yeah i guess the distinction for me is that 6 feels like a lot, it’s more of a drag to press on through and there’s just so much (like rudie said, there are essentially four versions of every area and the two worlds don’t feel as distinct as they could)
7 is slower and longer than any of the others, but doles things out very deliberately and doesn’t overwhelm nearly as much as a result
There’s no day night cycle in 6, so 2 versions. For most of the game you weave between worlds with portals and giant holes in the ground. It feels natural, you almost always know what direction to go next but you’re always seeing new terrain and figuring out exactly how to get there. And the two worlds are geographically distinct so you’ll see some unique places between them. You don’t necessarily visit two versions of the town back to back, I’m saying.
In 7 you keep going back to the same temple to teleport to the next island in the past. Complete the town and warp back to the present, where the island has been slotted into a continent in a completely arbitrary way. Fly around and find the present day version of the town, where there is usually nothing for you to do except find the key to the next island. Repeat x100.
I’m just nitpicking!!
yeah i could never get past this either. it felt like its main intent was to be played by someone on the subway in tokyo getting streetpass dungeons from 100 salarymen and no one else.
Here’s a really cool thing about 7: like most Dragon Quest games the player can’t change the story–any choice presented via dialogue box is either a “but thou must!” (if u pick the wrong choice it presents the question again), or a funny variant where the person ignores your response either way. DQ7 is the same way… every choice presented is a false choice.
Except one.
There is (I believe) precisely one story in the game in which the player can actually affect the outcome and get a good or bad ending. But because I’ve played DQ and I’m used to the "but thou must!"s, I didn’t think to poke the edges, so I just railroaded into the “bad ending” even tho i VERY CLEARLY KNEW I was doing the wrong thing and it SUCKED and straight up HURT to see what happened. And I just figured that’s how it was!
Turns out it’s literally the single instance of a story in this game with two endings. Whichever you pick (if you don’t keep a separate save), the fate of the town remains that way for the rest of the game! It owns.
the further complication that I haven’t seen people address is which versions of these games should people play? the DS 5 is so fantastic. the 3DS 7 is great, though I miss the PS1 sprites. 8 on 3DS is trash apparently. etc etc
dq 11 stuff: i was really disappointed with my marriage in dq 11, i dont want to play a game where i marry a girl from my childhood who i havent seen all game and who DIDNT FUCKING MATTER AT ALL. meanwhile, im falling in love with bunny costume lady who can turn everything into metal slimes BUT I DIDNT MARRY HER. we spent so much time together!!! its frustrating!!
did they fuck with the fonts in the mobile version of 2 ? i was watching someone stream Chrono trigger and the fonts were changed and like, how is that not a huge deal to everyone?? like all square remakes are COMPLETELY unplayable with those ugly ass default fonts. i almost made a thread about it!!!
which dragon quests can you see monsters on the field and which have invisible encounters?
Here’s my maybe take:
All the iOS versions are excellent except for 8. One small exception is 3, which has nice graphics but the SNES version has FANTASTIC graphics. Also, the DS versions are breezier to play because they control easier, but the iOS versions have hi-res 3d envirionments that look great so y’know, potato tomato
The mobile fonts, are good!! IDK what the deal is with square but they do a terrible job with FF and a great job with DQ
DQ started putting monsters on field with 9, then continued with the remake of 7, the 3DS port of 8, and now 11. i have VERY COMPLICATED feelings about this. In general I think monsters on field is a bad design decision–or rather, it’s not the monsters being on the field but the battles being optional rather than forced in whatever way (for example, Chrono Trigger battles are on field but largely non-optional). One of these days I will write a big thing about this. It has to do with uh, imperialism?
Weirdly enough 11 might be changing my mind to an extent, or at least the way it works isn’t the same as in 9, 7, or 8, or other games. Not sure yet, and I’m only like halfway through 11.
the battles were very optional in dq11 thats what i want
I really should have played 11 on regular mode. I mean, i am ENJOYING the game on Hard Mode quite a bit, but I realize now that if I were playing on easy it wouldn’t be “game with easy battles” it would be more like “game that is primarily about talking to people, with battles as a minor element” which sounds awesome.
I uh, am kind of inspired to make a game where you just explore JRPG towns. Like, a DQ7 amount of towns, but no fighting. I’ll call it Invisible Cities: The Game
Square and Enix are basically still two separate companies?
Really now! Well I guess that explains it. Another reason is that the Core DQ Team (Horii etc.) is actually involved with most remakes/ports (I don’t have a list of exactly who does what on which games but I know Horii at least oversees the writing of any additional content, for example) so maybe they have a high standard of quality they insist upon.
I’ve never understood the point of making the worst part of jrpgs longer
cuz its not harder it just takes longer
also its a single player game theres no one watching, no one will be impressed
Studio Oleomingus is really digging into the Invisible Cities vibe to me – sketches of place through snippets of mood and feeling; they’ve released a few short festival games but are leading into Under a Porcelain Sun:
Under A Porcelain Sun, is the story of a journey in search for the Mythical city of Kayamgadh. A text driven first person adventure game set in surreal Colonial India, it tells an absurd adventure tale during the tumult of the annexation of Southern Malwa.
Ok but DQ battles are really good??? They’re only the worst part of some jrpgs, like FF. Uh, again we’re getting into “I need to write my essay” territory lol. Not just the mechanics themselves but also the slow grind (to an extent) are satisfying and interesting mindgames, imo!
Which is to say, I think OG DQ7 is a masterpiece and the amount of battles is a GOOD part of that.
But a DQ with no battles at all would be A Different Thing and also extremely good.
it doesnt matter how good the battles are in ANY jrpg, after 40 hours they get boring (outside of bosses)
like all my friends make fun of me for how much i like getting in fights with small guys, because i love jrpg fighting!! but it always gets old
i am really interested in your essay tho
Again, legit disagree! I think there’s a way that this can be done in a way that is good, and Part Of It (which is to say, part of the… structure and idea of a game in a way that is intrinsic to the other parts working). Idk. I don’t really understand it myself but in the better DQ games (OG 7 specifically, also OG 1) it is a deeply satisfying thing to do the repetitive grind of battles for PRECISELY the amount of time required as part of the game’s design. I wish I could express it more but I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way, on account of the series’s popularity lol.
I will say… I think I value a lot of things in these games that the devs themselves don’t realize are valuable. Like, from interviews I’ve read, and also t he general progression of the series, I definitely think they see the writing as the Main Thing That Matters in the games (hence DQ11 approaching visual novel amounts of not battling), but I think the form and even the ritual of them is crucial as well.
An example: in DQ, you heal at inns, and save at churches. That’s just how it is. The form of the game involves expeditions into danger, and then a return home! In DQ7 remake for 3DS, the first scenario involves going to a cave for a boss battle. After the boss battle, some plot happens, and then Surprise! Another boss battle!
In the remake, the game heals your party between boss battles, presumably just as a QoL improvement. I hate it. It’s not… to me, the form of DQ, the Way You Exist In This World, is a part of the world. The game lays out a certain way things are going to work, and you can form a bond of trust between yourself and the game–you trust the game to maintain its form (or break form in a way that shocks and delights), and the game trusts you to try your best, put in effort to understand its systems and quirks, and actively engage instead of just peacing out and mashing X. Giving the player a free heal breaks that trust. Now I NEVER know when I may or may not get a free heal.
Games can be rituals, they can be A Way Of Existing for a certain amount of time (this is always why I fell in love with FF15).
In a thing I wrote a long time ago that I WON’T link, about Dragon Quest (the writing style is… bad), I said something like “maybe if you have three Things (A, B, and C) and you arrange them in time, giving each the proper amount of duration and shuffling them in the right pattern, it doesn’t even matter what the Things actually are”
EDIT: i’m sorry this thread turned into me hollering about dragon quest. i kinda opened up a fire hydrant i guess. I mean, I am playing two of them currently, and played two last year, so lol
writing is hard :c
i appreciate your love for the grind (i get that satisfaction in other games) and im glad that a game with a mechanic so horrible to me is so lovely to another.
H O W E V E R i would just like a suggestion on a game that fits with what i like about games, and not to be convinced to play a game i know i wont like
also i like how you say writing is hard. look how much youve done in this thread haha
how old were you when you first played the first game?
Oh sure, if you want to play a Dragon Quest that fits your ideas then I’d say literally just play the latest remake of any of them, cuz every time they remake a game they make it easier and breezier and have more trivial battles. And they’re still good anyway
It’s a shame they haven’t done PC ports cuz then they could do the FF thing where you can activate a booster or turn off battles entirely, etcetera
I think i was maybe like 15 when I first got into these damn things? I played 7 over the course of a summer at home between college semesters. When I wasn’t working at the grocery store, I came home, put on a Mahler symphony (3, the way too long and super weird one, fittingly), and played the bajeezus out of DQ7, sometimes while walking on a treadmill or doing pushups/crunches.
I replayed 1 on original hardware not long after, in my college dorm room, listening to Mahler 9, which put me in a mood to think about recombination and interweaving of discrete elements.
EDIT: just wanna say I also appreciate the heck out of your perspective, and the thing is your perspective makes a LOT MORE SENSE then mine, which is probably why I posted a wall of text trying to suss out why I have these weird feelings.