To Each Their Own Adventure

And now we come to what is, I think, the most interesting of the four games in what can functionally be called the Dragon Quest NES tetralogy. Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, aka Dragon Warrior IV, was the last of the mainline titles released for the NES before the series switched over to the SNES for the next section of its series. It’s also the first to not feature the world of Alfegard, instead shifting the focus for the series moving forward to new worlds each with their own history to explore.

But that wasn’t what really made this fourth game interesting. No, what really made it stand out from the previous entries was the fact that this was the first game to break itself into chapters, each with a different story and different heroes to control. After a short introduction where you get your Hero and can set the game in motion, your hero is then set aside and you’re introduced to other characters, each on their own quest, with their own goals. Only after the first chapter for each set of heroes is told are you then shifted back to the original Hero you made and set loose on the world as they collect the other heroes you played with and put together a full party to save the world.

Chapter one of the game follows Ragnar, a warrior tasked with saving a couple of missing children. He befriends a cureslime named Healie and the two explore around the local world for the kids. They find them, having been kidnapped by monsters, and they learn that the monsters were trying to find the Legendary Hero, who they suspected was still a child, and kill them before they can become who they were meant to be. Saving the kids ends Ragnar’s story and switches you over to Princess Alena. She wants to prove her strength and that she can be a great hero, so she ventures out to find a challenge worthy of her talents. This leads her to a battle arena to conquer, a kingdom to save, and a title to earn.

And then from here things get even more amusing as the next hero you play as is Taloon (aka Torneko), a merchant looking for fame and fortune. He’s not some grand hero looking to save the world, he just wants to build his shop. And then you take on the roles of Maya and Meena, twin sisters seeking to avenge their murdered father, who was killed by the evil Balzak. When they find themselves unable to beat the villain, they go off in search of the Legendary Hero, who is fated to kill Balzak and the great evils spreading across the land. And that’s where you kick back over to the hero, gather your party, and hunt down first Balzak and then his master, Psaro.

However, note that later remakes also include a sixth chapter that functions as an alternate ending, allowing the heroes to work with Psaro and reform him, battling a different villain to help heal the planet. The structure of the game allows for that kind of chapter shifting for the story. It’s an interesting addition that adds even more to a great game. Honestly, it’s my favorite of the series, and adding even more content to it only makes it more interesting.

In fairness, the structure is weird, especially if you’re used to the previous games in the series. You, in effect, start off with five level one parties. You play as Ragnar, starting from level one and working your way up. Then, when his story is over, you switch to Alena and take her from level one up to whatever she needs to be ready to finish her quest. And then again with Taloon, and then again with Maya and Meena. And, of course, once all that is done, then you get back your level one Hero and have to raise them up while gathering back together everyone else, who might be at all kinds of different levels from each other. For someone just trying to get into an RPG and play a fun little adventure, this is a lot of stop and start to get the game going.

At the same time, though, it actually gets you invested and involved with each of your heroes. Take Taloon, for example. He’d effectively be an NPC in another game, someone following along with you, selling you merch and letting you use his wagon to heal people, and he does all that here once he joins the full party. But you care about him more here because you spend time with him, helping him build his shop while he ventures out to find goods to sell. He’s not just some NPC to you, he’s a more complete character, and every hero that joins your party gets the same treatment because you have to spend time with them, learning who they are and growing them as people. It keeps you invested.

In fact, I’d argue the one character this actually hinders is the main Hero. You create them at the start of the game and then immediately ditch them to hang out with all the rest of “the chosen” while you learn their stories. You only get back to the main Hero at the halfway point, after completing so many quests, making them feel like an afterthought. They’re actually the least developed, the least fleshed out, and they feel more like a recruited NPC than a real party member, even if they’re also the most powerful warrior in your party.

As odd as the structure is, I find it a far more involved way to develop characters. I liked Alena and Taloon and Ragnar far more because I spent the time building them up. They were more interesting than the recruited prince and princess in Dragon Quest II, and certainly far more engaging than all the randomly generated characters with no personality in Dragon Quest III. Each character is, in effect, a hero of their own story, and then when they’re all brought together it makes the whole quest feel more epic. Each quest on its own felt important so that must mean the big quest with all of them involved is even more important by comparison.

I also rather liked some of the new ideas put into play for this game. One of them is the tactics system. Your lead character is controlled directly by you in battle, and you can define everything they do. The other party members, though, operate on tactics, such as attacking or healing, so that the party could smoothly function with minimal input. And then once you have a bunch of characters to choose from, and Taloon’s wagon at the ready, you could swap heroes out, even in battle, making their tactics even more strategic. It added a lot of depth to battle even as it streamlined the whole experience.

And then there’s the final boss gauntlet. Naturally there are a few bosses you have to fight through over the course of the last dungeon, as is tradition with the series. But then you get to Psaro, the evil lord with the power of evolution, and you’re treated to a whole new kind of fight. This is a multi-stage, multi-phase fight where the evil beast is slowly cut down, and then loses limbs, grows new limbs, evolves, expands, and gets scarier and deadlier as the battle goes on. This was a truly epic encounter that worked like nothing seen before in the series, and anyone going into this fight blind was in for a real shocking battle. It was truly great.

Truly this was the best evolution of the Dragon Quest formula on the NES. It had so much more to do, so many characters to get involved with, and so many new ideas at play that made it feel truly expansive and alive. For anyone lucky enough to play through all four games, this had to feel like the pinnacle of the series, its truest, best evolution on hardware that was pushed to its limits to handle it all. Enix absolutely outdid themselves for their last NES adventure, giving the console one last RPG hurrah before they moved on to the 16-bit era. And then they things they did over there got even more interesting…