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chuckroThe entire world is a single tiny island with a castle and a small fishing village, until a bunch of kids discover strange ruins and a series of tablet fragments that let them revisit the worlds of the past and revive the lost continents.
While this game doesn’t have quite the insane start-to-slime time of the original (2+ hours), it’s still a solid hour and fifteen before I fought my first battle. (Despite cutting out some early puzzles and streamlining a few things.) For that matter, there’s an absurd amount of game—easily fifteen hours--before you reach Alltrades Abbey and can class-change for the first time. (With a fake out, too: It looks like you’ll be able to change classes, but instead lose all your abilities and have multiple dungeons and events before you get to start earning new ones.)
The graphics are totally redone, which is very nice, as especially the character sprites in the original were really lame. The overworld is done in a 3D style close to DQ8. Enemies are visible on the world map rather than being random encounters, which both makes avoiding encounters more feasible and also lets you pick-and-choose what monsters you want to fight.
The addition of the monster tablet bonus dungeons (similar to DQ9’s grottos) gives you a very good class-grinding location and decent way to earn money.
They tried very hard to remove some of the frustration inherent in the original game: You can get a clue to the next fragment’s location from the menu at any time, along with reminders about the plot and where you’re going next. The fragment radar lets you know if there’s one in the area you’re in. The level caps for class-grinding have been adjusted in some areas, and the number of battles you need for many classes seems to have been reduced.
But all of that said, I still lost interest after twenty-someodd hours when I was still only a quarter of the way through the game. I made it farther than I did in the original, but I think there’s just too much packed into here for the level curve and the amount of plot. I suspect I’m more likely to replay the DS remakes of 5 or 6, with their ~30 hour total length, than end up here again.
Overall: This remains the only main-series Dragon Quest game to defeat me in all incarnations. I suppose I’ll see how 11 does.
While this game doesn’t have quite the insane start-to-slime time of the original (2+ hours), it’s still a solid hour and fifteen before I fought my first battle. (Despite cutting out some early puzzles and streamlining a few things.) For that matter, there’s an absurd amount of game—easily fifteen hours--before you reach Alltrades Abbey and can class-change for the first time. (With a fake out, too: It looks like you’ll be able to change classes, but instead lose all your abilities and have multiple dungeons and events before you get to start earning new ones.)
The graphics are totally redone, which is very nice, as especially the character sprites in the original were really lame. The overworld is done in a 3D style close to DQ8. Enemies are visible on the world map rather than being random encounters, which both makes avoiding encounters more feasible and also lets you pick-and-choose what monsters you want to fight.
The addition of the monster tablet bonus dungeons (similar to DQ9’s grottos) gives you a very good class-grinding location and decent way to earn money.
They tried very hard to remove some of the frustration inherent in the original game: You can get a clue to the next fragment’s location from the menu at any time, along with reminders about the plot and where you’re going next. The fragment radar lets you know if there’s one in the area you’re in. The level caps for class-grinding have been adjusted in some areas, and the number of battles you need for many classes seems to have been reduced.
But all of that said, I still lost interest after twenty-someodd hours when I was still only a quarter of the way through the game. I made it farther than I did in the original, but I think there’s just too much packed into here for the level curve and the amount of plot. I suspect I’m more likely to replay the DS remakes of 5 or 6, with their ~30 hour total length, than end up here again.
Overall: This remains the only main-series Dragon Quest game to defeat me in all incarnations. I suppose I’ll see how 11 does.
