When I was given Xenoblade Chronicles as a gift and played a few hours into it, I was floored. There's just so much stuff in that game. There's an unbelievably huge world to travel, a whole network of relationships to tend to, and an item system that's simply extensive. At least, that's the impression I was left with after those first few hours of play.
Dragon Quest IX now feels similar, but mostly in terms of the size of its world. I am definitely glad that the teleportation spell "Zoom" costs 0 MP.
But Dragon Quest IX also has an alchemy system. So, as seems to be the case with Xenoblade Chronicles, and is the case with Pandora's Tower, inventory management is likely to make up a considerable chunk of the game. So far, alchemizing things simply gets you stronger items, and helps you to solve some quests. But I wouldn't put it past the game's developers to get you to combine items to move the plot forward at a point or two down the road.
Aside from that vague sense of fetch quest-foreboding, the game really feels vast. The cause of this sense of enormity is the way that the overworld is broken into several separate maps. This, along with the Starflight Express' basically being a warp point rather than a proper vehicle, works to make the world feel huge. It's not just something that can be contained in one map screen, or trudged across, oh no.
It's likely that this overworld sprawl was necessary to keep within the DS' limitations. But, those limitations paradoxically give rise to a game world that feels much larger than it would were it just another of the continuous, rolling overworlds featured in most 16-bit era J-RPGs.
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