I've been playing through the Dragon Quest series in order since March of 2014. It felt like a pretty ambitious project not only because I'd never played anything in the series before but because these are some pretty long games in a style that I haven't always particularly cared for. I wanted to really experience the series because it's absurdly popular in Japan and is sort of a counterpart to Final Fantasy which of course I'm extremely familiar with already. I think my original plan was to more or less play them back to back and I started out pretty strong by playing through Dragon Quest I and II pretty quickly but I stalled out in the middle of Dragon Quest III even though I actually liked it a lot more than the previous games.
I revisited DQIII early in 2015 and finished it up. I really dig job systems in RPGs in general and although that particular game was a very early implementation of such a system, I was a big fan of how the game handled it and liked that I was able to shift classes around for my characters over time. It had a slightly similar feel to Final Fantasy III but with Dragon Quest's very specific charms. The SNES version in particular looks really nice and I like that the enemies are very colorful and animated. This game in particular resonated with me a lot more than the previous two games because I had a lot more input over how I customized my characters. Combine that with mechanics I already enjoyed, like classic turn-based combat, dungeon crawling, and item collecting and you end up with a retro RPG that I enjoyed even with modern context.
I was feeling ambitious after having picked back up on Dragon Quest III, so I moved on to the Nintendo DS remake of Dragon Quest IV right afterward. I honestly prefer the classic 2D art style to the low-res 3D style of the DS games but the gameplay is of course super solid. What I really like about DQ IV is that it has a concept that really appeals to me and I cite frequently when discussing other games. It is an embodiment of the JRPG trope where adventurers embark on entirely separate quests through disparate gameplay chapters and then join together once you reach a certain point of the game. This is a concept Final Fantasy IV flirted with but of which perhaps Final Fantasy VI was the best, most popular example. Dragon Quest IV did it first, though, and more fully embraced the concept. I'm a big fan of how each of the characters has their own unique backstory and plays very differently from each other. I'm still tempted to call this my favorite of the series so far.
It wasn't until May of 2017 (which is where we're picking up on the roundup) that I finally played Dragon Quest V to completion. It is second in a trilogy of games that were remade for Nintendo DS and similarly features its own high concept. In this case, it tells the story of a character from birth to adulthood, chronicling his adventures along the way, including a marriage and the eventual birth of his children. What's really interesting about this is that you have three different choices for who your protagonist may marry, which will then determine the resulting traits inherited by the children. I really love the concept and the gameplay itself is as rock-solid traditional as ever. I have plenty of things to say about Dragon Quest's staunchly old-fashioned gameplay style but I may save that for another article entirely since my feelings are complicated. Regardless, Dragon Quest V was a game I liked a lot. At this point, I felt like I'd played three titles from the series in a row that I really enjoyed so I was feeling pretty great about Dragon Quest overall.
So, those are a lot of words about Dragon Quest that I maybe didn't intend to really go into. I've played even more Dragon Quest since that time so I'll continue to discuss these games on this blog, but in the meantime I want to talk a little more about the games I played in May 2017--but we'll come back to that next time!
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