I never really played too many Dragon Quest games before taking up Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies nearly three years ago. Somehow, despite my appetite for 16-bit JRPGs I just never hunted down roms of the lauded series in my childhood, when time was mine and most of it was spent on the genre.
Maybe it's the come down from finishing Phantasy Star IV, but today's return session to Dragon Quest IX brought me right back into it. I'm sure having stopped right in the middle of the first big quest (the hunt for the black knight in Brigadoom) also made it easy for me to feel like I never left the game in the first place.
The game plays like so many JRPGs from the SNES era. Battles are turn-based, menus are deep, and the dungeons aren't so much expansive as they are tight. Brigadoom isn't a huge place, but it's got enough stairs and hidden rooms to keep you backtracking and wandering to find the right path. Plus, being able to see treasure chests and pots in adjacent, but seemingly inaccessible rooms is an invitation to deviate from the straight path to dungeon's end.
So far Dragon Quest IX's offered a fine mix of nostalgia and innovations on the formulae I remember from the 16-bit era's Final Fantasy series, Tales of Phantasia, the Lufia games, and even outliers like Secret of the Stars.
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