I just finished Dragon Quest 4, so here’s a review. Well, to be honest, I finished the original five chapters. Even though the DS version I played has a bonus sixth chapter, I don’t hold with bonus add-on content, especially since it’s hardly ever as good.

What distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from all other JRPGs, which are invariably based on Dragon Quest? The biggest thing is division into chapters; the individual characters are introduced in their own chapters and combined into one team in the final chapter. As a gameplay device, it’s a lot more fun than Final Fantasy 4’s constant suicides/swaparoos. It also gives you the satisfaction of that early levelling curve *five times*.

The other thing that distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from modern RPGs is that it basically doesn’t care about its story. The characters don’t engage in histrionics or solemn vows of revenge; the only thing that keeps the story moving is the deadly obvious clues that the villagers drop about the Next Step. The whole thing would get old, except for the complete change of scenery every chapter.

Which leads to the other other thing that distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from modern RPGs: battles are constant, frequent and fast. That’s a lot different from Lost Odyssey, which is that last JRPG I played. It has the gall to feature loading times before battle. 2-3 seconds even. (I quit playing that during the LAN party after Frazier made fun of “exciting menu-based gameplay” that I was in fact playing in order to put myself to sleep.)

Anyway, back to DQ4: you can crank up the text speed to max and blaze through most battles in 10-20 seconds. That’s good, because you’ll have to do a lot of grinding while finding your way through the dungeons of the game. I suppose when you replay it, you’ll know your way and maybe the bosses will be more challenging at a lower level.

Oh, right: the game isn’t super hard. It’s somewhere between FF4, as released in Japan, and FF “2″, as released in the US. I died a few times, but never fighting a boss; it was always early on when I decided to delve deep into a dungeon I wasn’t ready for. Because you get to keep experience even after dying, though, you’ll still eventually finish.

The chapters are a great idea, and the basic but zippy battles are fun, but the low point of the game was in chapter 5, near the end. There was a giant fetch quest to get an armour set or something, and it just felt like the designers were trying to give me my money’s worth by making me revisit every town in the world looking for clues. Given my bargain-bin approach to buying games, I would have been happier with a 18-20 hour game instead of the 28 hours I put in.

This is the first Dragon Quest game I’ve played, and I see now why it’s so popular in Japan. I still find Final Fantasy more interesting as a series, but that’s because it keeps changing. I bought Dragon Quest 8 this year, and I’m eager to have time to play it, but I don’t expect it will be much different from DQ4 from the hour I’ve played so far. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy is the series with FF5, FFX and FF12. That just about delineates the boundaries of the the JRPG genre. I guess that’s the difference: Final Fantasy tries to find the boundaries; Dragon Quest is the solid centre of the JRPG.