onsdag 12 oktober 2016

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky


My introduction to the Dragon Quest-series

As the release date for Dragon Quest VII and VIII for the 3DS draws near as of me writing this I started reflecting of the other games in the series. I've already written a decent post about Dragon Quest V and I thought maybe I should write about the first game in the series I played, Dragon Quest IX. It may also be that I spent over 400 hours on the game and due to servers shut down I can't replay the story without erasing all extras so I won't even bother. The story start as you, an angel apprentice under Aquilla are on earth protecting it's people and collecting prayers basically. They gather them so that this tree will bear fruit and they can see the creator. As the starlight express appears their world in the sky is shocked as a beam of light flies from the world below them and it seems to strike against the creators palace above them. Your character falls down upon the world and everything goes black.

You wake up and it appears you are a normal human. You try to find out what happened and get back to the sky, but to do so you are guided by the fairy Stella in a quest to retrieve the fruits from the world tree that have been scattered across the world. A bit problematic since they often causes small friendly creatures turn into wild monsters. You get them back and discovers that an ancient empire that was destroyed long ago have been resurrected and are fighting you at every turn. Even an ancient dragon have been awakened and you meet up with the last light dragon and after the dragons quest (well, they needed to get it in there somewhere) are allowed to wear his dragon armour as you fly of to meet the dark dragon that he defeated a long time ago.

The reason for the armour? Since you can customise your character (hair, sex, skin colour and so on) they made you wear full armour so that only needed to animate one scene 

It doesn't go as good this time and the light dragon is slain and you end up captured at the capital of the empire. You uncover there the true twist of the game. Below the dungeons of the empire is another angel held captive. The master of Aquilla, Corvus, that disappeared long ago that Aquilla searched a long time for. Aquilla even shows up, happy to have find us both, but the happiness is short lived as all these years in imprisonment have made Corvus go insane, doesn't help that he believes he was betrayed by a human girl he met and loved (when it actually was her father who betrayed them both and was killed by the empire as thanks). Corvus has somehow resurrected the empire, destroyed the creator and now kills Aquilla. You hunt after him and defeat him. At this point a ghostly woman that have followed your adventure intervenes, it's the girl that loved Corvus. Apparently she was turned into a ghost, but suffered amnesia and wandered the world to find her love once again. The Master gives up and are reunited with his love and restores as much damage he could and then disappears from the world with his love by his side.

So the fallen angel was defeated with love, gotta listen to Black Sabbath's N.I.B. again

Of course, the game itself isn't over, since you can play other quest that flesh out the story or go dungeon crawling for resources to use in alchemy or just level up and so on since there is a lot to level up if you want to max every class. Thing is, I believe most of these are downloadable quest, meaning you can't play these today since the server is down if they don't remake the game. So even though I loved this game, enough to spend over 400 hours on it to finish it twice, it's not possible to play it. Otherwise it's like most other DQ games, although even more refined. You customise your party however you like in looks and class. Changing weapons and equipment changes the look of the person as well.  The music is classic DQ with some new arrangement like the theme in the sky which is melancholic and sad. Another thing with this game is that it also pushed the social networking idea. The idea being that you had the game on sleep mode and those who had the game as well could exchange maps and visits the inn with boosted the rewards you would get from the inn. Rewards necessary to finish certain quest as well (technically you could buy those items by connecting to the server special days and such, but you know, servers down) so what I really need is another game cart and DS/3DS so I can max the damn inn since no one else plays the game today... or at least not around me and with the stoppers functionality on the 3DS I can't have the game in sleep mode.... So SquareEnix, can you remake IX and get rid of the social stuff and let the players get everything on the cart as well as 2 saves so I don't have to erase 100+ of playtime if I would like to play the games story again? Cause some of us actually prefers single campaigns if you get my drift.

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