A Nugget of Nostalgia: A Look at Dragon Quest IX

Nostalgia tends to be a comforting presence in our lives. Some folks tend to retreat into it, but a more healthy relationship can be a bit of an angel on your shoulder. The lessons and joy from stories and places and people you remember can break through the clouds of dark times, and inform decisions in times of uncertainty, or help you find yourself.

Not that Dragon Quest IX is really thematically linking its main character being a literal guardian angel to how people relate to the nostalgia-driven series, but this kinda overblown setup is kinda a perfect encapsulation of Dragon Quest. You start out with these perfect fairy tale concepts with endless potential, but rather than really diving into them it’s just an entry point into Dragon Quest doing Dragon Quest stuff.

So let’s elaborate on the premise. Your character, a player-constructed avatar (a first for the series), is a heavenly being sent as guardian of the village Angel Falls. You’re invisible to the townsfolk, but can help them fulfill daily tasks, find hidden items, drive off monsters, little things like that. Doing so lets you collect the gratitude of mortals, which fuels the divine tree, and one day will let the angels ascend back to the heavenly realm. Good basic mythology stuff all around. But during a visit to the heavenly realm, some sort of disaster strikes, sending you hurling back to Angel Falls (yes, all of Dragon Quest is this punny. All of it.), somehow rendering you human. And thus you travel the land, trying to find the means to get home and ultimately getting embroiled in a struggle to determine the fate of all angels.

I don’t want to dwell too much on gameplay elements, but I am going to make an assumption about this game that’s more based in gameplay than anything else, SO. Dragon Quest employs the simplest of turn-based mechanics, which doesn’t change here: you put in commands for your team, they and enemies execute actions one by one based on their agility scores and some heavy randomization, rinse and repeat. DQIX does however borrow leveling mechanics from across the series. The classes and character recruitment from DQIII form the core, with supplements from VI and VII’s classes, while each class has a choice of ability paths to put points into in the vein of DQVIII.

DQIX is the first natively hand-held Dragon Quest, the point of which seems to have been to use the various multiplayer features the DS had (and given DQX was a full on MMO, probably a testing of the waters for that concept.) A lot of those features no longer function, and I never personally dabbled in them much, but for this I want to highlight the Grottos. Essentially they were randomized dungeons you could only access by getting a map from a quest… but the main use of the game’s online component was to get special quests that contained maps with Legacy Bosses, ie the final bosses of the previous Dragon Quest games.

All of which to say DQIX in most ways is the ‘love letter to the fans’ edition of Dragon Quest. I mean, make no mistake, DQ has billed itself on nostalgia since roughly the mid-90s, but the way DQIX blends elements from across the series, in addition to the way it used online content, mark it as more of a celebration than merely being part of the brand. But by going about it this way, it sorta becomes the arch Dragon Quest- it’s not so much combining the strengths of different DQ games as simply becoming the least distinct of them… and in turn thus becoming the most representative of the essence of Dragon Quest.

So basically we’re really asking: what is that essence of Dragon Quest. We’ll start with DQIX’s basic production byline, then pick out the parts in common with the series’ past.

Now, Dragon Quest IX is made by Level 5, under the direction of the usual trio of series mainstays Horii, Sugiyama, and Toriyama. They worked on the previous entry, and had a lot of games before and after with some measure of respect in the jRPG Canon. But this is actually the pattern with Dragon Quest; the first five games were done by Chunsoft (who’ve gone on to make mostly console-based VNs), while Heartbeat worked on VI and VII and concurrent remakes of III and IV (later going on to become Genius Sonority, who work mainly on Pokémon spinoffs). Part of this is just that Enix have always been publishers, rather than developers. And the rest is that what unifies Dragon Quest isn’t really particular gameplay systems (after all, Dragon Quest features the simplest possible form of RPG mechanics), but the aesthetic, the fairy tale logic of the plots, and its plot flow. Toriyama and Sugiyama of course provide the distinct look and sound, but the rest is Horii, and that’s the real element I want to pick up on here.

The original Dragon Quest is basically the start of jRPGs as a genre (though DQII has more relation to most of the genre’s lifespan), but it was in many ways a sort of adaptation or homage to early PC RPGs (Ultima and Wizardry in particular), and those in turn were functionally adaptations of tabletop RPGs. Where this DNA really shines through the entire history of the series is how it approaches constructing the plot, because it tends strongly towards modular design. The original mode of play in tabletop was enticing the player to buy basic rule books and create characters, then as they played the dungeon master would pick up self-contained scenarios to keep the players going as they leveled up. Dragon Quest uses this basic approach, to greater and lesser degrees, with individual towns being fairly disconnected from what you’ve done before in the game, having its own attached dungeons and other little setting details. But more importantly, usually there’s no strong connection to the overarching scenario of the game, and if the particular details of the adventure clash a bit with what comes before and after, that’s not a big deal.

And that’s at the heart of Dragon Quest’s strengths and failings in general. Usually there’s not a strong thematic throughline in the game, and the hook of the premise usually doesn’t pay off. But if you just play without any particular expectation on that front, you’ll also probably find some wacky plotline that’ll hit just right. And DQIX in particular draws attention to that split, though it does hang a fig leaf over the problem. You just need the gratitude of mortals to power up your transport and get back to Celestia, so really that can be just about anything right?

Within that structure they do kinda stretch the point. Actually let’s back up. So Dragon Quest structurally tends to provide a linear path through a ‘main’ continent, with various kingdoms/villages with their own plots, then you get a ship and the game provides you 4–7 places you could go with no particular indication of a preferred order, where they are, any of that sort of thing. Basic non-linearity. And usually that’s also when the module plots stretch out and get a bit weirder, since there’s even less incentive for them to make sense with adjoining areas (they can be islands or other continents! So the geography can be nonsense too!) DQIX itself has three such quests before converging briefly: Swinedimples, the magic school (Yes. All. Of. It.), the desert kingdom of Gleeba, and the steppes village of Batsureg. In order, your tasks here are to: save delinquent students from the ghost of the overly strict founder, capture the wayward pet of the Queen (who actually is madly in love with the queen and stole a Fygg to gain ‘human’ form to woo her), and protecting the village from a vicious monster with the help of the chief’s ‘cowardly’ son (who actually is friends with the monster and the chief’s lover is a demonic temptress who is manipulating him). I mean, if you squint there’s some commonality in these stories? You have to look past appearances and trust that people’s better nature’s will win out in the end, and that ties into how your main character may have lost the trappings of an angel but retains purity of heart, something along those lines? But for the most part these are scenarios that barely make sense in the same century, let alone making sense as a single world map.

But that’s the point. You aren’t really here to get invested into the deep lore of the world here, but if you get a chuckle out of an extended Harry Potter reference, or have a soft spot for a kid who befriends monsters, or enjoy seeing a selfish Queen begin to make amends, you’ll get some warm fuzzies and go “yeah, this game is alright, I should tell my friends”. All you really need is one first class experience, in much the same way a tabletop player with great war stories of particular modules can stay in the game and get others to play. And that’s the essence of Dragon Quest; a series of small stories that’ll on average will give a player one or two that get them on board for the whole ride.

But let’s talk about the end, because I was a little unfair before. Fitting every area of DQIX into a single narrative, world, or thematic summary is a fool’s errand, but in the end the game does focus down, come back to the original premise, and tell a fairly complete story (if I’m honest, it’s sorta like the first hour and the last 6 or 7 are the original plot outline, then the entire rest is modules with two set pieces scattered in just to make sure the player doesn’t completely forget the main plot will come back). In fairly quick succession, and often times with the game subtly discouraging or even outright disabling the ability to wander off, you’re attacked by your mentor, climb a volcano to recruit a dragon, discover an ancient evil Empire has been revived, are tossed into prison by same, escape all the way back to the Celestial realm, discover God is absent… but his daughter was your patron and Yggdrasil all along, then get tossed into the final two dungeons in rapid succession, discovering that another fallen angel who was tormented into losing all faith was behind the Empire’s resurrection and seeks to destroy the mortal realm.

At this point there’s a much clearer and more intentional narrative about diligence, purity of heart, and having to trust people. Your character has lost the trappings of an angel, but still retains the essence that lets her guard the world: she can see what others cannot, the literally invisible spirits of the departed that surround us, and believe where others have lost faith. She does the right thing even as her mentor, his boss, the king of the angels, or the Almighty himself tells her to give up and leave well enough alone. To let mortals die of their own folly. The daughter of God has this as her explicit backstory, and the player expressly draws from her example to save the day in the end. And it’s kinda sorta in line with the module stories isn’t it? But in a way that makes that feel tacked on after the fact, or even just a brief touch of the ol’ apophenia of course.

And going back to it all, it’s disappointing really, because the presentation, dialogue, and heart behind the core narrative, particularly Celestia’s willingness to defy the Almighty (for that matter, if she’d been wrong, and mortals hadn’t been good at heart, she’d have essentially condemned herself to an eternal slumber), definitely have some real emotional weight. Like, damn, these are the sorts of bedtime stories that a kid remembers forever, whether consciously or just in a stubborn determination to be a good person they can never quite explain. And that’s really my own personal relationship with the series: yeah, it’s great to have those little nuggets of great stories here and there, but when it wants to it can truly deliver some spectacular moments (Level 5 in particular was great at creating mood, DQVIII… well, that’s another story for another time isn’t it) that feel like they could have been the whole game with the right approach. But still, even if it only rarely fires on all cylinders, DQIX does have those times, and a few clear memories of joy can mean a lot more to how you reflect on something in your life than a pleasant overall experience.

Nostalgia washes away mediocrity and dulls pain, leaving just the shiny jewels, the little stories that really spoke to you when you needed them most.

But then again, that’s why DQIX isn’t my favorite one. I mean, I was well into adulthood in 2010, and indeed no Dragon Quest game holds a strong place of nostalgia for me. So instead, my favorite is the one that comes closest to that ideal of a game with a strong narrative that weaves the entire length of the game, with emotional ebbs and flows that exercise the heart strings and forms not a single shiny jewel of “the coolest scene”, but a whole experience you can play on repeat with a little thought and perhaps a gentle nudge. But that’s a story for next time, I suppose.