Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is a Role Playing Game (RPG) that was released on Nintendo DS. It is also worth mentioning that Dragon Quest is one of the most popular game series in the world of video games — most people who enjoys playing RPG games would definitely love it. Now, there’s a reason why it’s Dragon Quest IX uh? And to make it even better, they were published by Square Enix, one of the most well known name among game publishers (Square Enix is publisher for Final Fantasy game titles too).

The story starts off with the player (YOU) being a Celestrian/Guardian of a nice little village, Angel Falls. The duty of a Celestrian is to protect the human village assigned to them. By helping people and earning their gratitude, they will be able to gain something called the ‘Benevolence”, which can be offered to the ‘World Tree’ back in the kingdom in the sky, where all Celestrian resides at. So basically, the World Tree will bears a rare fruit called Fygg once it has enough Benevolence.

The rest of the storyline is for you to find out yourself. 😉

Similarly to its other games in the franchise, you will be travelling around a vast world of different theme to adventure its way around. It has nice music but sometimes it gets repetitive. And yes, you can get to share your adventures with up to four other players via wireless connection and experience the fun of playing socially. You can also share your characters’ information and treasure maps and etc with other players from another social feature called Tag Mode.

Not only can you create your own character (as shown above) — you can create other characters also. Meaning — the ‘random’ party members that you could recruit from the bar/pub NPC. You can also set their starting jobs, which means you are able to form a team of your choice.

One of the things that I love the most about this game is its effort in making your character look exactly like what he/she is wearing. Isn’t that great? Most games make their protagonist look the exactly same outfit for the entire game — that can be boring (to the eyes) sometimes. However, by changing the appearance time to time, it makes the game stays pretty fresh. If you have enough money, you can literally ‘upgrade’ your characters’ gear/equipment every time you visit a new town.

In general, most of the monsters that you would encounter in the game are pretty cute looking. The all-time favorite “Slime” is still around as usual. And cruelcumber as shown in the image above. Yes, most monsters has cute names… NPC too. It’s for you to find out!

It is quite a nice game, and you can expect to play it for a large number of hours to achieve 100% completion.

Get the game now on Nintendo DS!