Exploring vocations

Along with hearkening back to classic JRPGs with its plot-powering fetch quest, Dragon Quest IX can be pretty obtuse. After the abbot returns to Alltrades Abbey, I'm invited to change my vocation any time I like and can wander around to sign up for job-specific quests.

But where do I need to go next? The game offered no direct help, so I just set out to wander the continent. After all, a large swathe of this land mass had been unexplored up to this point.

So I set out into the heart of this unknown territory, first going east, and then to the south. Once I reached the continent's southern tip, I found a small fishing town. That seemed a good place to stop, since battling armies of slimes and combined slimes had started to wear down my party. Since it sounds like I'll be able to sail from this village once this Lleviathan business has been settled, I must be in the right place.

Setting aside giving the players the illusion of self-direction, this game's job system (or "vocations," as they say in-game) seems rather clunky to me. When you change vocations, your old one retains its level and spells and such, but all you carry over are the abilities and traits that you picked up from your old vocation. If my main character switched from minstrel to priest, he would drop from level 18 to level one. Where's the incentive in that?

On the one hand you could make some sort of super character, with abilities from all of the vocations. On the other, that sort of thing would take a lot of grinding. Plus, a job system that requires you to leave the main game to change jobs bothers me since the systems I'm most familiar with (such as the one in Final Fantasy V) allow you to change job at any time, and to gain abilities completely separately from your main level.

So Dragon Quest IX's vocation system smells like game elongation to me. Just the sort of thing that someone blogging about their playthroughs doesn't have time for.