Leave a Review DRAGON QUEST IV
Best iOS Game
Just beat it! It took about 35 hours for me. I love this game!! Anyone complaining about the price needs to realize this is a PLATFORM GAME, not some little iphone game. Remember when we paid $50 for a new N64 game? It's like that, but cheaper, and with the convenience of playing from your iphone. 5 stars!Show lessKowachan10
Not The Reboot You Want
There was so much potential in this iOS release as Dragon Quest IV is probably one of the finest in the series. When it originally came out, it was part of Enix's A-list RPGs.
This release however, does not do justice to the franchise or the game. I've seen other review praise the new translations, particularly the "ethnic" anglicizations of the different regions. This detracts so much from the story however, as it causes you to stop and dissect each sentence like a poor-man's woolseyism. It's poor translation on the scale of "All your base are belong to us now". Weird word usage that doesn't belong, such as "Your extinct mother..." Instead of saying "Your dead mother." It's truly atrocious.
The name changes are also unusual. It detracts less than the ethnic translations but it seems pointless. Why change names? These are established characters. It would be one thing if the hardware limited the original game's naming system, but often that wasn't the case. Changing Taloon (6 letters) to his first name Torneko (7 letters) perhaps might have made sense. But Nara and Mara COULD have been named their reworked names, Maya and Meena, but they weren't. So why change back? I don't buy the argument that Mara and Nara are confusing, because Maya and Meena don't make it clearer. I think the worst offender is renaming Cristo, to Kiryl or something dumb like that.
The item and monster name changes are seemingly pointless as well. Some of them are genuinely worse than the original names. Happily, some of these weren't changed.
The game's one improvement is the graphics. It does look better than its 8-bit source material. And I think they stayed fairly true to most of the character designs. I will give the artists a star for that. They've also cut some of the grinding out which is good as well. But the UI for spells is atrocious to navigate on mobile and the control pad is so loose and wonky. The number of times I've walked around something instead of over it because the control pad is so loose was disappointing. I fee this has to do with the 8-direction pad replacing the 4-direction control.
The "3D" aspect also seems pointless in all but two or three spots through the whole game. Makes me think they could have just changed the view in these specific areas and saved the hassle of having the 3D "camera" at all.
It's playable to someone who has played the original and remembers the story and character and spells and can easily refresh their memory. It's not preferable to the original though and for people new to the game, it can be confusing. I wouldn't recommend this as a first time play-through. Just play the NES if you can.Show lessAntzen85
Unable installation
I purchased it but couldn't install this game. :(
I can't play it please fix itRed.del
Benifaction
...My life is officially complete. That's the phrase that keeps coming to mind every since I've conquered one of the greatest video games of ALL TIME!!!!!! ENTER DRAGON QUEST 4‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ again I would like to start of my review by stating that I have been on a journey to purchase, play, and beat all of the DQ titles available on the App Store, as I've done months back with the Final Fantasy series. The unfortunate thing though about writing all of these reviews, especially when each installment is better that the last, is the simple fact that it becomes nearly impossible at this point to adequately portray the awe-inspiring majesty of each game I review, and I don't think there's a single game that I have ever reviewed in my entire life that I would like to adequately portray said majesty more than the almighty Dragon Quest.
Where does one begin when trying to review a game of this magnitude? Well I guess I would have to start by talking about the sheer goose bump-inducing orchestration. Dragon Quest 4, without a shadow of a doubt has some of the very best music I have E-V-E-R come across in any RPG...EVER!!! For instance the music that plays when you sail around in the boat would send such monstrously jovial shivers down my spine every single time I heard it, and if I just happened to be playing with headphones whenever I boarded ship, FUGGEHDUHBOUDIT!!
Another mind blowing aspect of the game are the incredibly diverse and wonderfully ethnic dialogue. The writing for this game is over-the-top fantastic that you can almost audibly hear the words in your head. The programmers achieve this feat by adding many different dialects and English translations from many areas across the world, from France to Scotland to Italy to England and so on. By writing out the words in English as it would sound with that foreign accent is just something that needs to be experienced, and it's certainly something I've never seen before I've started playing Dragon Quest. For instance the French people would always say "ze" when they mean "the" and the British sounding natives would say things like "roit" when they mean "right". These are just a few of the thousands of examples but you get my drift. They even went as far as giving the Italian sounding natives horrible English grammar like "I am for having trouble. Can you be helpful of me" it's these subtle yet striking nuances that really make the game stand out. Many people think it's just bad Japanese to English translation, but it's obviously intended for there are many NPC's in the game that speak perfect English.
Again, even saying all of these things could never truly justify how perfect this game really is. I am very new to the DQ series so a lot of these things are pretty fresh to me considering this is a completely different monster than Final Fantasy. Speaking of monsters, after you've spent a hard day obliterating a pack orcs or cute squishy slimes, you can sit back and enjoy a quick game of DQ poker, or even a couple go'rounds at a slot machine, maybe even place a few bets on the monster arena, all located at the casino!! My point is, for those that aren't too particularly keen on grinding till your ears bleed (I for one love to grind😋), there are a myriad of different mini games and side quests to keep you busy through the roughly 40 hour campaign...which brings me to the story.
DQ4's storyline is FAR superior to the previous games. Where Dragon Quest 3's story only became really really interesting and critically important in the last ten or so hours of gameplay, DQ4 has a deeply structured, perfectly written, and wonderfully unique story line all of its own. Comprising of 5 main chapters, you play a unique short quest for the first 4 chapters of the game, playing as all of the main characters you'll eventually meet back up with in chapter 5. It's a lot like FF4:The After Years, in a sense that all of the character's stories intertwine with one another to make a story so very intimate and engaging from beginning to end. Speaking of the end, all I am going to say is that the very moment right before the credits started to roll, was one of the most intensely heartwarming and tearjerking moments I've ever seen...just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.
On top of everything else you even got an extra chapter to unlock once you beat the game to keep you occupied for a little bit longer...and don't even get me started on the fantabulous graphics, mainly the enemy animations. Each and every enemy in the game have downright gorgeous animations along with nifty camera play, it really draws you into each battle like never before. Which brings me to the final boss. While I think I had a much tougher time with DQ2&3's final boss, (mostly because I went grinding like crazy in this game so I was pretty well prepared...liquid metal slimes yo!) the final fight in this game is something you have to see to believe. With many different forms and the aforementioned jaw-dropping animations. It was one of the most punishingly brutal, and visually astonishing boss battles I've ever experienced and won't soon forget.
Well there you have it. Another long review for a game that truly deserve all the praise you can throw at it, and that's what I try to do every time I write one of these reviews. Although I do love this game very very much...I've been seriously looking forward to the next installment in the series and have no doubt in my mind that it will be even better...Next stop, DRAGON QUEST 5‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️Show lessUncleSlam Temple
Better than the original!
It's always been a great game. Some character names changed slightly, but no biggie. Unlike the original version, you can control all of the characters instead of just setting their AI. It's been great replaying one of my all time favorites!chapnasty
Great game. Terrible dialog
This is my favorite dragon warrior game of all time only updated. Overall the changes are great and make the game more playable without losing any of the charm. But the dialog completely ruins the experience. In an attempt to ethnicize the kingdoms, the dialog was rendered near unreadable with phonic spellings of various cliche accents. It is so heavy handed as to be offensive, especially the broken Asian English that another reviewer mistook for an unintentional bad translation from the original. Imagine watching a foreign film but to covey that it is foreign the subtitles are purposefully in broken English and spelled with accents.... Not necessary. Not fun. Fix it squareShow lessAvalonTears
One of the best in the series
This is the best version of the DQIV remakes. It looks beautiful and since it originally ran "full-screen" (i.e. using both screens) on the Nintendo DS, it is perfectly suited for portrait mode. It's like joining the two screens together and upgrading the speed and resolution. It is a little weird playing with a touchscreen, but you can play it one-handed on your phone, and it's beautiful on iPad.
DQIV was a revolution at the time, adding characters with personalities and a chapter structure. This game is a real joy to play.Show lessJesse_Dylan
GREAT but....
I love the dragon quest games and this one, I remember playing as a kid. Overall great game except for the translation of the in game text from NPCs. I appreciate the subtle dialect and even the "accents" that are written down. But what's with all the poorly translated dialog for the Alena chapter?! It makes reading a pain and almost reflects poorly on Square Enix's prestigious reputation. It almost feels like they hired a bunch of middle school Japanese kids to translate the game by only using google translator. Please fix this issue, because paying 15$ for a remade game (that I feel had a better translation team for the original NES version) and getting poor quality translation feels almost insulting especially considering that I can't request a refund, which I would request because of this issue. Thank you.Show lessLlama56
Keeps me up at night!
This game is addicting. I played DQ1 when I was a kid. Came free with a subscription to Nintendo Power. This game is a whole lot better. It's very long, took me awhile to beat. Very interesting story. I liked how there were different story lines for each characters, then merged them all together. Grinding was easy with the AI selection. I just control one character and the others just Attack. I was usually half asleep while grinding. Worth every penny. On to the next one.Show lessVietBoi409
Great game! Excellent port!
This is the third time I have owned this game and played through it! Not to mention that it is a very fun game with a good story and neat characters, but the port to iOS is wonderful! I love the Cloud Save function that works between my iPad and iPhone so I can play anywhere.
I don't necessarily like that I have to manually click "Cloud Save" in order to sync with the cloud, but it's a minor inconvenience at best.
Great job SquareEnix! Please do as good a job with DQV and DQVI if and when you port them! Those were great games when I played them on the DS and I look forward to them again on iOS!Show lessjrdragoon
