DQ9 is a good mix of Dragon Quest

So I got to Ruida’s¹ tavern in Dragon Quest 9. This means I can make my party! After creating a warrior that looks like Eriko² I had her pick out how to design the rest of my party. I’ve been playing around right now and have the main character Zerick at level 11, the Warrior Eriko at 9, the Thief Lin-lin at 9 and also the Priest Shotaro at, you guessed it, level 9. Going Swords/Spears/Claws/Staves on the weapon skills respectively for the characters but mostly putting skills into the unique class skill.

Monsters on the map isn’t as lame as I expected but it is still fairly lame. The surprise is just down a bit. But if you want to grind the population isn’t lacking. That’d be my only complaint thus far. Still, what with this basically being DQ3 meets DQ8 it is pretty goddamned awesome. What I mean by that is DQ3 let you create your own party of characters from a few classes and DQ8 let you select what weapon and other skills your characters had. Since each class has its own skill set to pick from, in turn despite there only being six classes at the opening of DQ9 there are a lot of options for creating your party.

For example I went with Claws on my Thief because the skills I’ll get in the future look like they could sap HP and cause status effects. But they could also go Barefisted which looks nice for doing damage.³ Priests have a few interesting options like Spears, Clubs or Staves. I really like how the staff you can buy can be used to cast the fire spell Mera (or at least it acts like that) so my Priest is doing decent enough damage. Staves also allow for MP regeneration when you do physical attacks with them. It is pretty sweet.

Now, I can’t do it yet but I’m sure later down the line you’ll be able to change the characters’ jobs. I wonder how changing classes and skill points will work since many jobs have the same skills. Will a Soldier with 34 points in spears keep those points when transitioning to Priest? It will be interesting to see.

And for those worried about the Japanese, the game has furigana. Which is so awesome because it makes reading it so much smoother, assuming you have hiragana down. Looking up words takes very little time for me and this is probably one of the first Japanese games I’m really understanding the dialogue too. (Although that may have been a long time coming thing considering how long I’ve been working towards it.)

Gonna get back to it while I have the time!

1. Luida? I don’t know the official English name. [↩]
2. Because I am lame like that. :D [↩]
3. But I really hate going weaponless, especially after playing my FFV challenge barefisted mostly! [↩]