The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The thing that really kept me going through most of Dragon Quest 9, though, was the story.

Now, one might thing one can’t have a super-deep story with a party of completely created people. I agree that this is a challenge of sorts. Having that character customization is important to the gameplay, but you can’t completely forget the story. The choice the designers of Dragon Quest 9 went with was to have a bunch of little tiny stories going on that you are on the fringe of in each town you go to. This worked fantastically.

Dragon Quest has always had a knack, at least since I started playing it, of doing very simple, straightforward, but touching stories. Each town in Dragon Quest 9 does this rather well. Since you are an angel who, for the most part, exists to do good things, going into towns and attempting to fix what is wrong there is really easy to narratively justify. The game itself takes plenty of time to flesh out the characters in the towns as well, and make them complete people of a sort. Sure, eventually you’re going to have to go into a dungeon and fight a dude. That’s just the kind of game it is. But at the same time, you’ll be, at some point, helping a husband grieve by showing off the good he’s done and playing detective at a school. These things really do work. They straddle a fine line between cheesy and simple, and pull it off. They were enjoyable to experience.

At the same time, the whole concept had, for the most part, run its course at the end of my 49 hour run through the game. They were classy enough to know when the story couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and let it come to an end. This is something I completely, fantastically appreciate. So few things know how to end.

Of course, it doesn’t really end. There is an insane amount of post-game content in the game. It’s just nothing I care to dive into. All the quests in the game were overwhelmingly annoying. All incredibly luck-based for the most part, or just flat-out time consuming. There are surely some interesting ones, sure, and the treasure maps are interesting as well. But even those require a lot of grinding to be relevant. To get good drops, which is the point of them, you have to beat them over and over and over. That just isn’t my bag. More power to people enjoying it though! Me, I am going to move on to something else… like… a game I’ve already bought two copies of and just bought a third copy of. Yep.