My love towards Final Fantasy as a franchise grew immensely over the last year or two, even for entries that I straight up dislike, all thanks to Dragon Quest. People say Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden… are same games each and every year, and while there’s a lot of truth to that I feel there’s an even bigger culprit that somehow is never brought up, and I’m not sure why.
A while back I straight up trashed Dragon Quest VIII, on this very forum, not understanding the love for it given its lack of narrative and any sort of depth to characters and gameplay along with some other flaws. Feeling that I perhaps unfairly misjudged an entire franchise based on a single game I gave Dragon Quest another shot. Multiple shots, that is. Played Dragon Quest IV, V and VI, in that very order.
The difference between each game is marginal at best, up to the point where I’m confident and arrogant enough to say that it’s the same game over and over again. Narrative wise, they’re identical, extremely shallow characters need to stop ultimate evil while facing and going through the exact same tropes along the way, ie collect legendary weapons to do so (that’s pretty much the depth of the story). The villains themselves, well, a demon that’s evil for the sake of being evil, that’s it, unfortunately there’s nothing more to it. Imagine posing a question “who’s your favorite DQ villain?”, just pick either one, it doesn’t matter. All of which would be fine I guess if the gameplay itself wasn’t identical as well. The strategy, spells, items I used to defeat the final boss of Dragon Quest IV are the ones I used in Dragon Quest VIII, even if you wanted to go with a different approach there’s no means to do so. Dragon Quest VI played with the formula a bit, but only on the surface. They’re also constantly using same assets in the form of pretty much everything, naturally it got better over the years graphics wise, but it’s the same visual style. Therefor for the life of me I couldn’t give you an answer to the following question “what is your most memorable place in Dragon Quest?”, there’s isn’t one, cave and cities you go through Dragon Quest IV are the one you go through VIII. But the biggest testament to the laziness of the franchise is that they didn’t even bother to overhaul simple things such as inventory management, for some unknown reason leaving what is possibly the worst, clunkiest, most outdated inventory managements I’ve ever seen in an RPG ever. Dragon Quest V is the only game in the series I actually enjoyed, it felt like some effort went into it introducing, but not going into quite enough, story ideas that were actually neat.
Dragon Quest is by far the laziest RPG franchise I ever had displeasure to experience, a true testament that you can sell anything based on nostalgia alone investing minimal effort.
Thus why I became to appreciate Final Fantasy more, Square made an attempt to make each game somewhat unique and fresh, sometimes it wouldn’t work, but often it did.
End of rant.
Not to be all negative nancy, anyone played Dragon Quest XI? There’s no denying that it looks downright gorgeous, but I’m not willing enough to play the same game over again, just prettier.
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Exactly you understood friend, there is nothing extraordinary to play Dragon Quest. I also note that Final Fantasy has put the bar very high in terms of achievement / rendering.
I played at Dragon Quest 9, but I was not very convinced, with a feeling of having to do a little too much the same thing, with a scenario that I was not more excited than that, so I been pretty cooled on the show.
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Last edited by avensis; 07-13-2019 at 04:19 PM.
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