The game finds its backbone in Horii's deft pacing of the story. Character development is pitched in perfect balance with your reach into the world and sweetened by a drip-feed of meaningful rewards and new features as the hours roll by. Battles are fast and straightforward and the new emphasis on customisation and questing with friends over Wi-Fi, while new to the series, is covered in Monster Hunter's fingerprints.īut it's in the execution and balance of these components that the game inspires wonder. Your party, composed of characters you design and name yourself, can be assigned one of a handful of classes each, and their development trees are limited to weapon specialisations upgraded with a clutch of skill points at level up.

The main story is entirely linear, with numbered, World of Warcraft-style side-quests that are ticked off as they're completed. Games of 2010: Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies More on Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies While it's progressive for a Dragon Quest title in dispensing with random battles and emphasising MMO-style multiplayer, placed within the broader contemporary videogame landscape, Dragon Quest IX's building blocks are humble and familiar. The result is a JRPG less concerned with gimmickry than articulating, in perfect balance, the things which always made the genre irresistible for those with eyes to see. A perfect storm of creative input, it pairs Horii with the warm touch of Professor Layton developer Level-5, the inspired translation work of Square Enix's best localization team, and the DS hardware itself. Placed somewhere between Grimm and Disney in terms of narrative light and shade, its creator Yuji Horii is a masterful storyteller, and his ostensibly simple fables pack more sincerity and weight than games with 20 times their ambition.ĭragon Quest IX - a game in which you guide an angel who has lost its wings to bring redemption and help to lost, broken humans, in the hope that their gratitude may sprout him new ones - is his best work yet.

While Final Fantasy has swung between overcooked Tolkien epic and sci-fi fantasy over its 20 years, Dragon Quest has never aspired to more than the fairytale yarn. The stories found within the latest Dragon Quest are as straightforward as they are affecting. A village brought to its knees by sickness, its mayor wheezing desperate cries for help. A knight caught in purgatory under a witch's spell that, down the generations, has cruelly kept him from his one true love, her memory now limited to a likeness in a distant descendent. A young woman who works tirelessly to honour her father's memory by making the inn she inherited a success.

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