Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (DS)

For the Dragon Quest series, entry nine is divine as the character you play as is essentially a guardian angel. Rather than this turn-based role-playing game starring some plucky hero rising to protect their world, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies has you playing as a customizable Celestrian, their wings, halo, and worship of a god called the Almighty giving this game a far greater focus on religion than one might expect. However, while the Celestrians are literally above it all in some ways, the hero you play as is a fledgling guardian angel for a small village and the Celestrians still believe that aiding mortals is the right thing to do, albeit out of the belief they’ll one day be rewarded for doing so. Before your silent character has had much time to ponder this mindset though, things begin to go awry, the story stripping away your angelic powers and providing a more down to earth fantasy journey as you’re literally brought down from your holy roost to walk among mortals.

 

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies begins with the Observatory the Celestrians reside in being attacked on a momentous day, the world tree Yggdrasil finally providing the divine Fyggs said to let them rise up to the right hand of the Almighty. The Fyggs and Celestrians fall to the Protectorate below, your custom character ending up the most proactive in regards to trying to set things right. Despite this opening attack being the core to your efforts to restore the Observatory by gathering the Fyggs, the game spends a long time unconcerned with the actual malevolent force behind the attack, the enemy group responsible not appearing until fairly late into this story. Instead, your activities instead are mostly directed towards searching out where the Fyggs landed in the realm of the mortals, these holy fruits able to make wishes come true but often leading to danger and heartache instead where they are found. Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies does do a good job of mixing up how these wishes gone awry can manifest, from a magic school mystery to a fishing village where a poor girl prays to a water beast to earn huge hauls without having to even cast a single net, and a few of them can have emotional moments like the dream of a sickly girl to have her doll to come to life only for that doll to have to try and understand what life even is after the sick girl’s passing.

Essentially you’ll be traveling around the land interacting with many self-contained stories that you need to help with, each area having its own set of characters. There is some effort to differentiate certain areas beyond the specific shape of the story being told there, the game including some expected settings like a desert kingdom but also going for a Mongolian-inspired plains community as well, but often things can feel like they’re cut from a similar medieval fantasy cloth and giving the residents of different cities pretty thick distinct written accents doesn’t always do much to make them actually feel too different. There is some of the Dragon Quest series’s typical whimsy involved in how certain characters and places are named though, although it’s not as prevalent as in entries like Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. Sometimes it is presented a bit cleverly though, such as the Alltrades Abbey being the place you can go to change your vocation but soon you’ll encounter the man in charge of it… Abbot Jack of Alltrades. Few major characters stick around long in the plot due to this focus on individual vignettes though, the only one with a fairly consistent presence being the fairy Stella who stays by your side to basically be the voice your character lacks, but this hot-headed ally does make her dialogue interesting with various malapropisms and accidental mixes of phrases that make her an endearing and amusing companion despite her attitude.

 

Part of why Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies takes on this almost episodic approach to story-telling and adventuring likely arises from its desire to be more than a single-player RPG. The only guaranteed party member for your adventuring group is your created character, but you’re able to have up to three other companions fight alongside you and these can be other players. The turn-based combat does mean that managing a fight doesn’t really require other human players since you can take your time strategizing and you respond to enemy actions in rounds, so instead you’re eventually able to recruit party members you’ll control yourself if you aren’t aiming for a multiplayer experience. Your band of four heroes is incredibly customizable as well, some of the job classes requiring extra effort to unlock but it’s easy enough to make your team look like you want and pick the desired niches for each member. Whether you’re fighting a boss character or battling one of the monsters you run into while out on the world map or in a dungeon, fights unfold in a similar manner where you input a desired action for each party member you control and then each enemy and hero executes a single attack for the round.

Beyond basic options like attacking, defending, and item use, your vocations will allow you to utilize different spells and abilities. A priest for example has healing-focused spells, the warrior’s strength and defense makes them a good fit for abilities that let them take damage in place of other characters or draw enemy attention, and the mage can utilize various elemental spells to harm enemies. In the main adventure there’s not too much pressure to optimize your party even though more powerful and specialized vocations can be acquired from optional quests. However, there is a good balance that allows for frequent use of powers and skills even in normal battles while making progress through a monster-infested area still likely to strain your resources effectively. A character’s death can be costly (and if the whole party falls it literally is as half your gold is lost) but even fighting most monsters you find won’t strain you so much that you’ll need to constantly retreat to recover, and the rewards for fighting are fairly well balanced as well. Gold you can use on new equipment isn’t doled out in excess so making purchasing decisions often requires a proper weighing of options while leveling up your character not only gives them boosts to their natural abilities, but it lets you sometimes invest points in different vocations and weapons. While spells are unique to each vocation, your skills will carry over even if you swap your job, meaning that some time spent building up one can give you an interesting ability mix while utilizing another. The growth in a specific area is linear, but you can gain inherent boosts to specific areas like the power of a specific weapon type or learn those abilities that can then be utilized no matter what role that character is serving. Experience points are scaled so training up a new vocation is sometimes a bit slow though and breaking in a new job can sometimes involve time spent just mindlessly building them up to the strength level of where you are in the adventure, but it’s not required nor is it too much of investment of time either unless you’re in the postgame.

 

Clearing the story of Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies actually opens up quite a bit of additional content that proves more demanding both in term of time investment and strategy. The main adventure will still have moments where you will need to be careful in a fight on when you attempt to use power boosting abilities, heal, or go for strong attacks, but the postgame definitely feels like it caters more towards long-term play with other owners of the game as there are somewhat randomized dungeons called grottoes to find that include much harder bosses as well as legacy bosses from previous Dragon Quest titles to face off with. The jump in power means you do have to devote yourself to a lot more training to keep up, mostly by throwing yourself against normal monsters in a grind, but this considerable amount of extra content is indeed just a way to get more out of the game after the main quest is complete. There are side quests you can take on during the main adventure as well, and while some do give you great rewards like new vocations, many are actually rather lean in both narrative substance and what you’re even asked to do. Acquiring certain items that are usually rare random drops from certain enemy types is the most common format, and while the game does have an endearingly cartoonish range of monsters to go up against, many of these side quests end up feeling dull for their simplicity and often the kind of work better completed if you just so happen to have met the requirements already. This considerable amount of additional content does feel more like the type of activity intended for whiling away the time when you have your DS on you or want to hang out with a small group of like-minded friends, its optional nature meaning it doesn’t weigh down the main journey with its fun story scenarios, excellent music, and its dungeon spacing that allows for a good mix of peril and player competence that keeps the action from stagnating.

THE VERDICT: An enjoyable RPG adventure that strikes a good balance on pressuring the player and giving them room to customize and upgrade their adventuring party, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies doesn’t reduce the substance of its offerings too much to accommodate its multiplayer elements. Extra content does put an emphasis on long term simpler activities to give reason to play it often with friends, but dungeon designs and boss battles still require enough thought to keep the action involved and the main story, even in its almost episodic format, provides enough areas of interest to help the journey remain engaging. Stellar music and a lighthearted tone that can still pull out an emotional moment or two give the game some memorable elements, but while it can sometimes be limited on how much depth any one element has, it still provides enough to like to stick with this fantasy adventure for at least its main quest.

 

And so, I give Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies for Nintendo DS…

A GOOD rating. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies was first conceived as a multiplayer action RPG and then shifted into the series’s usual turn-based format, because more active battle systems are more conducive to multiple players. A turn-based system is usually manageable by one person easily enough and tactics are often better handled when one player controls all of their strategic elements, but there is still value in having friends along for a ride just because it’s nice to spend time with others. Still, without real time pressure it’s hard to design something where aide from other human players is necessary, and Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies at least quite wisely didn’t kneecap solo players just to force you into group play. You can still put together a band of adventurers on your own, and being able to customize each of them as much as the main Celestrian hero does mean you can put together interesting party strategies and certain foes can make you adjust your plans and tactics based on how they can disrupt it. While the amusingly-designed monsters can be avoided at times as they walk around the dungeons, the game still does a good job of making chokepoints so you face them often enough to grow and while also ensuring specific areas provide a challenge to your group’s longevity and resources. It is a shame the story and optional activities aren’t more robust so that players can more easily pop in and participate, but the little vignettes you find while searching for Fyggs can at least tell some interesting quick tales. Achieving greater longevity with unique bespoke content isn’t easy and the approach of randomized dungeons and side quests that mostly ask you to just fight things you’ve faced already a few more times is at least a way to ensure you can find things to do if other players are interested in grouping up, but greater focus usually does lead to more meaningful and engrossing content and it’s a shame the plot can only brush on a few themes on the nature of mortals while giving you few characters like Stella who are fun to spend time with.

 

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is an enjoyable fantasy adventure but perhaps not divine in terms of its quality. It’s well put together and harnesses its systems well, but its efforts to be flexible also hold it back from being heavenly. You still get a fairly lengthy fantasy adventure where you discover new lands and new dangers and the flexible systems do mean you’re constantly working to cater your team better to new threats while seeing the rewards of them overcoming foes who put up a good fight. The extra content does offer a lot to do if you want the fruits of that customization labor to continue to come in and there are many little reward systems like alchemy and character titles for continued play, but the journey still plays best when consistently fresh and repetition doesn’t sink in too much unless you’re wanting to engage with it for all those extra goodies and grottoes. While it doesn’t dive to deep into complex executions of its ideas, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies puts together an RPG that gives you a platter of ideas to think on to make the small stories and frequent battles effective throughout.