here is thread about my new favorite game. i’m going to do bullet points so you can pretend it’s a youtube video
- language
first of all, to play in english you have to use some external translation tools. this is a significant negative, no question about it. loose npc text is machine translated, though anything cutsceney in the “main quest” or in major sidequests is handled more deliberately (some of the people responsible for these tools like to say this stuff is “hand-translated,” though in reality it’s some mixture of full fan translation and hand-cleaned-up machine translation, and you can only speculate what’s what). that said, like 98% of the time you can navigate everything in complete comfort, and any hiccups are really pretty minor. you just have to adjust to the fact that an actual localization would likely be much more interesting in lots of sequences
but it’s still nice once in a while
- important things
moai heads are back, along with one of history’s wildest palette swaps
also one of the immediate charms of the game is that it’s a ten year old seven-expansions-deep mmo freak thing and this is its entire main menu
though don’t get me wrong, there are a few rabbit holes on the other side of that misc
- a lot of this is like a regular game
the reddityrs are right about something: you actually can play a lot of this alone as sort of a regular dragon quest if you want. whenever a player logs out their character becomes hireable at the party planning place and you can bring them into your party (for up to a week at a time, with locked level/equipment). you can be like i want a priest and a mage and a martial artist, though you have to take them as they are past that, which usually means scrolling past a few people who have logged out completely naked to find someone who’s at least holding a sword. and once you’ve hired them you get the classic
- combat
this is about where i guessed the game would fall apart for me, but it turns out dqx combat is not mmo-ified almost at all, no rotations or cooldowns or tank/healer/dps structures in sight, and instead it’s just regular actual dragon quest fights with a real-time atb-esque layer over them (there’s some cute nuance to the atb, too-- there’s a little breathing room after the command window pops up before you start losing time, and if you take too long it’ll kind of stack up your next turn and you’ll get to put in your following move very quickly)
on paper i would have thought that piloting a single character in a dragon quest party would be, i don’t know, too simple or something, but they have not skimped on those dq boss fight teeth-kick inflection points where someone gets dirt napped and half the party loses their buffs and you need to frantically restabilize, except now you’re trying to do it in real time while monitoring what other party members are doing and what attacks are coming from the boss(es) next and watching your own positioning (!!), and it can be hell on earth enough when you’re driving a single character (it owns yes) (asterisk, trying to suss out “balance” as you navigate a decade old mmo is of course a psychedelic challenge, and whether a given thing is too easy or too hard can be erratic, but so far it has been fun to try to punch up when the opportunity arises)
and yes the maybe biggest juke is that there’s also a layer of positioning/movement in combat, and it’s more dragon quest than i could have even hoped: small ideas, high clarity of vision, graceful execution… by which i mean, you know, frizz hits a single target, crackle does an aoe around the target, and bang does an aoe around the caster (i love this). even more beautifully, players and enemies push against each other in battle, which involves an equipment weight stat (with associated buffs/debuffs etc)-- so your warrior can probably push around a slime, but maybe can’t push around an orc; if your warrior and your thief push together they probably can push the orc around, but maybe they can’t push a golem; but maybe they’re still strong enough to stop the golem from moving toward the mage it’s trying to attack, which can effectively make it lose turns (!) in the middle of a fight (i strongly suspect some of these concepts are refugees from the famously abandoned non-menu-based early concept version of dqix)
- number boxes
dqvii (psx) is a turning point in the series in that it is 300 hours long instead of 30, and a key element of its shifted scope is well-known-- two hours before you get to the first fight, 25 hours before you can change classes. in the shift from Regular Length rpg to Very Long rpg dragon quest was uniquely successful imo because it was able to reflect the spirit of its delicate progression of Numbers up onto the broader structural level, onto the pace at which the games’ mechanical ceilings break and shift. so i have always been curious to see how this plays out over the mmo one
in dqx new systems/activities open up very gradually too, and so far (only partway through version 2!) it hasn’t acquiesced to the clean-cut mmo-style new dungeon/raid that supercedes the last one, or whatever. instead it’s e.g. the pyramid where you can go to war weekly that rewards enhancements for its own dedicated gear slot, or the boss fighting club for which new tokens are regularly released that let you invite other players to fight escalating bosses to enhance bespoke accessories, or the “master orb” that lets you start collecting drops from almost any enemy in the game that let you buff incredibly specific aspects of your character, or the 70 floor solo-only tower dungeon that restricts you to its unique class and item pool and lets you carry out items that enhance another bespoke gear slot back in the real world…
as opposed to these character-building systems, i will not be touching on minigames like the card game or the other card game or bingo or the slime races or sugoroku (beautiful) or pvp or crafting. (i think maybe we’re going to unlock a monster arena soon and i genuinely don’t know which category it’s going to fall into) (oh yeah, the monster raising stuff in this game is outrageous, and it actually is a lot like being able to build a second member of your party by hand)
here’s purakushis looking out a buranson in a fight on the other branch of the inexplicably gears-of-warian two-path “alliance” dungeon we did, where we each went in with a party of hired mooks to meet up and fight [redacted] at the end
for me, who loves pretty much every dragon quest System, this is all catnip, though for a regular person, idk, ymmv. you could easily play the game by setting almost all of that stuff aside and just playing the story stuff
- the story stuff
i’d say it’s almost experimentally weird in its opening sequences, though then it settles down for a while, and it’ll be like a little mmo quest, go kill this enemy, get this item, come back, cutscene, etc, except the cutscene parts are just straight-up little dq stories, like what would be in any new town you pass through in dqvi-xi. slapstick farces and tragedies. you can kind of start to see the outlines of the wider structure as you get into the meat of it and imo it does start to feel like going through the motions a bit… until it doesn’t anymore, and since then i’ve kind of just underestimated it over and over. legitimate narrative predecessors to some of the best parts of dqxi. sometimes there’s just a completely out of pocket side quest like a three hour mansion murder mystery adventure game sequence or you know actually i’m not going to detail this other one i just decided or other things i wouldn’t wish spoiled on my worst enemy
between the heavy story structure and the real-game combat i do think this is the closest thing to the multiplayer jrpg that many of us may have imagined mmos to be as young people first hearing the term
- why make thread
if you want to know anything about dragon quest x in english your only options are a handful of youtube gamers and people in blighted discords that have no taste and they’re all saying the most annoying things imaginable and they’re wrong half the time anyway. i’ve written more about the game in this post than i’ve ever seen in one place in english. in a way it’s an interesting change of pace for a game like this, being on the tip of the spear, not being able to look shit up all the time! and i figure there gotta be a few other sbutts than me who’ve always wanted to know a little more about it
i would of course never actively recruit people into anything that was even sort of an mmo.
(…though there is a free trial that includes the whole base game and i do have a stack of metal slime king boss coins burning a hole in my pocket and you can put the in-game team’s blue rose crest on any shield and i will invite anyone’s monsters to a triple meat party on the japanese-language app as soon as they’re on my friend list)
and of course none of this would be possible if the following was not a picture of me irl hitting the post button right now
