Dragon Quest XI S is available to download on Game Pass (in Windows, anyway) if anybody has Game Pass and was waiting for this. I didnāt realize itād show up on it.
has anyone considered trying to muddle through X despite the language barrier and having to (?) fuck around with vpns etc.
I heard recently that there apparently isnāt a region lock for North America anymore (unclear for Europe) so it got pushed onto the pile of MMOs I wanna play, but thatās about it
The free trial apparently gets you through the entire base game now?
Donāt know how relevant this is but pre-registrations for the localized version of Dragon Quest Tact are now open on Android and iOS
I need some advice, one human being to another.
Iāve spent 10 hours with Dragon Quest 5 (iOS), 15 with DQ7 (3DS), and 20 with DQ11 (Switch). In all three I kind of enjoy grinding against cutie pie Toriyama monsters. Whenever I get to a new area Iām constantly turning to my partner and saying āgetta loada this little man!ā
But what I always hear about DQ games is that the little episodes and quests have a quality of writing that really charms and draws people in. But nothing Iāve encountered in any of the games has struck me as interesting or moving; just very flat and obvious.
I promise I do have feelings, and have felt things in the past.
So my question is: do I just have a tin ear for this style of writing and vibe, or does that stuff come later in the games, or is it kind of reliant on playing the whole game and looking at everything holistically?
I only ever got that from 11, for what itās worth, so Iād encourage you to play that one a little further if anything. Iād be agreeing with you on the basis of my experience with the earlier games
Are you playing the three concurrently?
The pacing of the writing (and the overall experience) lends itself to enjoying playing it for short stretches regularly with the option of occasionally binging. If you are going back and forth between several that might take away from the experience. Enjoying a Dragon Quest is a comfy ritualistic thing.
Grinding against cutie pie Toriyama monsters is part of what I like about them. Itās possible thatās the only part of it that works for you. Like anything they arenāt for everyone. They might not be your thing.
Iād suggest picking whichever one seems comfiest and try playing through just that one and not the others. That would be the way to give it the fairest shake and determine if DQ is or isnāt your thing.
imo itās (partially) charming because itās so obvious? theyāre saturday morning cartoons that punch above their weight occasionally but usually sit pretty squarely in JRPG Comfort Food territory. the āeach town has a self-contained story you have to resolve to progress the quest against the big badā episodic structure always reminds me of cozy filler monster-of-the-week episodes in junk food TV/anime series and thatās exactly why i keep coming back to them
If 7 isnāt doing it idk what will fam
iāve played through all of 5, 9, and 11, i feel like basically my experience with all of them was the same.
the first phase is very much
but eventually i always get kind of caught up in the plots, even though theyāre not particularly great.
i agree with @physical that it is charming in the way a boring but cute cartoon is charming, or likeā¦ a long train ride. itās not a life changing work of genius but a pleasant way to pass the time
but then for me the third phase is when i get more into the pure grind. like leveling up not necessarily to be strong enough to beat a boss, but just for the subtle dopamine trickle as you watch numbers continue to go up.
thatās why itās always made perfect sense to me that the games feature increasingly elaborate gambling systems. the game itself is casino-like in a very low stakes wayāitās not the adrenaline rush of making a risky wager, but the calming sensation of living in a world that can be completely explained with simple math. of course with casinos thats an illusion, but in dragon questā¦ your dream is reality
to me 11 is the one that i felt most in tune with, because you really donāt need to grind at the beginning, so watching all of the different Small Men and their activities is really low pressure.
even though the plot isnāt as interesting as 5 is, it manages to become pretty compelling right around the middle, and then as soon as you get to the post game scenario all of the plot logic just kind of dissolves so you donāt have to think about it at all, and you get to just indulge in getting all your mates to lv 99 just for the heck of it
but, yeah, i donāt think itās the kind of game where you absolutely need to power through it if youāre not enjoying it. the pleasures of dragon quest are all pretty superficial, if they donāt work for you i donāt think you need to treat it like bitter medicine
NES Dragon Quest 1 is just purely this right off the bat and itās the one I like the most.
Admittedly I canāt actually compare because I never got around to playing any non-NES DQ because I intuited I would feel exactly as HardSoftJohn says he feels about them. Low-stakes slice of life in medieval Europe fantasy world sounds like the kind of aesthetic I would have difficulty mustering interest for.
Indeed, the other thing that changed from NES to SNES DQ is that the vibe of the world changed from harsh to nonthreatening. There is a Beowulf vibe to DQ1 which of course the English translator introduced with the Olde Englishe, but I think he caught onto an interesting connection. The primal story of DQ1 feels directly related to Beowulf: the foreign adventurer surviving brutal battles with the evils of nature and proving himself worthy of becoming king. Thatās something I personally really love and that the DQ series decided to move away from.
for me itās mostly a pleasure in seeing how theyāll change up their fixed structure this time - like you always know thereās gonna be another village with a problem caused by a boss monster. but sometimes the problem is goofier or more distinct than you were expecting (a village where everyone is turned into an animal), or they end up being weirdly emotional little character dramas (all the ones about lost love or etc), or they use this framework as an excuse to play with setting (investigating ghost rumours in a boarding school), or they throw in some kind of mechanical twist (you gain / lose a party member, or the ability to use magic, etc). they have a good hit rate i think but itās almost a structuring pleasure rather than an emotional one.
i also feel like the main thing making this distinct from earthbound or whatever is the constant knowledge of just how conservative dragon quest is as a franchise - itās almost like the games are always holding a threat over your head, the threat of collapsing into pure no-bullshit grindathon where you make numbers go up for expressionless ciphers in a nondescript world full of monsters youāve already seen before. and i mean thatās kind of what they are doing, and what they inevitably end up doing, in the postgame. so the little variations and bits of humour or invention in the different areas kind of have the sense of disproportionate relief of a suspended sentence, as if the developers are saying āok, weāll play along, weāll keep giving you the charming light-touch version of this game as opposed to the brutal serotonin hell one that you might secretly desireā. dragon quest narratives are a perpetual game of peekaboo between the friendly smiling face of the designers and the closed hands of the system theyāve set rolling, and part of the appeal is an uncertain back and forth between the two.
maybe iām just easy but these ones tend to get to me.
also something about the weird dissonance in tone between how tragic or grim the setting can be while everything is so cuddly cute always puts me in a mood when playing dq
feel like dragon quest is genuinely nice without being twee, overly paternal or patronising but if youāre not really feeling it from 4/7/11 you aināt gonna
i finished the dq11 demo yesterday and this is the compromise i eventually went with to get it to run at 30fps. i couldnāt give up on the fancy lighting and postprocessing cause they make it look way too good, so i sacrificed the internal resolution instead. makes the game look pixelated like a portable game and i kinda like it
you made the right choice imo
was actually playing around with DS emulation for Dragon Quest Monsters Joker on my phone and the right choice was definitely to render it at the native resolution. The outlines get super chunky in a satisfying way. High resolution rendering makes the outlines super thin and itās just not right
Iāve been mulling for a long time thereās like an underlying vocabulary weāve been missing about why exactly we enjoy videogames, especially ones like Dragon Quest. āseratonin/dopamineā are useful ones brought up itt although I suspect theyāre more metaphor than a literal description of whatās happening in the brain. I tried to develop the word āmeaningā at one point but I now think itās too general a word to inspire productive discussion.
An interesting word I was reminded of lately that I might replace it with is āsalienceā. A salient thing is something that at a gut level we understand the need to act upon. Games establish a closed hierarchy of cross-reinforcing salience such that it is effortless to justify taking action. The escapism of games comes from how that contrasts with the real world, where establishing saliency of a task often requires a heroic cognitive effort of meaning construction and maintenance to avoid lapsing into procrastination.
saliency is absolutely a factor, but i also think a major part is just finding that closed system and the experience of interacting with it beautiful, it has a sort of gestalt aesthetic meaning that isnāt reducible to simulating the experience of a simple life. this is something that unites āsimpleā games like dragon quest and ācomplexā games like idk dwarf fortress where itās harder to establish saliency but the rich experience of systemic beauty is similar. that experience isnāt just escapist, itās something you bring with you back into the world.