My first foray into Dragon Quest began identically to many other kids in 1990: begging my parents to buy me the $15 Nintendo Power subscription that generously included one of the many unsold copies of Dragon Warrior that Nintendo couldn't convince anyone to buy. It was unlike any other game I had ever played on the NES, and armed with the Nintendo Power guide and youthfully resilient eyes, I ground my way through it and verily, I was hooked on the genre. Lest I get too mushy, the game was often terrible; the plot inarguably had the depth of a rain puddle and its mechanics were unnecessarily clunky. You have to go to a church to find out how many experience points you are from the next level? Really? Now, on iteration number nine(!) the frustrating aspects of the game experience remain distressingly familiar while the driving essence of the series breaks new ground - but in a barren landscape.
Dragon Quest has always occupied a unique niche in the JRPG ecosystem; it is to Quentin Tarantino as Final Fantasy is to Martin Scorsese - always willing to smirk at itself and lacking the occasionally heavy-handed gravitas of Square's flagship games. Would Nester ever have appeared in a Final Fantasy, as he does in Dragon Warrior? Doubtful.
It's one of many legacies that DQIX proudly inherits from its progenitor. One desert in the game is cheekily named "Djust Desert," no doubt delighting philosophy and criminal justice majors all over the world. Unfortunately, the other legacy that DQIX stubbornly clings to is its insistence on making everything more difficult than it has to be. This is a menu-driven series and always will be. But is it really necessary to make you manually transfer items ONE-BY-ONE between characters and from the bag, instead of just letting players pick items from a common pool in bulk? And why the stinginess towards resurrection items and spells? If there is a resurrection item, I never found it once in an entire playthrough. Your standard resurrection spell, Zing, only works half the time. You WILL at some point be fighting a boss who kills a member of your party, and then you WILL spend four turns unsuccessfully trying to bring him/her back to life while said boss proceeds to slap you silly. That kind of capricious battle flow would be okay if the game didn't take away half your gold when you died.
Still, even those sins are forgivable if the story is good, and here, it is not. Despite also having all the aforementioned problems, I look back on predecessor DQV very fondly for its simple but sentimental and well-executed story. DQIX unfortunately has much of the former but little of the latter. Instead, it is content to fall back on all of the standard RPG tropes: a mysterious fall from grace, an evil empire, a desert town, a snow town, a port, etc., and no greater than about four music pieces, total. These elements are bound together by the tired "go from town to town solving each one's problems as they first distrust you and eventually come to be filled with gratitude" story structure into a JRPG Mad Libs plot that is so predictable that you need only have played maybe two RPGs to guess where it's going.
Compounding the lackluster story is an utter dearth of character development. Your hero says nothing, of course, but neither does the rest of your party. There is a stated emphasis on multiplayer and freely interchangeable party members in this game, and the price is an utter lack of any kind of attachment to your blank slate of a team. You can change your party members' vocations, but since you're relatively far into the game when you gain this ability and you're forced to start at level 1 for any new jobs, there's little incentive to do so unless you're willing to grind the new vocation up to snuff - as if there isn't enough grinding already. Combat is straightforward and while it lacks any glaring faults, it unfortunately also lacks any creativity or innovation whatsoever while perfectly capturing the experience of working on an assembly line.
All that said, it's a competent game. It looks great for a DS game and one change (seeing enemies on the map before you encounter them) is welcome and long overdue. The quests can be interesting diversions and it is eminently thoughtful to allow each piece of equipment to be visually reflected in your character. It's just too bad that that level of thoughtfulness didn't extend to the plot. It was, again, by design that DQIX was to be a more social game (and by "social game," I mean a pastiche of tiny side quests), and it is. Quite frankly, it's a soaring love song to Pokemon and Monster Hunter's slavish devotion to the Pavlovian surge of dopamine at the acquisition of rare virtual trinkets.
Where you fall on your judgment of this game will depend on what you view as the most critical, defining aspect of the genre with regard to your expectations for the title. This is not a new dichotomy; we've had "tactical system" RPGs and "story" RPGs for as long as the genre has existed, plus the relatively scant few which excel at both. Dragon Quest IX is oddly neither - its narrative exists only as a framework for its mishmash of miniquests to achieve some semblance of continuity. Collectors and completionists, your game has arrived.
Don't get me wrong; I am under no illusion that Dragon Quest will ever be a dramatic masterpiece transcending the narrative permutation du jour of "find the evil guy and defeat him." But at least it's always had heart, and that, sadly, is what is lacking in the paint-by-numbers quest number nine.
6.5/10
