like this could expand the original gameplay if it was too simple, and fix other issues. And the story didn't get me hooked, the only character i really liked was Torneko because he's just a guy trying to be an weapons merchant, but dude, the selling weapons part is cool on the first time, but after that it becomes very boring, i would have dropped there if wasn't for fast forward. Yeah i get that the concept of being a seller is boring so it's accurate, but i still don't like it. I really don't feel like to finish long games when i'm not having fun. Guess i will try DQ V then, i hope this one's better