Review!
Your adventure awaits!
Dragon Quest is a wicked new role playing game from Japan that'll keep you glued to your DS for ages. Read on to find out why it's one of our fave games of the year!
The first thing you'll notice is how great Dragon Quest IX looks. Some DS games don't bother with decent graphics, but this one puts in extra effort and it's worth it! This is one of the best looking DS games around, with fantastic 3D worlds to explore and exciting cinema-style battle scenes.
Wicked Wireless
Although Dragon Quest IX is awesome fun when played by yourself, it's even better when you team up with three friends for multiplayer adventuring. There's even a Chance Encounter mode, where the game sniffs out any other players within wireless range and lets you trade items with them. How cool is that?
One of the game's best features is the way it lets you create your very own hero (or heroine) to star in the game. Once you've come up with a cool character, every new item of clothing you equip changes their appearance even more. It doesn't take long before you're playing as a hero that nobody else in the world will have.
Dragon Quest IX is one of those games that just sucks you in and won't let you leave. Fans of Pokemon, Zelda and Final Fantasy will go nuts, and if you love adventuring and exploring and building your own character over hours and hours of play, there's absolutely no escape: you need this game!
Your character is a guardian angel who wakes up on the ground without their wings. You've got to explore, make new friends, collect items, weapons and armour and - oh yeah - defeat loads of monsters and save the world. No pressure!
Dragon Quest IX is a big game. No, really. It's BIG. You can spend days, even weeks, just roaming around and doing side missions for the hundreds of characters. All the time you'll be getting stronger and picking up cool new weapons, so you're never really wasting time. It's the sort of gameworld you want to lose yourself in. Put it this way - remember to take your DS charger wherever you go, or you'll run the batteries dry in an afternoon!
Top Trivia!
The Dragon Quest games are absolutely massive in Japan, with over 50 million copies sold since the first one, way back in 1986. They're so popular that they're only released at the weekend, so Japanese grown ups don't bunk off work to play them! Despite their huge success, only the last two games in the series have been released in Europe. Boo!
Our only real complaint is that saving your game can be a bit of a slog. You can make a quick-save to checkpoint your progress, but this is only temporary - it gets deleted when you switch the DS off. If you want a proper save so you can carry on later, you need to trek to a church and ask a priest or nun to record your progress. We lost hours of progress by getting the two save methods muddled up - don't make the same mistake! Aaargh!
