The prices ranged from £27.99 to £29.99 though, which is pretty expensive these days for a SNES game. I hope it doesn't put people off or give them unreasonably high expectations. I bought my copy from the online version of the high-street videogame retailer GAME (for the loyalty card points) for £24.99 and they shipped it on Wednesday but it still hasn't arrived! :( I blame the weather.
Anyway, that's a game with character designs by Akira Toriyama. :D It's definitely not the only reason to like it; it's got one of the best battle systems I've ever used, multiple paths/endings, a good story and a great soundtrack. That's why I'm so enthusiastic about the game coming out in the UK.
Oh well. It doesn't really matter since I'm currently playing through another RPG with Toriyama designs on the DS, and that game is... no, not Dragonball Origins, it's "Dragon Quest: Chapters Of The Chosen". Which is actually "Dragon Quest 4" but for some reason they've decided not to give the games numbers now they're releasing them in Europe.
It's a good game, I like it a lot. It's the most traditional style JRPG; meet some people, go out and fight monsters in random encounters, level up, fight more monsters in random encounters, buy some better weapons / armour, fight some more monsters in random encounters, fight a boss monster, rinse and repeat. If that doesn't sound good to you, you won't like this game. I got my copy 2nd hand and the previous owner had given up after 3 hours so I guess that was the case. For me, I really like it. The translations were annoying at first, because in the first few town you meet a lot of characters with bad accents in written form. I have heard many many Scottish people talking in my time, from all parts of Scotland, and none of them talk the way they do in the "Ragnar" chapter of the game. Honestly, it makes "Scotty" from Star Trek seem really good. The next chapter is maybe Czech or Slovak or somewhere Eastern European, as one of them greets you "Dobry den", but I'm not sure... it also seemed like a mockery of people as it was mostly expressed as poor grammar rather than an accent. I thought "why have I paid good money for a translation that's as good as a Chinese bootleg DVD? Why did I pay for something so insulting?". I found the various regional stereotypes irked me somewhat, as the translators seemed to just be "putting on" various accents, and didn't reflect how people really use the language. I honestly thought about giving up the game near the start simply because of the dialogue, but I persevered.
I'm quite glad I did because this game turned out to be a lot of fun. You begin by playing through 4 chapters where you get to play as different characters, each on their own little adventure, and then they meet up and form a larger party later on. I really like it, because the most interesting part of a lot of these old RPGs is the beginning, when you're struggling through each battle, low level. Well, not so much when there's no strategy and it's all luck, but this game seemed pretty fun, starting at level 1 for my characters. I get a good feeling for them too, whereas in a lot of RPGs you just meet characters along the way who join you and you don't know much about them or feel anything for them. I'm well into the 5th chapter right now and everyone's met up and formed a big party, and we're adventuring together happily. I think there's probably not too much further to go before the end, and I'm almost 30 hours into the game. The next game in the series ("Dragon Quest: The Hand Of The Heavenly Bride", which is much harder to remember than "Dragon Quest 5") is coming out soon, though. Plus, my copy of Chrono Trigger should be arriving soon. :)
The translations got better throughout the game, either that or my tolerance got higher. Haha! There's some really funny stuff in there too when you get Torneko back into your party and make him fight. He does some random funny stuff. The music (Koichi Sugiyama) is standard Dragon Quest music, which I like a lot, and the character designs are really cheerful looking and I just generally feel happy playing this game. ^__^
I guess if I'm done with DQ4 this weekend and Chrono Trigger isn't here, there is one other Toriyama-character-designed RPG I could be getting on with, and that's Blue Dragon, for Xbox 360. I started it a looooong while ago, and wow it looks good. And wow it sounds good (Nobuo Uematsu), but wow I don't care about the story or the characters! XD It's one of the few long RPG games of current times that I'd wholly recommend as suitable for children, but I'm not feeling much attachment to the game.
I just met Toriyama in the game! Here's a screenshot:
it's just how he draws himself in the old Dr Slump (and maybe Dragon Ball?) manga I own. ^__^ That's as far as I've gone so far in this game, and I'm only on the first disk. I have bought the soundtrack and have listened to it quite a bit. I'm not too keen on the tracks with vocals but the rest is good, Uematsu's best in a good few years, I would say. I don't think it's helped my enjoyment of the game, though, as it's not breathtakingly amazing music in the game anymore; my breath was already taken with the album...
EDIT: I just found out through wikipedia that Koichi Sugiyama is a very bad person. :( The DQ music is good to listen to, but now I feel bad about helping pay his wages by buying his soundtracks and games... though they're a lot of fun... come to think of it, I did buy most of my DQ games and Ideon LP second hand... so he's barely made any money out of me!
