It is undeniable that if you talk about Dragon Warrior IV and what makes it great that you'll end up talking about Torneko Taloon, our favorite guy. He embodies all the best parts of the game! I do think it's interesting that for both Final Fantasy and DQ, the fourth entry took the freeform class sytem of the previous games and said "what if we made each of these an actual defined guy." Obviously the games went in very different directions with that premise, though. But you know, while Final Fantasy to me is always narratively at its best when it's a little bit of a comedy, Dragon Quest is at its best when it's a little bit of a tragedy.
DQ3 had some pretty distinct early attempts at this, but IV having a more developed story and characters means there's just a lot more of it. I'm not saying it's super original or developed, but I think that was the point. The D&D roleplaying roots were still here in 1990 and the way it manifests is that you just get presented with with stuff and you have to fill in the blanks. Your little green main character has their entire village wiped out within a few minutes of being introduced, and you're just left with a particularly lonely feeling, standing in the bombed-out ruins of her home. None of those characters got enough screentime for me to remember their names, but the vibe of the first moments of being a level 1 lonely child thrust into the world is real. The last scene in the credits is your protagonist returning to those ruins and magically having their friend come back to life or something, which isn't explained and maybe serves as an early warning of the series' later tendency to give every game a super happy ending where you retroactively undo every bad thing that happens. Including this one, actually, in the later remakes.
Take Mara and Nara, or Meena and Nina or whatever they translated them as later. They have a pretty straightforward revenge plot going. Just when they're about to get what they're after, it's pulled away from them by the revelation that things are Bigger than they realized. Even after you kill off the guy responsible, NPCs who know them indicate that their revenge isn't finished yet, probably because they realized they have to stick around and defeat the Real Bad Guy and so on. The bits are all there but they really wanted the player to put them together, and since this is a game for children it's pretty sick! I don't think any of the other party members have anything that could even be stretched to call a character arc.
Psaro, though. The bad guy. He's pretty cool. Probably a little TOO many missing pieces to his story, really. I know they took great pains to make him an entire spinoff recently so I assume this has been rectified to hell by now. The antagonist who hates humans because blah blah discrimination is a juiceless premise but I DO like the antagonist who is manipulated into throwing away his whole-ass brain and becoming a big monster but everyone agrees he's kind sympathetic. He also has a badass sprite so we're like 75% of the way there already.
The game is full of stuff like that, and having played through most of V I know they chose this kind of storytelling to refine in the next game. Torneko's chapter rightfully gets a lot of love for kinda inventing the entire minor genre of fantasy shop simulators but when you look at mainline Dragon Quest, it was the presentation, very ambitious for the NES, which kinda informed a lot of the next several years of the series. Seeing Dragon Quest steering itself in new directions with this one, a lot of the reputation the series has for being all the same does not seem especially justified!
All this having been said, I don't quite like it as much as III. It's neat that you don't control your party directly in theory, since it makes them feel a lot more like companions and it's a fun experiment, but holy hell Cristo stop casting freakin' Thwack on bosses. What is wrong with you my guy. That's not going to work! I could never play one of the remakes of this sucker and deal with an entire extra chapter with more dungeon, this version was already just a smidge longer than ideal. None of this makes the game too hard, though: the difficulty curve is very good and leans well within the range of easy enough. The original trilogy is pretty great, but I'm really looking forward to digging into the middle section of this series that I missed, and also V which I did not miss but it kicked ass and I didn't beat it so I'm still gonna enjoy that one.
DQ3 had some pretty distinct early attempts at this, but IV having a more developed story and characters means there's just a lot more of it. I'm not saying it's super original or developed, but I think that was the point. The D&D roleplaying roots were still here in 1990 and the way it manifests is that you just get presented with with stuff and you have to fill in the blanks. Your little green main character has their entire village wiped out within a few minutes of being introduced, and you're just left with a particularly lonely feeling, standing in the bombed-out ruins of her home. None of those characters got enough screentime for me to remember their names, but the vibe of the first moments of being a level 1 lonely child thrust into the world is real. The last scene in the credits is your protagonist returning to those ruins and magically having their friend come back to life or something, which isn't explained and maybe serves as an early warning of the series' later tendency to give every game a super happy ending where you retroactively undo every bad thing that happens. Including this one, actually, in the later remakes.
Take Mara and Nara, or Meena and Nina or whatever they translated them as later. They have a pretty straightforward revenge plot going. Just when they're about to get what they're after, it's pulled away from them by the revelation that things are Bigger than they realized. Even after you kill off the guy responsible, NPCs who know them indicate that their revenge isn't finished yet, probably because they realized they have to stick around and defeat the Real Bad Guy and so on. The bits are all there but they really wanted the player to put them together, and since this is a game for children it's pretty sick! I don't think any of the other party members have anything that could even be stretched to call a character arc.
Psaro, though. The bad guy. He's pretty cool. Probably a little TOO many missing pieces to his story, really. I know they took great pains to make him an entire spinoff recently so I assume this has been rectified to hell by now. The antagonist who hates humans because blah blah discrimination is a juiceless premise but I DO like the antagonist who is manipulated into throwing away his whole-ass brain and becoming a big monster but everyone agrees he's kind sympathetic. He also has a badass sprite so we're like 75% of the way there already.
The game is full of stuff like that, and having played through most of V I know they chose this kind of storytelling to refine in the next game. Torneko's chapter rightfully gets a lot of love for kinda inventing the entire minor genre of fantasy shop simulators but when you look at mainline Dragon Quest, it was the presentation, very ambitious for the NES, which kinda informed a lot of the next several years of the series. Seeing Dragon Quest steering itself in new directions with this one, a lot of the reputation the series has for being all the same does not seem especially justified!
All this having been said, I don't quite like it as much as III. It's neat that you don't control your party directly in theory, since it makes them feel a lot more like companions and it's a fun experiment, but holy hell Cristo stop casting freakin' Thwack on bosses. What is wrong with you my guy. That's not going to work! I could never play one of the remakes of this sucker and deal with an entire extra chapter with more dungeon, this version was already just a smidge longer than ideal. None of this makes the game too hard, though: the difficulty curve is very good and leans well within the range of easy enough. The original trilogy is pretty great, but I'm really looking forward to digging into the middle section of this series that I missed, and also V which I did not miss but it kicked ass and I didn't beat it so I'm still gonna enjoy that one.