YMMV / Dragon Quest IV

• Broken Base:
  • Fans who remember the original straight-forward NES translation were generally disappointed with changes made in the remake's localization: the addition of regional accents, and the changing of most names of people and places to make cultural references or bad puns. But plenty of new players enjoyed them and found the humor charming.
  • The mobile port. To begin this divide, you have fans that are furious that Square Enix decided to put out a lackluster port (the game only works with the screen vertical, there's no controller support, etc.) vs. fans grateful to even have a legal way to get it/support the series after the limited print run of the DS version. (And even then, many are worried that it sends the wrong message to Square Enix to support the series over mobile platforms since the majority of the fans want console rereleases.) Then there's concerns over whether this is a worthy port when it's essentially the DS version vs. this release being the definitive edition because it adds party chat back into the game. However, it should be noted that this port received considerably greater acclaim than the mobile port of VIII because of the features this port added when compared to what VIII lost (VIII lost voice acting and the gorgeous symphonic suite of the American rerelease; IV had the textures spruced up for mobile tablet screen resolutions, the symphonic suite added to the soundtrack and the aforementioned party chat restored).
  • Chapter Six. A welcome expansion of content, including being able to recruit Psaro, or is it a Fix Fic that ruins the tone of the first five chapters, as well as the original game?
• Breather Level: Torneko's chapter is Lighter and Softer in tone than the chapters that come before (Alena) and after (Meena and Maya) it. There isn't even a boss for him to defeat — all he has to do to win is arm the guards of Endor Castle with strong weapons and armor.
• Demonic Spiders: In the remakes include Pandora's box from Dragon Quest VII in the bonus dungeon. They will not be afraid to use One-Hit Kill spells against your party and have a lot of HP. They also tend to attack in groups and if one doesn't kill your party members, another will finish the job.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Psaro, who gets his Heel–Face Turn moment in the remakes; Alena, who has a manga feature her as a main character and a game loosely based on her and her two helpers; and Torneko, who has his own series of Mysterious Dungeon games. Every main character except the hero and Borya has appeared at least once in the Fortune Street series.
  • Alena in general is considered practically the poster girl of the Dragon Quest series. It helps she's a tough princess who not only dresses conservatively, but is also a Bare-Fisted Monk who will easily dole out the most physical damage as a character in the party. Her high Critical Hit rate also makes her an ideal party member for taking down Metal Slimes and all their variants.
  • Kiryl in particular tends to get quite a bit more fan art then you'd expect, and as such appears pretty often in spinoffs. Healie also goes from being a Guest-Star Party Member (albeit the first playable monster one ever) to being one of the most reoccurring characters in the series.
  • Sofia, the female version of the Hero, who was popular enough to receive an appearance in the arcade crossover game Monster Battle Road alongside her male counterpart, in contrast to the other heroines who didn't get so much as a nod. There were many fans who lamented her exclusion in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate when she wasn't confirmed alongside Solo as an alternative costume.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Solo/Maya or Solo/Meena and to a lesser extent Solo/Alena are both very popular. On the Ho Yay side of things, Sophia/Alena and Solo/Psaro are the most common pairings.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Prayer Ring. One of the cheapest items in the Casino is, well, one of the "cheapest" items in the game, giving you literally infinite MP (praying outside of battle recharges MP for free), and thus infinite grinding with only the occasional break to save the game.
  • Psaro. The ability to equip cursed items without penalties is just the start of it. He is so powerful and his spells so useful there is no reason not to have him in the party at all times.
  • In the NES version of the game, the Dream Blade. On a successful attack, it has a chance to put enemies to sleep, and bosses are not immune to this effect.
  • Chapter 3 can be this...depending on how much you take advantage of the valuable items the enemies tend to drop. The casino in question happens to open up near the end, where being a merchant would be most useful. The game tries to compensate by raising the price of the tokens but due to the high amounts of money you can make, it doesn't matter. Alternatively, just buy as many cautery swords as you're willing to grind out, since they sell for a massive 2625 gold each, you can easily get them with only a little work, and they carry over to chapter 5.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The hero's slaying of Estark is this as of the events of Dragon Quest V. To avenge his death, the monsters started killing off most of Solo/Sofia's descendants, fearing that another legendary hero could rise.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The French localization calls Marquis de Leon Lord Lionel, who is quite smug. Almost five years later, Animal Crossing: New Leaf happens to introduce a lion villager named Lionel, a smug lion villager.
• Ho Yay:
  • Elisa gets some fun dialogue in the beginning of Chapter 5 if you choose to play as the Heroine Sofia.
  • In Femiscyra, the elderly priest thinks Sofia is jealous of his being the only functioning man in the whole queendom, and asks if she or one of the other female characters is one of those 'modern women'.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Two party members are overshadowed by another.
  • Borya is the wizard whose flaws include low vitality, his tendency in the NES original to cast ice spells on ice-resistant or ice-immune monsters causes him to waste a turn and lack of gear selection puts him well behind Maya.
  • Meena does get Insulatle, but in the NES version she had the worst vitality stat in the game (even worse than Borya's), takes the longest out of the eight Chosen to level up and lack of MP has Kiryl usually outperform her.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Though he does get a Heel–Face Turn and become recruitable in the postgame chapter, Psaro slaughtering the Hero’s home village at the start of Chapter 5 can make it difficult to forgive him.
  • Aamon murdering Rose, thus ensuring that Psaro the Manslayer crosses the Despair Event Horizon and goes along with his plan to destroy humanity.
    • To a similar extent, the humans who pursued Rose for her ruby tears also cross this by abusing her to make her cry rubies, leading to her death and solidifying Psaro’s Humans Are Bastards mentality.
• One True Threesome: Maya/Solo/Meena are considered the most popular trio shipping in whole game, also some extent with Maya/Sophia/Meena.
• The Scrappy: Maya tends to be universally favored over Borya as the party's mage both in terms of spell casting and personality. Borya also makes the least amount of appearances of the entire cast in the spinoff games.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the NES game, in the Hero's chapter (i.e. the main story segment) the combat actions of everyone in the party except the Hero are controlled by the game's A.I., with the player only getting to select vague "tactics". Unfortunately, this often resulted in a huge amount of Artificial Stupidity, such as your healer wasting all their MP trying to repeatedly cast instant death spells on enemies that were immune to them, rather than, you know, healing your party. Fortunately the PS1 rerelease onward included an option for more traditional manual control.
  • The Shimmering Dress is a relatively decent armor you can get, it has an added benefit of occasionally deflecting enemy spells and flinging them back like the Bounce spell. The bad part is that it has a nasty tendency to do the same when trying to heal or revive the wearer, instead bouncing back at the caster making Zings completely worthless and wasting healing on a most likely healthy character.
• Squick: Psaro's growth of limbs and a second head/face is pretty icky in the NES game, but is just gross looking in the remakes. In a good way. Made even cooler as they shows this from multiple angles. It really shows just how "not right" his transformation is.
• That One Boss:
  • Estark in all versions. He starts off asleep, which doesn't sound bad, right? Instead, he opens up with Eerie Light, a party-hitting attack. When he wakes up, he will occasionally nullify your buffs every couple turns or so with Disruptive Wave, meaning you'll have at best a turn or two of buffs before they're removed. Much like all story bosses, he gets two moves per turn. He also hits very hard too, meaning your squishy characters aren't going to be alive very long.
  • The Marquis de Leon in all versions and Balzack in the remakes have always given veteran players trouble. Not just because of his sheer power and the ability to hit twice, but also of his another skill, Cold Breath, which deals just as much on the whole party. If you're underleveled, you're facing a total party kill no matter what.
• Values Dissonance: Alena has a reputation for being a tomboy, but outside of her specific predilection for martial arts and adventure, her design (and her personality as revealed in party chat) are fairly feminine—what makes her a tomboy is the fact that she lacks the docility and elegance seen as a feminine ideal in Japan^note A similar example of this can be seen in Akane of Ranma ½, who is likewise quite feminine by Western standards but lacks docility and so has a reputation in-universe as a tomboy.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Thanks to a Manual Misprint in the instruction booklet for the NES version, it was believed that Panon is a female; yet when you do meet Panon (and talk to some villagers) in the game itself, the comedian is actually a man! But with the sprite for the Panon character in the NES version, it was hard to make out if he is a man or not. The Nintendo DS and PS1 versions thankfully cleared up the confusion by making better sprites for the character and renaming him as "Tom Foolery".

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