[scratchmonkey]

WISE FWOM YOUW GWAVE

I'm finally coming back to this with the goal of actually finishing it. First of all, man, the DS really holds a charge well. I dredged the machine out of the depths of my desk and I've been playing the game off and on on my commute for a week and the battery still hasn't really budged from full.

Anyhow, this pretty much is Dragon Quest alright. It definitely has the disconnected narrative flow of DQVII where each little area is its own (heavily telegraphed) story that you need to resolve before moving on to the next. There's a fair amount of running into creatures in fields (traditional (read: invisible) random encounters come back when you're in the ship) until you can afford incrementally-better equipment that you will probably replace one or two towns down the road, and for gaining levels, especially since changing jobs involves starting from scratch.

That...doesn't sound so great laid out like that; however, I'm really enjoying the game because DQ is basically a meditative experience. You get into the groove, something that is helped by the briskness of the experience (although the animation issues that, along with the music loading, made DQVIII a bit of a pain to play compared to the earlier titles, are still around) and really, by the overall meaninglessness of the experience. It's not that different for me to play it on the subway as opposed to playing a match-3 game on my phone, just a different style of physical interface, the same basic level of cognitive investment that means that you get into the "flow", just at a much slower, deep-REM kind of situation.

Plus making your character look like how you want and putting clothes on them is fricking great.