All I ever want to do is enjoy the view. So symbol encounters with real-time aggro are the worst. They should only be allowed to move when the player does.
For DQ8, they could maybe have it so you can turn encounters on or off with a button press. The default state could have the MC with weapons drawn, encounters on. The other state, the MC puts their weapon away and you can roam freely.
i could rank them but for me itās more just broad tiers
S+: III, IV, V, VII, VIII, XI
S: I
A+: II, VI
D: IX
my partnerās been playing through a bunch of them voraciously for the first time the last few months and as usual every game continues to reveal new depths
i was really stunned at the jump from playing II to III back-to-back, somehow in the year between those two games they leapfrogged from interesting rpg experiments to being at the absolute height of their powers. wild
i really do like DQVI, really, but i canāt deny that, for fuckās sake, itās between V and VII
played all the way through DQV ps2 for the first time. it is extremely beautiful obviously and the battle animations are incredible yes. i am on team deborah but i donāt care too much. itās probably the best version to play, but honestly i donāt like the fan translation very much. i donāt think it has much character! the game itself does of course. waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night realizing that, even though by the end of the game everyone in your party gets much more powerful than papas ever was, he could take two actions in one turn and youāll never be able to. masterstroke
then i am currently being absolutely blown away by playing through VII for the first time in like 15 years. the writing whips ass constantly. there are places where an awkward line or a dialogue box pops up that was clearly translated in a vacuum, definitely, but there are huge sections where it just kicks my ass over and over again. one of the most recent was this part where this petulant self-described genius guy is being told by his buddy that he should tell his orphaned daughter that heās actually her father, and his buddy is like come on, she already really admires you as an architect, and his reply is, āyeah, well, as an architect, i still donāt want to talk to her.ā iām still shrieking at the tiny texture of āyeah, well, as an architect,ā just totally owned. also the whole game is just wilding the whole time in structure and tone and shape. like, you look at it and think itās just taking all the usual DQ stories and literally sealing them apart into separate chapters as a cute gimmick, and that would be cute enough, but itās so much smarter than that at every turn. all the real ideas are bubbling around underneath. and thereās this really nice swarthy working class flavor fisherman village youāre always coming home to. and your alcoholic side-hustling uncle, who also at one point genuinely piece-of-shitly threatens to harm you, is sketched so gently and beautifully. so many of the stories are tragic and also willing to really juke on you.
anyway weāre getting into the back half soon, which is where i start to really have no memory of anything that happens at all, but right now i suspect iām easily going to move VII up to the position of best pre-XI dragon quest probably (and if purple turban man has a competitor, i do think itās dirty little green hood kid)
if you play them in order you get to III and youāre like āwow, i had no idea what they were capable of! and now i doā but then you get hit that same way every single game after that (VI and IX aside). right up to XI! maybe XI most of all, somehow!
anyway dqviiiā¦ itās on that otherwise-peerless tier with FFXII and not much else of just incredibly luxurious, generous ps2 rpg localization. hard to ignore on just its raw audiovisual power. random battles, voice acting, waiting on alchemy pot, skill point shit, iām on board with all of it. everything i remember about the game right now is something i like. anyway looking forward to assessing it again after iām done with VII over here, at which point i will doubtless be dragonquestposting further~~
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what was the deal with translation patches of V and VI before the DS localizations, can someone remind me? were they regarded as playable by an English audience in the early 2000s?
in general I really like heartbeatās work (on both their two original titles and the remakes), I think itās weirdly underrated in the English speaking world because we never got VI and itās no oneās favourite, and VII came around as this labyrinthine throwback
anyway fully agree with your ranking except Iād bump VIII to a C tier just above IX (Iām sorry, I hate the ps2 and I hate level 5 even more, part of the reason I was motivated to take over this website was as a corrective to people liking the ps2 too much) and put XI on celestial tier
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almost did make a different tier for xi. it really is the best
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seriously. that neither of these is totally an option for the Smash character makes me sad. at least we get a sorta purple man costume, but bāmon.
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i have no real opinion about the Dragon Quest series but i feel like i canāt let this aggression pass by for the sake of ps2-loving comrades. (iām ps2-neutral)
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v. excited by this, pls expound at your leisure
I hate the PS2 because we got ours used from GameStop and I learned how to open it up and adjust the laser calibration gear manually to make it read blue discs when my piano teacher gave me a copy of Okage: Shadow King. I credit this with a host of subsequent personality flaws.
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Itās so weird seeing the hardcore DQ heads on here rate XI so heavily, because every time anyone talks about it, it sounds like a massive pain in the ass that drags on for way too long and I have only lost desire to play it as Iāve heard people talk about it
I canāt say I have the same feelings about DQ7 and how people talk about that
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I donāt even like DQ that much myself, just a concerned citizen, and XI is unbelievably breezy
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You will never win in this. I will take my PS2 library to my grave.
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At the end of that console generation I traded in my Gamecube for a PS2, bought a few games (notably Persona 3 and Odin Sphere, and then also some more Vanillaware games and Persona 4 later on). Borrowed a whole giant stack from my friend who was thrilled to see me catch up on all the non-Nintendo stuff Iād been missing out on.
Gotta be honest, no regrets in hindsight. I donāt think I played more than a few hours of almost anything I borrowed off of my friend, which included a lot of the Big Important Stuff.
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Also I think all the Dualshocks were dogshit until the PS4, those convex thumbsticks, woof
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the only console i have big opinions about being overrated is the SNES tbh. beyond a handful of (extremely overexposed) great games the quality really really drops off. that goes for SNES music tooā¦ thereās the great soundtracks, and then thereās a lot of other just totally flat stuff. thereās a clunky stiffness to a lot of bad or even decent SNES games i canāt stand.
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V was playable, VI was obviously unfinished (and i believe thatās still the case?)
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yeah that was like the icā forums founding thesis to the extent I remember it
my anti PS2 stance is mostly that it was like several orders of magnitude less innovative than the PS1 and contributed a lot toward driving up budgets toward stodgy linear stuff, and I donāt like that the PS1 isnāt remembered as like, lightyears more important
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Mobile version of 6 is really good. In the original SNES version however, there was some weird stuff going on with the stats. The remake smooths it out and it has a comparable feel to 2.
Did someone say PS2? I love PS2.
PS2 has volume over the PS1 but that does come with a glut of crap. I see PS1 and 2 as a āstormingā and āformingā for 3D ideas before completely norming out in the HD era.
PS2 is how I learnt to read maps
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thatās just re: the translations, the snes one hasnāt been touched since 2001 (!) apparently
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I wonāt argue about its hardware or being a moving force but IMO I donāt think any other console has a library as varied, wide and containing as many interesting peaks of titles. If you were to ask me for best game of the big three at the time Iād probably only give you 5 games for GC, 3 for Xbox but I could easily go for 20 under PS2s umbrella.
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