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Dragon Quest IX Is So Fine
I must be a prognosticator of sorts, because after I wrote about how busy I’ve been lately, I had what could have quite possibly been the busiest stretch of days that I’ve had in a long time – possibly ever.
It started on Sunday with doing inventory and sorting through all of the Concatenation Records CD stock, along with properly organizing them, which took quite a good chunk of time. Then, I wrapped everything up with Ryan8bit’s “ 2010.8.2 ” release and sent it to the printers. Once I was done with that, I had to package up CDs for all 20 of the participants in “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two”, which took until Monday morning.
Work was busy Monday, so I tried to get some work done on the Concatenation site that night, but didn’t have much luck with it. I was able to get all the basic stuff done for the site and had the pages set up by Tuesday morning, though I still have some miscellaneous work to do for the rest of the site that I’ll likely get to next week. Work was also busy Tuesday, so I collected addresses for orders on Tuesday night and packaged up CDs, and I did the same thing Wednesday morning.
Wednesday at work was my busiest day of work in four years, if not my busiest day there ever. I can remember being more slammed when I worked for Pagliacci’s, but never at my current place of employment. I processed 42 cases that day, which is more than when things were so busy in 2006. The thing about 2006 is that I had my co-worker at the time, Gilda, helping with everything else. It’s all on me now and I somehow managed it the best I could.
I was on my feet in that copying room working as fast as I could for a good five hours that day, whereas I’m generally in there for an hour to an hour and a half on a normal day, and two to three hours on a busy day. It was a perfect storm that came together – it was slated to be a busy day anyway, but one of the hearing representatives wanted to start his vacation on Thursday, so he had to write his own decisions and check the work of the three claims examiners (that also write decisions) under his watch, which meant that he had to check all of his and their cases for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and get them out.
It was an absolutely brutal day, and the only thing I could do after work that night was fire up the DS and play some Dragon Quest IX. Outside of processing orders for the newly released CD and collecting addresses for the pre-order, that’s mostly what I’ve been doing while not at the office since then.
Sure, I’ve been doing my usual routine things, but playing it is why the blog is going up so late today and why I’m going to have to finish my song for Dwelling of Duels tomorrow. I think I fried my brain with all that work from Sunday to Wednesday, and all I want to do is play this game!
If that doesn’t give you a fair idea on how I feel about this game, I’ll come out and say it – this may end up being my favorite of the Dragon Quest/Warrior franchise. I have gone on record in saying that Dragon Warrior III is my all-time favorite game (even if I’ve spent a ton more time with the Civilization series), because of the depth of the game and the ability to have such a customizable party.
Dragon Quest IX is definitely in second place right now as the series stands because of the similarities, but I’m nowhere near the end of the game, so I can’t properly assess whether or not I enjoy it more than Dragon Warrior III. I definitely appreciate that there are quests that will let you open up double the amount of classes that you start out with in the game, which leads to even more customization as the game progresses. Dragon Warrior III only had the Sage class which you become when you were level 20 or higher, whereas you can switch back and forth between classes in Dragon Quest IX and keep the levels of each one you build (once you find the place to do so, of course).
That feature certainly leads to more character versatility, as does the fact that you can keep any attributes earned through applying skill points to the specific skills of each class. You can even have any class use a certain weapon if the weapon’s skill points have been maxed out, which is definitely useful if you want to build one of your warriors as a magic-user, and can keep their heavy weapon skills intact.
Another thing that could push Dragon Quest IX over the top of Dragon Warrior III in my opinion is that DQIX has tons of character and I’m a fan of bad puns, which are definitely abundant in the game. For example, the place you change your class is called Alltrades Abbey, and the Abbot’s name is Jack. I love it!
I imagine it’ll still take some time to get through the game, as I love to kick back and ease my way through games these days, exploring every nook and cranny. I imagine I’ll be posting in a few weeks (or longer) with a full assessment of Dragon Quest IX, or maybe I’ll finally get the VG section up over on the Writing tab and post a full review of the game. So far, it’s been great and I want to get back to it!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on July 24th, 2010.
External Links
• A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two – A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two – CCN022 – Concatenation Records
• Civilization (video game) – Civilization (video game) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Concatenation Records – Concatenation Records
• Dragon Quest IX – Dragon Quest 9 for the Nintendo DS – Nintendo DS Games
• Dragon Warrior III – Dragon Warrior III - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Dwelling of Duels – Dwelling of Duels
• Ryan8bit – 2010.8.2 – Ryan8bit – 2010.8.2 – CCN023/GE002 – Concatenation Records/Good-Evil Records
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