real dragon quest game dragon quest x

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

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  • 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…

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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

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I will definitely be using that last image, thank you.

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How often is the machine translated stuff total nonsense versus just funny somewhat nonsense?

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honestly like 95% of the time it’s just maybe slightly strangely worded or somewhat flavorless but totally clear. there have been text boxes that made no sense at all but they’re rare, at most there’s usually just a line or two you have to glaze over to get to what they’re really talking about, like this npc saying this before they get to whatever glamour information they’re on about

and then once in a while someone will be comprehensible but way out of pocket

there used to be a guy who said he couldn’t wait to get onto the cruise ship to find somebody to fuck but i just checked and he toned himself down to saying something about flirting unfortunately

sometimes it does feel like it’s rolling pronouns at random, i think probably in conjunction with that machine translation feeling that it’s taking sentence by sentence in isolation. and not just he/she, if someone is supposed to be saying “i hope you can help him get his sword back” it might come out like “she hopes he can help you get your sword back.” that and the occasional repeated sentence are the things that come up most commonly

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“Incarnation of the mode” is phenomenal

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This is prime living vicariously through other posters. I liked DQIX despite the lack of a normal cast of characters and always thought I’d thrive in DQX. The idea of an evergreen dragon quest game as a pretense to regularly visit all those lovely systems is just too much.

How are interactions with other players? Does the obviousness of the translation layer hurt you?

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you too can Log On…

almost every time i sit down to play i interact with random players about zero times other than maybe swapping a thumbs-up once in a while, marching through a hundred players if i go past one of the more populated hubs, or i guess market board transactions

we did do a matchmade 8-player holiday event thing, that was pretty bewildering. it’s mostly trading common phrases, you can set hotkeys for sending little “hello” and “thank you” stamps, people seem to use them frequently the few times i’ve been in parties

the one time there was direct communication is when we were in queue for four-player sugoroku (which has significant perks when compared to playing with 1-2 players). when i only sort of knew what i was doing and we beefed it at the boss of the board i did end up taking out my phone to google translate some of what they were saying

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oh, but if this is your question, the translation tools connected to the game don’t do anything with player communication. you can chat in english in-game though

and look who we ran into last night

he said he misses his wife and son and would love to see them and all but dang it he just can’t stop exploring the maze right now, could we post this letter for him when we get the chance

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Fantastic

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Fantastic write up, thank you so much for this!

I would probably play this if it got an actual localization. Or even just the offline version. Hope springs eternal…

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in dragon quest x online you can recruit specific species of monsters. you have to get a corresponding scouting book and then switch vocations to either “monster master” (can tame dragons, beasts, slimes, etc) or “item master” (can tame clockwork cuckoo, restless armor, etc) and go out and find them. they take up a party slot and you can only have one in your party at a time, and you have to be in a tamer class to hang out with one… until you get their happiness to 100+, then you can bring them out on any class. research currently suggests that the fastest way to do this is to throw/have your friends throw meat parties on the app and invite your monsters to the meat party tables. there’s a huge monster arena thing that i ain’t barely scratched the surface of yet, but they’re more interesting as legitimate party members anyway

they have full ass skill trees, and you get to choose which new trees they gain access to as you “reincarnate” to them, aka prestige them past their level cap of 50, which also raises their stats and gives them extra starting skill points each time you do it. they also wear normal character equipment, all matched up with player classes-- golem can wear the gear a warrior/paladin could wear, healslime can wear priest/sage shit, etc-- and once they’ve prestiged once they can wear any of that gear regardless of level requirement (yes, the game does have mmo-style level requirements for weapons/armor)

so they end up becoming potentially very strong as you keep leveling them, and they also have another major advantage over the hireable player characters you usually fill out your team with, which is that you can look at a list of all your monster’s spells and skills and put in little check marks to determine which ones it can actually use in battle. since you control their equipment and since you can raise them to fill out any specific role-- golem can be a heavy defender guy, healslime can be your party’s whole healer, marionette could be a status dumper, etc (with even more nuanced specs available as you swap skill trees around)-- it ends up feeling a lot like just leveling up the other party members in a regular game. and if you’re playing with one other person and you both bring a monster, well, that’s the whole party!!

however the real reason i’m posting about this instead of posting about the pvp mode i was thinking about posting about is: i previously posted about prancing pillar appearing (that’s the kind of alliteration we’re missing out on here without a real localization smh) after a long hiatus but turns out it’s actually been shown even more respect than that and was tapped to be one of the 30 recruitable monsters

and if you give it a shield it wears it like this

that would be worth a post itself but i also happened to get a two-seater mount recently and i found out you can ride in it with your fellow monster

i was of course very excited about golem shrinking down like that to sit in the back seat. but the reason for this post is that, in yet another instance of my repeatedly underestimating dragon quest x’s juice, i assumed that prancing pillar would also shrink down

i was wrong

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every time i say fuck it and decide to play dragon quest x online for more than four straight hours a bunch of insane things happen, pretty much without fail. this last time we ended up following through a quest line about the summoning of nokturnus, who is the kind of estark-tier super murder bastard figure from dragon quest vi. (funny to see such heavy dqvi representation, it’s often so overlooked. in fact a character from dragon quest vi also shows up prominently through the quests and says all she does is chase nokturnus around through existences since he left her as the sole survivor from her world (so maybe all of dqvi world has been annihilated in dqx canon??))

it’s a long line of quests where you help people who are suffering from nightmares and solve riddles that have you trace shapes on the town maps and read numbers on statues and make pillows for sad husbands. and you keep having nightmares yourself where a massive figure (nokturnus turns out) is like stringing you up and etching runes onto your soul or some shit

thanks to the game’s bizarrely, consistently high level of cutscene directorial flair he also keeps being depicted like this

you also find out that this all ties in deeply with events and characters that appeared very early in the base game in fairly alarming ways. this is all “optional” “side” “content,” which are concepts which it is becoming increasingly clear that the game has no respect for

anyway, what i really wanted to share: at one point you find out a dwarf guy is being haunted by the dream curse and you should go help him. he’s deep in this cave under the desert working on this project that you have to help him with. his project is to get this special jewel out of the ceiling of the cave. the jewel has been hidden by a magic spell and has unique properties that can help break curses or something, i don’t quite remember. the jewel was some super powerful warlock’s third eye, as in your standard glowing third eye in the middle of your forehead situation. it’s up there because the warlock finished up what he was doing in the cave years ago and “cast the ancient spell known as zoom” to leave the cave and “shot up so fast that he smashed his head on the cave’s ceiling” and his third eye was dislodged from his head and stuck into the ceiling. the injury was lethal and he fell to the ground and the last thing he did was cast a spell that would keep the jewel hidden forever so nobody would ever know what happened

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important update

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she prance on my pillar till i put a shield on my crotch to prevent excessive damage

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just got an email that they have a free weekend at the end of the month and i should come back…
hmm…

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