Then in the fall of 1997, I was an alternate in marching band, spending my late July and August weekdays, eight hours a day, split by a 2 hour lunch break from noon til two, in the Marching band at the high school, mostly sitting on my ass eyeballing the girls in the band while getting chastised by the goth girl and some other guy sitting next to me for reasons I cannot remember. But my savior in those hot summer months - was this game, laying down for 2 hours, with Gatorade and lunch, and playing it through. I had merely borrowed it so I gave it back to my friend. Who I later bought out his NES collection a year or so later, but alas, this particular game was no longer in his collection (lost/sold?). What would ensue, would be 20 years of watching, waiting, and not having the money for it.

As the years went by, this very hard to get release kept going up in price. AS a poor teenager, $45 was way out of budget for most things, even my GUITAR was cheaper. As a 20-something, the game went from $50, to $60, to $75.00 loose as I approached my 30's. In my 30's, the darned game was now breaking $100, with sealed copies costing as much as $500, thanks to those rich scamming dipshits who think a sealed copy of Combat is worth something because it has cellophane on it. When I moved where I am as of this writing....I put my name on a list for this game and Dragon Warrior II, it would take almost 4 years for a copy of Dragon Warrior IV to surface.

In the United States however.....The SNES was already out, kids were not at all into RPGs, you were called out still as a Miliquetoast Nerd for liking or playing them at the time. At that point, SPORTS GAMES were all the rage on the console, whether it was Shaq-Fu, Michael Jordan and whatever came out in his license, or Joe Montana Sports Talk Football for the genesis, otherwise, Doom on PCs - raising the now ubituqous First Person Shooter (FPS) genre, and of course Mario/Zelda on the SNES were all keeping our interest. Dragon Warrior IV silently came and went, ended up liquidated, with few copies sold. As a result, it's one of the bloody hardest NES games to find, a shame since it's one of the biggest, best, and deepest RPGs for the NES.

To give you an idea of this dispreprancy in distribution, one has to look no further than the Famicom vs. NES cartridge releases on e-bay. An E-bay copy of Dragon Quest IV might cost you $25.00 max, maybe $45 sealed. But the American release I've seen as low as $92.00 on e-bay and as high as over $1500 for a boxed copy from people who are really "dreaming" when it comes to cost.

The game is split into 5 chapters, each telling the backstory of your various colleagues in your eight person party that you carry until the end of the game after you all come together as if by chance on the road somewhere. While on the surface, we hear the tales of Ragnar the Burland Soldier and the case of the missing children, the tomboy Princess Alena of Santeem and her two "watchers" Cristo and Brey going to Endor to fight in a championship Americna Gladiators style, Taloon the merchant and his various civil duties and community service following his entrepeneurial enterprises, the two sisters of Monbaraba Nara and Mara in a revenge story with their father, and lastly - our sole hero of the game and his story of growing up early from his village being destroyed - under it all is a deeper story about a man named Saro whose girlfriend is murdered by greedy humans who beat her to death because she cried Ruby Tears.

The TRUE story of Dragon Quest/Warrior IV is the heartbroken Saro, a student of Edgar the Alchemist on Monbaraba (his daughters being Nara and Mara), discovers that Edgar discovered the secret of Evolution, and so Saro kills Edgar, steals the secret of evolution, and starts evolving various nemesis throughout the land including Balzack and himself in a misanthropic quest to destroy all of human kind for their greed and the murdering of his girlfriend. He becomes Necrosaro, and takes over the dark underworld, where you have to go to defeat him before he destoys the world and wipes out humanity.

Quite a far cry from some rando walking into castle Tantgel being tasked to kill a guy who plays with dragons and rescue a princess huh?

The end result is a ginormous game with a deep, immersive story. It was one of the first video games where I actually FELT something about it, rather than that I was just playing some kind of video game. Just the scene with Rosa - Saro's elfen girlfriend - getting the shit beat out of her by two Redneck pieces of shit, put a fucking lump in my damn throat. Made me almost wish I could go in that field with my party and fuck em' up! This was one pivotal scene that drew me into the entire series when I was 15!

For starters, there's a lot more overworld animation with regards to water features. Towns and cities include animated water features and various other things designed to give the game more life than usual. Also new is the addition of readable signs in the overworld, elevators in castles, towers, and caves. The overall design of the towns, castles, and whatnot, really are top quality for a 8-bit NES title.

For example, we have a town called Aktemto which we have to visit more than once in the game, complete with nausious gasses rising from the mine, sick and dying people in the town, sad music, and a demon filled lair of some pretty hard enemies. The poisonous marshes with the bodies and skeletal remains of the dead, and busted up fences and destroyed buildings really tell the tale of this town before you even talk to the first weary inhabitant and hear out their dreary stories of gloom and doom about what happened.

The mere amount of difference between terrain and the variations of everything makes this game quite immersive. People no longer sleep on white tiles, now they have PROPER beds. Tables, chairs, bathtubs, even the Santeem castle maintenance man boarding up Alena's window with a board, is all there. The amount of detail is amazing. Everything just sort of flows from one area into another. You can even search the shelves, drawers, beds, anything pretty much, and it addresses as such. THis makes it feel more complete and more compiled compared to earlier releases except manybe III.

We have themes for each overworld characters's chapter, and even different battle music for some of them. Ragnar's somewhat early-morning sleepy theme, Taloon's frisky tune, Nara and Mara's Eastern-influenced overworld theme with it's own wild quasi-Jewish-hymn like battle song, a marching stomping song for when you're riding around in the horse and carriage...dreary death music that's a literal tear jerker! I mean, the MUSIC in this game kicks from all sides, there's something for everyone in there. Even Casino music with a bit of a Jazz theme that I could totally hear being played in Circus Circus or The Nugget while dinking away at a Slot Machine. We even get some 8-bit metal in the final battle with Necrosaro, some stuff that would almost fit with Slayer even as a pair of Square, one pulse, and a noise channel.

First off, the grand scale of the game is segmented off in a way as to not be intimidating. That's one thing I encountered with Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II, as well as Ultima: Exodus, is that the scale of the game is immediatley apparent, and is ether somewhat overwhelming - ie Dragon Warrior II or Ultima, or in time you realize just how tiny it is, as it was with the first game. You have a huge overworld to explore, plus another overworld, the Zenithian Castle, and the "Last Refuge/Dark World" at the end of the game. Each one has it's own look and feel, conveying the particular feeling this is an adventure, a quest, not just some rinky dink video game with a series of side quests to get to the big evil guy to beat up.

Segmentation is done in the form of chapters and plot devices intended to keep the player in an intended spot until specific quests are fulfilled, with an added layer of punishment for straying too far in the wrong direciton in the form of harder enemies. THere's one point in the game where you need a horse to cross a desert, but you can't even ENTER the desert until you have a horse, meanwhile, if you try to veer too far off track in the wrong direction, you won't survive to see tomorrow.

The Day/Night Cycle has evolved to be a little more important now too, as well. Since characters now go to sleep, wake up, and run their own schedules.