The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Dragon Quest 9 is a huge game, with lots of quests and stuff. It is also a game with a class change system, and that means that it is, by default, a game meant to be min/maxed and broke the fuck open by people fiddling with the systems in place to make super-powerful characters. This is a good thing. It has appeal for those people, as well as touching little mini-storylines in each city and gameplay that’s pretty casual friendly. That’s always been the appeal of Dragon Quest. However, I just have to question some of their decisions.

There are 12 classes, from what I understand, but 6 of them are locked behind quests. These quests require you to kill things in a specific way to prove you’re worthy of being a member of that class. Nothing wrong with that, perse. That’s a fine enough idea. The problem comes in with how complicated the quests are. Or, I guess, the one I’m going to talk about.

One of them I had was the quest to unlock the class “Armamentalist” which required you to cast Wizard Ward, and then deliver the final blow to two Metal Slimes. Metal Slimes are hard to hit, and run away very often. They’re also very rare. You can see already how this quest may be a problem. When you already have to waste one turn, and MP, casting Wizard Ward before you can even start hitting the Metal Slimes, often they will run away before you even attack them. There’s a skill that helps you hit Metal Slimes, called Metal Slash, but that’s a sword skill. Mages, who learn Wizard Ward, can’t learn Metal Slash. To complete this quest, you need someone who can do both.

This wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the previously-mentioned Min/Maxing I was talking about. Having your Warrior, who’s using swords, use 8 Skill points to learn Wizard Ward is a waste. Similarly, having your mage put a ton of skill points into Sword Skills to learn Metal Slash is also a waste. Fully-leveling a character in a class nets you 200 skill points (But who would ever get a character up to level 100 in a class?) which means that if you level up every class completely, you get 2400 skill points. There are 26 skills, and it takes 100 skill points to completely level up a skill. Therefore, two skills will never be fully leveled. See where I’m going with this? For the craziest level-grinder, mis-investing those 8 points does matter in creating the very best character, because they can’t fully level every skill. For those who aren’t going to hit level 100 with every class, which is completely insane and would take forever, mis-using those skill points is even more of a big deal, because that’s that much less power your characters have.

Plus, even with a character so specced out, the quest is annoyingly hard. Doing that just makes it possible.

I got kind of angry with the game over this today. I wanted to have all the classes, so I knew I had to do this quest, but it was just so annoying. Even though I’m playing casually, I didn’t want to purposefully mis-handle my character building. I really resisting intentionally gimping myself to completely this quest. I got really angry at the game and put it down.

Then I picked it back up like… 20 minutes later. DQ9 is really good. There’s some questionable decisions, but overall? Really quite good.

But I’ll review it another time. Like when I beat it. (Here’s where you laugh because that probably won’t happen.)