PREVIOUSLY TITLED: Dragon Quest under SE is better than how FF is now
It’s weird
All these great Dragon Quest spinoff games:
Also, oh my fucking god, can we all take a moment and remember how fucking glorious the attack cutscenes are for Dragon Quest Monster Battle Road?
I still think each of these cutscenes are some of the best animated sequences I’ve seen in videogames or any media. Each one’s hype level and density of style and action crammed into less than a minute blows my mind.
Bless all the talented creators that worked on these sequences. True geniuses.
MAN FUCK IT, I’M GONNA RE-EDIT THIS THREAD INTO DRAGON QUEST APPRECIATION THREAD
I also really appreciate how every game in the series still has either direct Toriyama-designed or Toriyama-styled characters and monsters. I don’t imagine that changing even after Toriyama passes on.
Meanwhile, Shin Megami Tensei has fuck-all to do with Kazuma Kaneko now outside of his legacy designs and minor involvement in scenario and that really depresses me. 99% of why I got into that series is Kaneko’s designs and the future of the series without him loses my attention. SMT4Final looks pretty rad though, but man fuck Persona what the fuck don’t even get me started on FExSMTwhateventheufck fuck no fuck
BUT MEANWHILE, THIS HANDSOME DEVIL IS NEVER CHANGING:
the new dragons quest is gonna be fun and nice, i bet
it’s true that dragon quest is being done a lot better than final fantasy these days, it makes me retroactively feel like dq has actually probably always just been better?
I have been playing a helluva lot of older Dragon Quest in the past month and yes it has absolutely always been better than Final Fantasy, on the whole. The SFC FF trilogy holds its own really well though (and in the case of DQ6 vs FF6, the latter is much stronger and more memorable even if the former is endearingly tryhard at being Dragon Quest Does Final Fantasy).
Actually, let’s do a comparative rundown~
DQ vs FF: the former holds up wayyy better thanks to lack of micromanagement and more free open world
DQ2 vs FF2: they are both bad but DQ2 is more solidly constructed, like the worst you can say about it is that it’s tedious where FF2 is just maddening
DQ3 vs FF3: DQ3 by a fucking landslide imo, it’s impeccably designed and balanced. i like FF3 but it’s so much sloppier. they both have a sweet job system and a few awesome twists though.
DQ4 vs FF4: this is a tricky one since they both have a heavy story emphasis and memorable characters. i think DQ4 edges it out for me a little these days, i just can’t say no to Alena and Taloon. really up in the air honestly.
DQ5 vs FF5: kind of incomparable because they’re doing such different things. i’d go with DQ but i have a lot of time for FF5, it might even just be my fave FF??
DQ6 vs FF6: like i said, FF6 beats it out. DQ6 is a neat change of pace but it has lots of growing pains and feels too constricted at times. FF6 is a delicious hot mess of a game with the best cast of maybe any RPG in the 16-bit era.
DQ7 vs FF7: i will never finish either of these. FF7 wins handily if you’re going by its first hour, because the Midgar segment is the best Final Fantasy has ever been. i have a hunch that the rest of DQ7 beats the rest of FF7, though.
DQ8 vs FF10: the rest of the PSX FFs don’t readily match up to DQ8, but it whups all of them and FF10 without even breaking a sweat. i <3 u DQ8
DQ9 vs Four Warriors of Light: lol (it’s FWoL btw)
DQ10 vs FF11: FUCK MMOS
remember that one time when a slime mori mori trailer had some of the best bits of animation ever and you just wondered why the fuck there isn’t an anime centered around slimes and the dragon quest universe in which every episode is a bite-sized seven-to-ten-minutes long bag of slice of life mixed with crazy action scenes every now and then.
That chart is really interesting when you compare it with week to week Famitsu charts. Heroes had a much longer tail as a failure than most games in Japan.
these jrpg classic-ass classics are best consumed while commuting combined with hours of podcast consumption mine being through the fucking ceiling at this point
podcasts and RPGs emulated on my mobile are 90% of my workdays right now.
DQ5 is pretty short compared to most RPGs, Iacus, and probably the shortest Quest for Dragons besides the original (and maybe 2 but i can’t tell, it all started to blend together after awhile)
Actually i think they started to get really long with 6, the NES games and 5 are a reasonable 30 hours tops (which is still a long-ass game, but hella short as RPGs go).
As mentioned elsewhere I just finished DQ V last night as I’ve been playing the game each Sunday during the late afternoon NFL games this season. I think it works better in this extended “have a bit at a time” kind of way, although I may just be biased. Plus when the NFL games were actually good that was when I snuck the mindless grinding in.
But mainly I dropped in here to say that while I haven’t played the vast majority of Dragon Quest games, this won’t stop me from declaring Rocket Slime the best thing the series has ever produced.
