Solo Dragon Quest IV finished

 Yesterday I finished my solo playthrough of this game. I made a big push this last week and weekend. As of today I am no longer working from home, and I wanted to finish as much as possible before resuming my commute.

This was not as intensive as Dragon Warrior III, or even II. I went to max level in both of those games; this one I finished at level 47. Doing it at a lower level added to the challenge to keep it interesting, but at much higher levels I think this could get pretty easy. The most interesting part of this was learning about boss regeneration values, which are not as well documented as they are on Dragon Warrior III despite this game having more bosses with background regeneration. It was fun to try this game's different item and spell sets to find the right combinations for beating regeneration on the bosses.

I mentioned before that, for reasons I can't really justify, I stepped on each square in the game. I no longer clearly remember what ever possessed me to do this in Dragon Warrior I. In some ways made more sense with I and II, which have a steeper EXP grind anyway than the future games. But, as one might expect, it was kind of ridiculous in III and IV, which have much larger worlds but a tamer EXP growth curve, as well as endgame metal enemies with much higher EXP yield. Whatever compulsion made me keep going with this, since I'd done it previous games, I'm confident I won't ever feel the need or desire to do this in any other game.

I also went back and finished off my 100% game file. I am pleased to say I found everything in this game without using a guide (other than to confirm I actually had everything). I also updated equipment and monster lists I've been compiling to track recurring items and monsters in the series.

I've decided that what I've got done is enough for me to move on to Dragon Quest V as my main game, which I started last night. I will still do my challenge quests/comparison playthrough of Dragon Quest IV, as I have energy, but my main focus will be V. I've been wanting to replay it for a long time, and have tried restarting it twice before. I think the time is finally right where I can give it the attention it deserves.

Dragon Quest IV

I hit a major milestone on this game in my solo playthrough. I finally found the last of the small medals.

As I accomplished this, it set in for me that I could finally finish my 100% playthrough of this game, and I felt a shift in my focus. It has been my plan in to finish my solo run, then simultaneously do my miminalist run, my no-magic run, and a comparison of the NES, Famicom, and remake versions. After that ambitious project, I figured I'd finally move on to focus on replaying Dragon Quest V.

But now I'm feeling a surprisingly strong ambition to compress things further. Now that I found all the small medals here, I want to start looking for them in V. And now that I found them all, any potential for spoiling their locations in the PSX version is gone, so I feel like I want to start that version sooner than later as well.

I fear I could easily burn myself out too quickly to try to add these runs and DQV simultaneously to my in-process solo run, but I think I'm going to start off on it anyway. We'll see how it goes.

I'm pretty far into my solo run, anyway. It may not take more than a few weeks to finish it, even if I start juggling more games at once. My current save is at Gardenbur, tackling the nearby cave.

On my level 99 Famicom file, I collected the last medal and I've resumed the process of collecting one each of the game's weapons and armor to store in the vault. Some time back I re-collected an iron claw after having sold it. On my last play session I re-collected a cypress stick. Surprisingly, neither of those items can be repurchased if you get rid of it, so you have to find and fight enemies that drop them. It took me exactly 100 enemies to get the drop for the cypress stick.

I suspect it will take me a couple of hours to repurchase everything I can for 100%. Then I'll check the rest of my equipment against equipment lists on the internet and see if I'm missing anything else. But I think I have all of the hard to find pieces; if I'm not wrong there I should be able to declare my full playthrough done within a couple of hours of game time.