Now --THAT-- was a SUCCESSFUL event ! ! !

_______________________

It started out kinda rocky, as I arrived at 12:15PM and it was still being set up. Immediately, bad memories of the GameStop event flooded my mind. I was told it wasn't going to start until 1PM... despite what was advertised.

*Blood Pressure rising!*

I had to walk around the mall for 45 minutes or so, which I generally don't enjoy, but there are worse things I could do...

*This was the same mall where I discovered the Black Wii was coming out so...*

Anyway, 1PM rolls around and the event starts. Turns out, it is a Simon Malls run event, including many sponsors, not just Nintendo. Coke was there, some kind of Dermatological Product company, etc... and Nintendo. Apparently, it was a "Back to School in Style" promotional soiree.

General Marketing people were running the event. There were NO Nintendo Reps there AT ALL. This would not normally be sooo bad but...

...anyone remember when I was given Dragon Ball Z: Budokai by a marketing rep after a run, when I was leisurely resting in Washington Square park a year or two ago? She sat on my lap, gave me the game... blah, blah...

Guess who one of the Marketers was for Nintendo...?

...yay...  

*Blood Pressure spiking!*

I really just wanted to get the Map and run... Instead I get: "Oh. My. God! You HAVE to let me take a picture with you!" "How have you been?!" "I TOTALLY don't come to malls normally!" " Do you have time to hang out and show me around?"

...what makes it worse: This woman had NOOOO idea what she was doing. Not only did she totally blow the anonymity I was trying to maintain, but guess who had to instruct her and a fair amount of people in the crowd how to set up for and get the map...?

Uh-Huh. Me.

It gets better.

I am canvassing for the Nintendo Agent in the game to get the map and, of course, I am picking up everyone but... BUT ALSO... people are picking up ME. Remember, I have TWO copies of the game. I Canvassed for one as "Phantom." I Canvassed for another as "Leo." I hear from a chubby guy standing with a bunch of people: "Dudes! I think Phantom Leo is here!"

*Yeah. I actually do have a bit of notoriety for more than a few reasons!*

Geek Squad is now on the patrol for me... Between Marketing chick hitting on me and the Nerd Herd hot on my trail, I just barely got out of there with my Super-Secret Identity intact!

All in all, it was TOTALLY worth it though: As I was canvassing, I was able to acquire the following maps:


Malroth (Lv.1)  -- The Map the Event was Giving Away

...but also...

Copper Mine of Woe (Lv. 11)
Granite Lair of Bliss (Lv. 17)
Iron Mine of Bliss (Lv. 4)
Granite Cave of Dolour (Lv. 20)
Ruby World of Dread (Lv. 95)

...

...

...

...aaand...

Baramos (Lv. 1) -- THIS was the map given away at E3!!! Someone in the crowd had it and completed it!!! That ALONE totally made all the trouble worth it!

_______________________

So. The Dragon Quest IX Tag Events come to a close. I got what I was Questing for, plus some bonus booty (the map, not the Chick!)... and I only had to brave The Infernal Mall of Consumerism (Lv. 97) to do it!

Discussions of faith always seem to make people uncomfortable, as most  participants in such discussions are involuntarily thrust into the   situation. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute about Jesus?” Not all of  them are religious, like the always awkward “Why don’t you have any faith in me?” Why do you think we see so few games willing to touch such  a topic unless it’s some JRPG with a world full of inhabitants who   worship the “world tree?”

Amidst all of this, there’s Dragon Quest IX, a game in  which themes of faith -- religious and otherwise -- pervade each hour spent  playing. In fact, this strange DS role-playing game even takes the theme  of faith beyond what the developers intended. For me, the game had a  quite profound and unexpected effect.

Dragon Quest IX restored my faith in traditional,  Japanese-developed RPGs, and the game’s focus on themes of the  restoration of faith had a lot to do with that. For the first entry in  this two-part series, let’s take a spoiler-free look at why Dragon Quest IX has the power to make you love JRPGs again.

                

For those readers who have not played Dragon Quest IX and   refuse rather vehemently to consider it due to its status as a JRPG,   this initial part of the discussion may seem written as a letter to you.   In a way, it is. I understand your position. I slogged through hour   after hour of White Knight Chronicles after agreeing to review it, and watching a recent live stream of the game nearly made me slam my pinky toe in a car door.

In fact, does this match up to your own reasons for giving up on   JRPGs? “If the combat system hasn’t already bored you into a coma, the   mission design surely will.” “None of the incredibly boring characters   makes the journey more bearable.” “It forgets the one thing that I love so much about JRPGs: charm.”

These are all lines taken from my review of White Knight Chronicles, and they perfectly sum up why I’ve been disappointed in the vast majority of JRPGs in the last ten years. I ended up hating Final Fantasy XIII long before its conclusion for the exact reasons above. Time and again,   I’ve entered into a JRPG experience only to give up after it failed to   capture my attention.

In the current environment of game design, which sees Japanese  developers seeming to lose faith in themselves and suggesting that they  need to be more like Western developers, it’s easy to see why this is  happening. These games are trying to be something that they aren’t. It’s  as if Japanese developers want to appeal to an image of the Western  gamer that is more twisted and deformed than the figures in a Dali  painting.



Because of this, that quality of charm that I mentioned before has   nearly disappeared from RPGs, Japanese or Western. Hell, did anyone   smile while they played Final Fantasy XIII? Aside from the   beautiful introductory cutscene and the incredible music, I found little   to smile about. Frocobo (the chocobo who lives in Sazh’s afro) was   cute, I guess.

Still, no one can call FFXIII a charming game. Its story  has little to no personality. While its characters aren’t the worst of  the recent JRPG releases, they’re not much fun to spend time with, and  their struggles and problems don’t feel particularly human.  

Then there’s the gameplay, which I initially thought to be a nice  way to streamline a game in a genre where the gameplay feels  unnecessarily overcomplicated. After about fifteen hours, those thoughts  were gone. Streamlining, in this case, meant taking away everything  that I enjoy about RPGs: interesting progression, exploration, and the  furtherance of an epic quest.  

Again, none of these problems is specific to any one game. Instead,   they represent what appears to be a future design theory that is slowly killing what used to be my favorite genre. In trying to evolve and meet   the demands of a changing industry, developers are leaving us with   products that aren’t nearly as enjoyable as the games they made fifteen years ago.

Then there’s the Dragon Quest series, which has somehow continued to get better as the years go by. Dragon Quest VIII was one of the most traditional RPGs released during the PS2’s life,   yet it was also one of the best. Somehow, without changing the formula   much at all, it managed to provide a much more enjoyable journey than   those games that tried to stir the pot.

Dragon Quest IX is a similar story. Its turn-based combat  doesn’t have any flashy additions to the typical formula: choose your  action from the menu and wait as the fighting unfolds. On paper, its  story sounds pretty basic: someone wants to destroy the world, and you  have to stop it. Aside from the addition of multiplayer, the game sounds  like it does nothing new at all. And, really, it doesn’t.

Instead, it just does everything well, which seems to be  the major element missing in all of these evolutionary JRPGs that can’t  seem to get anything right. There’s no value in doing something new if  it isn’t any good. New does not automatically equate to good, and old  does not automatically equate to bad. It’s the adherence to this  philosophy that allowed Dragon Quest IX to restore my faith in the genre.



There are a lot of specific things that the game does to achieve  this, and perhaps the most important simple thing is that elusive  element: charm. Our own Jim Sterling said in his review of the game that it “exudes charm from every pore and reintroduces the concept of   giddy excitement in games with each new step taken.” Indeed, this is one   hell of a charming game, just as the series always has been. It isn’t afraid to keep those elements that make it this way, including the   ridiculously named monsters like the “Meowgician” and the “Raving   lunatick.” Games nowadays are terrified of being silly. Dragon Quest IX is not.                    

The charm enters into the fantastic writing as well, with even the   most innocuous of characters adding to the world in some pretty   hilarious ways. For instance, all over the world players find churches   at which to “confess” and save their progress. Most priests are typical priestly sorts, who save your progress in a very proper manner and bless  you before you’re sent on your merry way.

However, one of these priests in a random town just happens to be a  total bro. Approach his altar and hear his holy words such as “Yo! Man, I  am choked up! My eyes are filled with water. The words of the Almighty   have spread far across the plains. Word! Perhaps you will open your ears   to His words too. For sure they will help you in the sweet times and   the wack.” Word, indeed.

It’s stupid, but it’s the most charming kind of stupid. You can’t  help but smile as you come across this dude and hear his most righteous  rap, and he’s just some copy-paste priest character model hanging out in  a cave! Things like this make for a rich world that is far more fun to  inhabit for the often extended running time on an RPG.

And while the game eventually tells the story of a group of  adventurers saving the world, its initial adventures are far more rich  and original. You play as a Celestrian—essentially a guardian angel—who  can travel to the world below and perform good deeds for people, though  they cannot see or interact with you at all. It’s actually a very  startling beginning; RPGs always put us right in the spotlight, but the  first time you help someone in DQIX, half of the people don’t even believe it.

As you travel and continue to help the world’s populace, you’ll come   across some pretty amazing situations involving incredibly rich and   original characters, and their stories are actually far more human and   emotional than you’ll find in the typical overwrought RPG story. You   won’t find every other character crying for stupid reasons in this game.   The emotion is left up to the situations themselves and the player’s   understanding of them.



The game is initially set up as a series of short stories that the   player participates in—you’re not actually aware of the overarching   “save the world” plot until late into the game. For instance, there’s a quest near the middle of the game to assist a town that has been ravaged  by a terrible sickness. A man’s daughter has fallen ill, and the man  has locked himself away in order to find the cure. I won’t spoil it  here, but it doesn’t exactly turn out like most RPG quests do. Other  quests involve finding a man who has recreated an entire town in stone  and a woman whose unique powers allow her to control a monster fish,  compelling it to provide the townspeople with food.

The point here is that you’ll actually get invested in each town and  each set of characters you come across. Even in this very traditional  RPG, quests are set up so that you don’t feel like you’re doing the same   useless tasks over and over again that have some loose, unstated   connection to “helping.” Your voiceless character and your three   voiceless companions enter into these stories and leave as quickly as   you came, but the effects are lasting not only for the town and its   inhabitants but also for you as a player.

What Dragon Quest IX really proves to me is that a game can  achieve a sense of JRPG whimsy and tell rich stories at the same time  without resorting to a bunch of melodramatic blubbering. That sentence  there really sums up why Dragon Quest IX gives me hope that  there are still people out there who love making good JRPGs the right  way, capturing everything that we loved about the genre in the first  place. It truly restored my faith.

It’s strangely coincidental that DQIX achieved this, since  it is a game in which the theme of restoring faith is so prevalent from  start to finish. I’m going to take a good look into the story of DQIX and how this theme is used in the second part of this series, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go play Dragon Quest IX or, as bro priest would say, "go forth and have your faith restored in a totally radical way, homie."