Promotional Consideration: Dragon Quest IV commercials were weird

by Eric Caoili { May 25th 2008 at 11:30PM }

With the Dragon Quest IV DS remake announced for the US and Europe this week, we thought it'd be good a time to dig up Enix's commercials for the original Famicom game's release in Japan. They're completely different from the retro ads used last November when the DS remake shipped.

As with Squaresoft's chocobo commercials for Final Fantasy IV on the Super Famicom (launching a little over a year after Dragon Quest IV), these ads were just plain odd! They show hardly any in-game video, relying on logos and recognizable theme music instead. Gather your party and meet us in the fifth chapter, past the post break, for the commercials.

Train tracks. City skyline. Sweet dream.

Weird, yes, but they're still pretty cool! What inspires someone to follow a chubby kid with a video camera, stalk a woman in a subway train, and turn it into a Dragon Quest IV commercial? We have tons of saved up footage exactly like that from our own activities, uh, secretly video taping people. All we need to do is throw them together, overlay a logo, and add the classic overture theme -- baby, we got a stew goin'! We could make our own homemade Dragon Quest IV commercial!

Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.