Probably, if everything fully ended there I woulda been satisfied.
Stillll there’s multiple cherries on top of Act 3 so I shouted 11/10 at the staff roll.
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It’s the third half of the game
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“post-game” is crucial imo
i strongly feel there should be some spoiler tags in some of these posts
yeah it’s essential
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Story-wise, it’s non-essential (unless you are really into the world and want it fleshed out more, it’s essentially a side “what if” story that completely rewrites act 2) but if you were enjoying the battle system as much as I was (on hard monsters) it has some of the most rewarding and difficult fights in the game.
(Also I kind of liked the reoccuring gag in act 3 where your teammates are impressed/annoyed that you seem to know everything that is about to happen and you are too strong)
I got the platinum trophy on this last night. Total save time of about 80 hours, though playtime was a bit more than that due to deaths and reloads. Never grinded for levels until act 3, when level 99 is both essential and getting there is trivial.
On that note, man oh man this game had a satisfying cycle of “1)wtf this boss is impossible, fuck this game 2)OK wait maybe I can do this 3)dang just need a littttle help from RNGesus 4)Holy shit I did it!” for almost every boss right up until the end.
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Carried on, got all my levels back but
It’s difficult to really described why I’m so bothered that the party don’t get all their memories of the original timeline back too
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yes it’s really pretty dark, i like it a lot. the idea that the mc is the only one who knows and that he decides to not talk to anyone about it… it’s so lonely and weird!
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Thoughts on dq6 and dq7. I have been playing them back to back for about 5 years now. I like to take it slow. I am 115 hours into 7 and still on disc 1 because I feel the need to talk to every NPC multiple times, to see how their dialogues have changed.
Choosing to play the DS version of 6 and the PlayStation version of 7 really helps you notice the similarities between the two, since the DS games kind of have the same look and feel as a PS1 dragon quest. It’s clear they are both going for the same type of experience. There’s no real plot motivation behind either game, it’s like some kind of classical anthology of adventures. There is a distant evil being, threatening world peace. The only thing motivating you to go to the next town is because it’s the next stop on your map, and maybe it will bring you closer to the source of the evil, but probably not. It feels you’re never actually going to face the final boss. So when you do it feels kind of amazing.
They are both developed by the mysterious company Heartbeat, who disbanded after the PS1 remake of 4. I’m pretty sure they all just retired at age 30 thanks to all of that ¥¥. All of the Heartbeat DQs have very rich art direction and battle animations. 6 and 7 have very strong earth tones. 7 in particular has some great mud textures, accented by orangey wooden textures inside houses and ships, and orange candlelight. It looks like a Saturn game–I love it.
The problem I’m finding with 7 is the way the game breaks up and feeds you the quest. There is a “loop” in this game which doesn’t really vary 99% of the time:
- Get teleported to cursed town
- Figure out what’s wrong
- An NPC who is particularly affected by what’s going on, ends up joining your party
- Go to a cave/dungeon/tower with the NPC
- Fight a boss
- Go back to town and get thanked by everyone
- Travel back to present and visit the present day version of the town
- Find the shard which allows you to teleport to the next town
- Repeat
Maybe that would be OK, but it’s always some demon henchman pulling the levers who ends up being the boss of that area. And it’s always just some curse that needs to be broken. They will repeat the curses across multiple towns. I think there are four towns in a row where the curse is that everyone is turned to stone. Usually they try to incorporate some kind of personal, tragic element to the monster’s curse, but it just feels a little played out after a while.
Maybe it’s because I played 6 first, and a long time ago at that, but I think I remember every town in 6 being really different with regards to drama and the steps you have to take to “complete” the town. I’m pretty sure there were some towns where just like, stuff happened to your characters that didn’t really have anything to do with a Demon Lord.
Also in 6, in order to find out where to go next, you had to just follow the path or maybe look at your map once or twice–it felt more natural. And at the beginning of 6, there’s a big fat “vertical slice” that lets you experience “beating” a dragon quest game in about 15-20 hours. In fact at that point I thought I was done and playing some kind of post-game. I thought that was brilliant. In 7 there’s just a hub world at the beginning and the whole rest of the game is in 3 hour chunks. Although I looked at a FAQ table of contents and I think disc 2 is going to be one big endgame thing for the most part–looking forward to it.
And as I’ve said before, the party chat system in that 6 DS remake is amazing. Every member has a unique response for every single NPC text box and there’s like almost no continuity errors. The party has so much more personality that way. I really wanted that in 7 and I think that was a huge missed opportunity in the 3DS remake.
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oh man i’m also playing dqvi right now and i’m nearing the end and i’ll probably make a post about it soon
i’m not surprised that it’s read as pale compared to iv and v but it still pretty much rules!
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DQ3 is probably the best one of all
i keep coming back to that.
DQ3 is so perfect, it’s absurd!
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Dragon Quest 3 is my favorite as well. When it first came out, all I had were a few ads and reviews from magazines to imagine what the game must be like. I didn’t see how I’d ever get to play it, however, given how expensive new games were.
Apparently I talked about it a lot, because a kid in our neighborhood asked for the game for Christmas after hearing about it from me and/or my siblings. It was still quite new at the time. That kid had a different idea of what video games were supposed to be like, and didn’t enjoy it at all. I traded him several other games for it.
I eventually managed to get my dad to try DQ3, and he became hooked. Until then, he’d also had an incomplete idea of what video games were like and had been generally opposed to them.
In Dragon Quest 11, I appreciated the direct references to the third game–the characters, music, and even a little of the early English. I think the series never should have abandoned that language style, but I understand why they did.
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Got unstuck in Dragon Quest V after a two year break, so maybe now there’s a hope I’ll finish this someday
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For their next big budget outing I’m voting a new Rocket Slime
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I’ve been playing the Dragon Quest Monsters remake (fan translation) on 3DS. I have words. I’m sorry.
Dragon Quest Monsters (The original one on the GB) takes a few important ideas from roguelikes and implements them into a very basic Dragon Quest game. The major thing is randomized dungeons - the most important parts of randomization being “How far am I from the stairs” and “what items am I going to find along the way.” There’s also a harsher penalty for death than usual: All your items and half your gold.
A couple of other important things:
- You can only carry (I think) 10 items at a time.
- Healing opportunities are few and far between.
- You can’t warp home without a, uh…warp wing I guess.
- The encounter rate is fairly high
- You can only bring 3 monsters.
So, all of this combined makes the game feel like they took the dungeon crawling from DQ1, smashed it together with Pokemon, and added some randomness to make a fairly barebones dungeon crawler. It’s not brutally difficult, but item management and health management are extremely important. Each dungeon is constantly draining your resources through random encounters, harmful floor tiles, and just straight up bad luck. At the end of the day, it feels like pushing on a boundary little by little, and constantly assessing risk versus reward. That is the key DQ experience to me, and probably why I didn’t really connect with DQXI.
The other key feature is breeding, which is much more complex than Pokemon in certain ways, and also absolutely necessary to succeed. This is improved upon and there are more monsters so…nothing to say here.
They fucked up everything else.
So, in the remake:
- You have seemingly unlimited inventory space and you don’t lose items even if you do die (just gold)
- At the last floor you always have the opportunity to heal completely.
- You can warp home whenever you want for free
- The encounters aren’t random (you see them on the map and can avoid them)
- You can take eight monsters with you! Four in battle, and four as backup that can be switched out in the middle of a battle with no turns lost.
But here’s what they kept: randomized dungeons. Except now the environments are 3D and occasionally deeply annoying to navigate.
DQM was already an extremely barebones game. There’s one town, no overworld, and mostly just dungeon diving. In the remake, they took out the dungeons and replaced them with fields you can leave at any time. The whole structure collapses. There’s no real difficulty curve to support the breeding side of things, so getting new monsters is, while necessary, extremely unexciting to me.
On the flipside, they didn’t do anything that modern DQ does, like beautiful environments, funny characters…charm. So it’s just this lifeless husk of a game that, two hours in, has already shown me the entire path to the end of the game.
I’m all about easy games, but you have to have something to support the player actually caring about the game.
And yes I know this is a 7 year old game for children but god damnit DQM is one of my favorite games and I’ve been excited about it for like 3 years, and what they made is an insult to the children who play it.
EDIT: okay 60 seconds after posting this i feel weird dunking on a kid’s game for kids. i’m just a very sad child right now.
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Seems like an urge from the era of Diablo trying to commercialize roguelikes, not our modern era more popularly conversant in the benefits of permadeath and resource scarcity and random generation than at any time.
Is Monsters Joker like DQM? I played it back when and I can’t remember it anymore. I just remember that I liked it a bunch… I kind of want to play it again to revisit it but I don’t know if it’s worth it and I have too much on my plate as it is…
I feel like it was a way to support the structure of breeding and the tournament more than a decision to commercialize roguelikes. All of the features are actually present in older DQ games in terms of resource management, limited inventory space, etc. They just…put the dungeons in blenders and spun it around. I’m guessing it was a very practical decision to not spend a bunch of time handcrafting a world.
They did add a bit of rogueiness to it, like the special floors you can encounter, but it feels very loyal to Dragon Quest in most ways.
In DQM2 they dropped the randomization thing in favor or a more traditional JRPG Overworld/Town/Dungeon format (although it has its quirks). The difference between the two games being that they already had all the breeding tables and mechanics in place, all the monster art they needed, etc. So they were able to make the game they wanted to make the first time.
At least, that’s how I would surmise it happened, obviously I have no real information to support this.
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Joker is pretty decent! It’s much more like DQ8 in presentation and style, so much more charming. Kind of forgettable IMO but really not bad.
I think Joker 3 for 3DS got translated recently.
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Thanks, I’ll check out some reviews and see if I want to play any of those 3! Didn’t know it had sequels
did you play any of xi on hard mode?
i also love dqm! i played it when i was a kid when i had basically no idea what a jrpg was and had a pretty wild time
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