Review – Dragon Quest: The Chapters of the Chosen (DS)

Do you ever get the distinct feeling that you’ve been somewhere before, even though you know there’s no chance you ever could have been? It’s like a kind of déjà-vu, only a little more unsettling, because while it’s entirely plausible that the same black cat that crossed your path two minutes ago could have gone the long way around and crossed your path again (probably just to freak you out and give you déjà-vu on purpose), you know it’s physically not possible to remember the interior of someone’s house when you only just met them and have been invited over for the first time. Dragon Quest: The Chapters of the Chosen feels like a very familiar place to be; it’s a little unsettling at first but it’s not horrible, just a bit old fashioned. I never played the original on the NES way back in 1990 and I’m almost completely certain that nobody reading this has either (it was never released outside of Japan) but still, every minute of it feels like a stroll down memory lane, like the sum of every other RPG to emerge in the early Nineties.

Allow me to briefly paint a picture for you. You play generic hero A (insert name here, then select gender – if you’re unsure of either, ask your parents) who lives in small village B (only two houses, but somehow large enough to support an inn and three separate shops), in the magical realm of C (green hills, dark forests, snow-capped mountains – Tolkien by numbers). Generic hero A is learning to swordfight, for reasons twofold; firstly, the economic stability of small village B depends on ‘adventurers’ frequenting the inn to replenish health and the three shops to upgrade their equipment, and secondly, when the sky inevitably turns black and generic evil megalomaniac X cuts a swathe through the civilised world, a swordsman is infinitely more useful than a pig farmer when mounting a resistance. Generic hero A goes home for tea after swordfighting practice and generic parents tell generic hero A how great life is and how things are going to be peaceful and lovely in small village B forever. Famous last words if ever I heard them.

I settled down on the sofa, pulled on my cardigan and slippers, popped in a Werther’s Original and resigned myself to a forty hour trip to cliché-town. I’d already met the bog-standard hero and dipped my toe into the about average world, so I was due for a meeting with the cast of secondary characters – were these going to be any less of an RPG stereotype? Not a chance! This is where the titular chapters come into play – you cut away from generic hero A for a while to spend a little time with the members of the secondary cast for a while, completing their own little subplots and prologues before they ultimately all meet up to vanquish evil together, reminiscent of the original Wild ARMs on the PlayStation (where at one point all three heroes were in the same town, oblivious to each other until their ‘chance’ meeting).

First up is Ragnar McRyan, a knight of some country, who couldn’t be more Scottish if he were wearing a string vest, drinking Tenant’s Super and eating a battered Mars Bar. It’s not just poor old Ragnar who’s living in Mel Gibson’s “Scortland”, though – everyone in Ragnar’s world is a Rab C. Nesbitt-alike, complete with och aye’s and d’ya ken’s (in a similar way to the dwarves of Condie Petie in Final Fantasy IX, but far less cute). Ragnar is trying to find the “wee bairns” who have been kidnapped by some “evil beastie” – slay some monsters, find some items, befriend a jellyfish (yes, jellyfish – okay, that was a little unusual), save the children – it’s all just as formulaic as you’d expect. The second chapter follows tomboy Tsarvena Elena, daughter of the Tsar, who just wants to be let off her royal leash and allowed to go on an adventure – again, formulaic if ever I heard it. Being the daughter of the Tsar, Elena and her people are very obviously supposed to be Russian. If you didn’t get that though, you may actually start to believe that the game has been translated incredibly poorly from Japanese, but that’s not the case – at the best it’s a bunch of misguided stereotypes and at the absolute worst it’s a little bit racist (if someone wants to read that into this game then I’m sure they could but I certainly don’t think that was the intention). I think that’s probably enough of the back story; needless to say, big nameless evil decides to take over the world, hears the prophecy of the young hero who will rise up and stop him (hence the kidnapping), the young hero turns out to be generic hero A and the secondary characters all join generic hero A to save the world. I’m sure you get the picture.

Chapters of the Chosen is pretty, though, which makes up for a lot. All of the locations in the game are made up of pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, populated with 2D sprites (part-3D being all the rage on the DS at the moment) in a style that’s very similar to Xenogears on PlayStation. Much like Xenogears, the view is rotatable via the shoulder buttons, but this is more than just a neat visual trick (although it is pretty neat) – in Xenogears you would often find items hidden behind walls and in corners, and it becomes apparent fairly early on that you need to get into the habit of doing it here (you spy a young man peeping through a window at a nun in the bath – yes, really – giving you a clue that you should head around the corner to talk to him, at which point he admits to being a pervert before giving you a clue for how to move the game forward). This was always an interesting gameplay device in the Breath of Fire series (which was essentially an isometric faux-3D series of games) that immediately felt as though they had a much greater range of depth to the world by being able to spin the view through four axes, so given that the view fully rotates through 360 degrees here it really does look and feel great (if very occasionally you can get a bit lost and spaced out).

The polygon count in the backdrops isn’t exactly huge, but given that the backdrops are largely static, a higher polygon count wouldn’t lead to smoother animations (of which there are next to none), just jerkier screen transitions, so I’m glad they’ve kept it simple. Instead, Square-Enix has concentrated on optimising their background textures and colours for the DS screens, but it is a shame that the sprites aren’t quite as high quality. They are colourful and lively, and in excellent keeping with the spirit of the Dragon Quest series, but they look a little retro and dated in comparison with the backdrops. The battles too are cute and bold with fun animations, but they’re quite dated. They look like the original Phantasy Star (way back when on the SEGA Master System), set from behind the characters’ eyes, standing toe-to-toe with the enemy. Limiting your battle screen to this 2D, one-sided view removes any chance of showing off or doing anything remotely spectacular; the attacks are just a scratch across the front of an enemy and magic spells look like special effects from the Pokémon TV series (blocky and apparently drawn in eight colours).

The battles do have one very serious thing going for them, though – they are hard. Excruciatingly, painfully difficult. Downright evil, in fact – but don’t despair! This is in fact a good thing (honestly, it is). Too often in RPGs you trundle through the game from random battle to random battle and, upon being faced by some monsters, hammer the ‘ok’ button repeatedly to attack until you hear a little fanfare, collect your experience, then see how far you can walk before the next one stops you in your tracks. Unless they are difficult, battles turn into a hindrance, a speed bump on the otherwise long, straight road from plot device to plot device, and are basically a formality. It’s no good having easy random battles and difficult boss fights either, as this seems rather unfair and you’ll die in the boss fights more often than not. Personally, I’d rather have combat difficult than too easy; it means that you have to stock up on provisions before every trip out of town, keep curing yourself in between fights, and even consider whether a battle is too much to face (you’ll often find that discretion is the better part of valour in Chapters). It keeps you on your toes – keeps you honest.

Another component of the game that you don’t often see in (easier) modern titles is the requirement of levelling up, the process of pitching up camp in a town, running out and killing a few dozen monsters, collecting the experience and cash, before retreating to the town’s inn. Not only does this improve the experience and gain levels, but the inn is invariably less expensive than the money raised in one round of levelling, meaning that you can upgrade your characters’ equipment before moving on to the next major plot device. This is somewhat antiquated and perhaps shows that the flow of the game isn’t as perfect as it could be, but is another dimension and is fun for a while, so long as you don’t have to spend your whole life levelling just to get past every boss or dungeon.

Sound-wise, Chapters returns to being fairly run of the mill after distinguishing itself so well with the degree of challenge in its combat. It essentially boils down to the issues I highlighted earlier with the setting and story; it’s a road very, very well travelled. You could take five second snippets from every 8- or 16-bit RPG ever created, splice them together in any random order, add a little polyphony, and you have the entire soundtrack to Chapters. Again, it’s not bad. It’s nice and quaint and it feels like a lovely warm-the-insides trip into gaming antiquity, but don’t expect anything spectacular here.

That’s the case with a lot of what Chapters has to offer; none of it is inherently bad – in fact, a lot of it is really quite good – but in a bizarre sort of way, Square-Enix has put this game into a niche and may have alienated a large portion of the market. This isn’t a title to reel new gamers in and you may even struggle with it if you love RPGs but didn’t start off playing them until the 32-bit era. It’s an odd little package. The graphics are quaint, the sound is old-school, and the story and gameplay are so firmly rooted in Dragon Quest’s early Nineties origins that if it weren’t for the top screen, you’d probably forget you were playing a DS title at all (you certainly don’t notice it for the stylus as there’s no stylus support at all in this title, not a problem in itself, and in some ways a lot neater, but possibly an opportunity missed). That’s just the thing though – this is so delightfully old-school that I can’t help but wonder if I’d actually be better off playing an original old RPG instead of this modern remake that adds little (if anything) to the genre. Even the DS Final Fantasy remakes (Final Fantasy III and the new and quite spectacular looking Final Fantasy IV), which are just as old-school but actually feel newer and fresher than Chapters, which is a brand new title.

Dragon Quest: The Chapters of the Chosen certainly is an odd beast. I feel as though I should be warning you that it’s not just retro but positively a step backwards, and as we all know backwards steps are not good ones. We should be taking giant strides forwards with our technology – flying cars, robot servants, tube technology for personal transport (you know, Futurama, the Jetsons and their ilk) – and videogames are simply another piece of technology, albeit a creative and fun one. If we are not moving forward then is there any point? This is the videogame equivalent of pulling your barge down the canal with an old pony on a rope when you could quite easily whack a great big outboard motor on the back and be at your destination in hours rather than weeks, yet there is something really enjoyable about it. Some people would argue that this is much the same as obtaining a NES emulator and a copy of the original Dragon Quest IV title (not that I’m advocating this – it’s actually illegal to own a copy of an emulated game for more than twenty-four hours unless you purchased the original) and it would undoubtedly be very similar, but there is something very special about having the genuine article in your hands. I’m certainly not saying that this is for everyone – if you don’t already love RPGs then Chapters certainly isn’t going to be the game to change your mind – but if you have more than a passing interest in the genre and you want to get a feel for how the RPG evolved and how things used to be in the good old days, then this is a great game (and much better than poorly translated, glitchy, emulated copies). I say go for the real thing every time – and you might just find this trip down memory lane worthwhile, and more than a bit enjoyable.

Score: 7/10