Ramblings of a Gamer

Last couple days have been a little bit of “same old”, but there are a few interesting things that have come about to mix things up a bit. I’ve spent a chunk more time in World of Warcraft gearing up my characters, but most of my WoW time has been spent working on achievements, with the Winter’s Veil holiday starting this Tuesday past (15th). I have played a bunch more Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as well, but the most notable thing that I’ve done in the past few days, is start a “Dragon Quest Marathon”. Of course there is a good chance that if you know the Dragon Quest series, you know it as Dragon Warrior. The series has had a long and twisty history in the west and so these things get mixed up a lot. The series should have been Dragon Quest all along, but was not for Copyright reasons. I believe the 8th installment of the game was the first to be called Dragon Quest in the west, but thats not what you’re here to read about now is it.

What exactly is the reason behind all of this? Well, Dragon Quest is a series that I have always meant to really delve right into. The Dragon Quest series is one of the biggest RPG series there is, and even older than Final Fantasy. As a self proclaimed RPG fanatic, it’s one of those series that I owe it to myself to experience. The thing is, Dragon Quest has really lost out to Final Fantasy in the west. While I was able to play most of the Final Fantasy series sequentially growing up, Dragon Quest was virtually unheard of. Meanwhile in Japan, Dragon Quest is the biggest selling video game franchise of all time. It has become so integrated into their culture, that it’s said you can ask a random resident of Japan who has never played a video game in their life to describe “slime”, and their description will be of the Dragon Quest slime. I’m not really sure what made Final Fantasy so much more successful in the west, I suppose it just adapted better to modern culture. It’s actually rather ironic to make this comparison, seeing how the companies responsible for Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (Square and Enix respectively) merged in 2003, to become Square-Enix. The long and short of it though, is that Dragon Quest 9 is coming out in early 2010 (in English that is, it has already been released in Japan) and I am excited about it. I own Dragon Quest 8 and it was a truly superb game, but upon reflecting I realized that I had never really played most of the series. I played a good chunk of The first game when I was little and I rented Dragon Quest 7 once, but that was about it. Thus I embarked upon my journey to play them all.

The first step was, of course, to beat the first game. As I mentioned, I had actually played a good deal of it already on the NES, as my uncle owned it. For a while I was quite addicted to it, but I only ever got so far. For the purposes of this “Marathon” though, I instead opted to play the Super Nintendo version. This version was never actually released in the west, but through the wonders of Emulation and a group called “RPG-One” a fan translated version of the game is available. I’m unsure how changed the game is, but it should be mostly/all in the form of updated graphics and sound. At any rate, I beat the first installment of the game today, and got a start on the second. I beat the final boss by a very tight margin, but was actually quite underleveled. I want to say that the first game is a masterpiece, but I would be lying, quite frankly. Not that this is any fault of the game’s, its simply a matter of being almost 24 years old. Some of it, like the size of the game world, comes simply from technological restraints. Other things, like party size or encounter rate, are just a sign of the times. Back in 1986 when the game was released, RPGs were tabletop games, so pretty much the entire game was built without precedent or anything to refer to. This was one of the games that shaped the RPG world, it didn’t have a mold to work from.

In reality, a lot of the game’s problems are common between all older RPGs. The encounter rate is rather high, and yet even if you fight every battle you will have to do a lot of grinding for gold and/or experience. In most RPGs today you can run from story point to story point, crawl through dungeons etc and never have to grind at all, but story points are practically non-existent in Dragon Quest. The game actually has a very open world-esque feel to it ironically, but notby design. It’s simply a matter of “you need these items to beat the game… Ok go find them”. There is no story path, very little guidance, and all the guidance that you do get is in the form of talking to random townspeople. Battles are extremely simplistic, as they are always 1 on 1, you versus one monster. The majority of your opponents can do nothing but attack, and even the ones with magic typically only have offensive spells. Your own options in battle almost always comes down to kill or heal. There are “sleep” and “stopspell” spells, but very few enemies use them, and I beat the entire game without using them even once myself. Even the final boss battle comes down to a balancing of killing and healing yourself when low. The biggest thing that will decide if you win or not is if you have enough HP to keep healing yourself long enough to kill him. In the end, the game is just really simplistic. The whole thing is a matter of getting yourself strong enough to go to the next area and do what you need to do there, and hoping you get enough experience while your at it that you don’t need to grind too much to go to the next area after that. That is, if you have any clue where to go or what to do, which you may well not. In the end, I’m very glad to have finally played through the whole thing. It’s definitely not aged particularly well, but I was still able to find some fun in it. The final battle was a real teeth-gritter despite the game’s age.  The next game promises to be a good deal better. My understanding is that Dragon Quest II is one of the series’ masterpieces. 3 Part members, multiple enemy battles, and a more existent storyline should make it more of an experience than a grind. I guess we will soon see.