IDK I’ve just tried really hard to make status work against the pyramid boss, but the only status effect that worked was stopspell on the support enemies, and it only worked one time out of three, and it only lasted one turn before running out.
The pyramid boss was one of the only two bosses in the first 10 hours. And I wouldn’t use status effects against non-bosses encounters. The actual use cases for status effects seem pretty niche
there are later bosses that you more or less have to stunlock to defeat (the aforementioned garboyle if you don’t have insulatle, the ogre and the gaia’s navel wizard to a degree though you can kind of get by with attack attacker for the former, which is a near-essential skill that only monster wrangler gets and fairly early on too). leg sweep is extremely good for this if you get annoyed trying to land fizzle and your martial artist is fast enough to go before the boss.
anyway as borderline useless as magic damage is, you will basically want one character who will spend 4 out of every 5 or so turns casting and refreshing oomph and kabuff in most boss fights, like that can’t even be your dedicated healer’s job so you will need one near-dedicated buff caster and it’s not hard to give them something else to do on that 5th turn (this is my Mage → Thief, and Thief is mostly just to buff their agility after all that)
playing dragon quests has made me wonder why every other jrpg story throughout history is incoherent nonsense
I’ve been playing dq3 remake so much lately… Finally a video game for sophisticated middle aged people
finished dqvi sfc. hits way better than the remake, no question. big surprise huh (have i announced publicly that i have become an evangelist for dqxi original over dqxi s?). that snes soundtrack really beats ass. i love dq remakes but the foundational texts must be prioritized. for example dqii hd-2d was pretty great, some real real interesting stuff going on there, but it also needed to shut the fuck up. should have had half as many words in it. at most. maybe more importantly they should have been better words (dqi hd wasn’t as bad). anyway, as far as vi goes,
vi has a real great ending, like a top two dragon quest endings ending. maybe the best dungeons in the series, in a way?? real brutalizer of a final boss, i’d say it might be the hardest one. the greater plot skeleton feels almost radical. all the individual self-contained stories are lovely, and a shocking number of them involve very little to no combat at all-- depending what route you take through the game you could a have a few hours straight of just little adventure game sequences. beautiful. pretty unbelievable how structurally open the whole thing is, actually, i think that’s much more key to its identity than “two world maps” or whatever. they haven’t gone further in that direction before or since
pretty mechanically compelling too. a lot of stuff established that persists to this day. i also suspect yuji horii was really inventing something here, even if culture still hasn’t come to terms with it:
it’s too bad this english patch is the best one we have, it really is full of holes. some of them are really funny at least. nobody mentions that it lists the stats as strength, speed, agility, wisdom, style?? (changing “agility” to “speed” for some reason, and what it calls agility is actually resilience??) (don’t get me wrong though, it’s totally playable!)
anyway i guess i have another favorite dragon quest now. how many is that. at this rate i’m gonna have to re-open my heart for a dqix playthrough someday
now, as far as dopplegangers hunting and evading each other, detectives navigating to specific coordinates in order to be sucked through unexplained holes in spacetime, an unspeakable secret evil on the other side of a mysterious ring of electric blue flames, the ambiguous nature of identity, and literally living inside a dream…
Damn guess Sugiyama didn’t just work on the music but also did map design for DQ3 huh :
I have tried my hardest to keep a gadabout for the whole game on draconian mode but I have failed. When in a boss battle they contributed almost nothing, then near the end shocked everyone, making them all lose a turn and ultimately the fight, that was it. I immediately reclassed to Sage and grinded on metal slimes for 20 minutes
Got the bird in DQ3HD. That’s a great moment. What a beautiful beast! I wonder whether its design influenced that Ho-oh pokemon. It’s so empowering to fly so high above the world map and alight on shiny spots in an instant. It’s silly how unnecessarily articulated the bird controls are. I can fly low or high for no real purpose… Just because I can.
I already knew about the twist at the end of DQ3 where you go to Alefgard, but it’s actually much cooler than I expected in practice. Is this the first time a JRPG has let you return to the map from a previous game? Another excellent idea Pokemon borrowed from this.
Zelda II did it before.
well. dqii didn’t exactly not do it
Might try a Spanish translation of the famicom version DQ1&2 to practice. I was playing Morrowind, but I imagine there will be less reading and less complex sentences in DQ1&2. And it’s not a real-time game, so that helps.
RPGs are fun for this but I personally think Famicom text is too short and spare for good language learning. GBA/DS were sweet spots for me when I started playing games in Spanish.
Thanks for the input. I’ll consider looking into some GBA games. That is a pretty big lacunae in my gaming knowledge, so it would be fun to fill some of it in.
Every item in DQ3 HD-2D has an unique drawn picture, and the only time you can see them is in the span of two seconds after opening a treasure chest they’re inside. Equipment menus and even the item list remain black and white, without pictures or anything to differentiate a leather armor from a medicine herb, other than text. Even though each of these items has its own picture stored in the game
This seems too wasteful to not be deliberate. The Dragon Quest menus have to remain austere, and this is a more important part of the Dragon Quest experience than bonking your head against the ceiling by mistake by using Zoom indoors (removed from this version) This is fucked
Activate “classic mode” by closing your eyes every time you open a treasure chest
it’s esp. bullshit because while this is kinda true, sometimes it isn’t. like dq8 UI isn’t perfect but i fucking love the little icons
did you know the japanese original doesn’t have those
quite interesting i’m sure you’ll agree… (i also love the item icons)
you get to see the weapon sprites again in battle at least but yeah this also mystified me, a lover of tiny pictures of a sword or magical orb
Level-5 are a mixed bag, but they always deliver on item sprites in menus.
wow I wasn’t sure what to do with this japanese dq8 I got from rudie at the meetup, had no idea I was actually now in possession of the superior version of the work
