The Dragon Quest/Warrior thread
 

DQ VII: Reimagined is announced!



Looks incredible! Comes in February. It's a little bit unfortunate it is so soon after I bought the 3DS version, which will quickly become obsolete. But hey! Smart money is that they do DQ VIII and DQ IX next.

And this comes out next month:

I've played VIII only so far. Love it. It's also a super long game.

I own IX for the DS as well, but am yet to tackle it. I imagine it's a bit long as well, so I'm holding on before playing it.

VII is the longest of them all, apparently. I'm really curious about it.

It saddens me to know that XII will be the last game to feature both Toriyama's character design and new compositions by Sugiyama. I'm sure the monster designs and old theme music will continue to be used but new characters and their theme music will be made by other people.

At least Toriyama left behind a general template they can use if they choose to continue the art style. I mean most of the Dragon Quest characters look like weird variations of Goku, Gohan and Bulma and so forth with different clothes and hairstyles.

Give XI a try! I spent like 120 hours in it and I still didn't do everything. Fantastic, fantastic game. Maybe my new favorite JRPG of all time. It's a slow-burner but man it's amazing.

People swear by IX but it's hard to get into. And unlike VIII on DS, the character models are TINY.

Odds are pretty good we'll see some kind of IX re-release in the foreseeable future. Probably we'll get VIII after VII Reimagined comes out in February, then IX after that. Then X Offline, if we're lucky.

And probably HD-2D remakes of IV-VI simultaneously. Man, it's a great time to be a DQ fan.

Check it out the VII Reimagined version in February. Supposedly it fixes a lot of stuff people didn't like about the original game and gives it a better narrative.

If it ever comes out at all. It was announced 5 years ago, announce trailer and all.

Yeah, he has a pretty consistent footprint to follow. Same with the Chrono Trigger character design.

Sure, it's not like it's that hard to follow the Toriyama style guide, plenty of animators at Toei and modellers at Namco has had to do it for decades. It's just that even if you can follow the style guide, it's not that means you have the same touch.

For example, these are the gods of destruction in Dragon Ball. Some are designed by Toriyama himself, some were designed by the artist for the Super manga's artist Toyotaro and some are collaborations between the two. Even though they follow the same design ideas and these characters can stand next to each other without raising eyebrows, there is still a clear difference in how these men draw and what sort of detail they gravitate towards.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x6WDAWBbEZI/maxresdefault.jpg

Those designs for Super are so weird and lazy.

To be fair, with two exceptions, all of them were designed for the Tournament of Power. The premise of that story arc demanded the creation of over 80 new character designs.

My first game in the series was Dragon Warrior Monsters on the Game Boy Color which was basically a Pokemon clone meant to cash in on the craze and it was a great game inspite of that.
It got me to register on the enix.com message boards as a little kid and that's how my forum dwelling life began. I was sdpwarrior.

The moderator of the forums was Nob, forgot his last name but he used to translate the games for Enix but he also translated the Pokemon games for Nintendo. I convinced him to add my name to the next pokemon game and after months of telling him, the guy actually did it, my name is one of the trainers in FireRed LeafGreen. I am canon to the Pokemon universe, all thanks to Dragon Quest.

Here's my first Dragon Quest experience:

This is pretty cool... today/now there is a Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo available you can play and it'll save your progress so that when the full game comes out in a month you can keep it.

Guess I won't need to get a copy of the 3DS version anymore, then.

I wouldn't throw it away, necessarily. This VII Reimagined does away with whole components from the original game, but also adds new story elements. It sounds like it may actually dumb down the original game quite a bit.

So it's not just QOL improvements?

And DQVII is quite a long game, so I'll have to settle for just one version of it. Don't have time or the drive to replay a game that's gonna take me 100+ hours long to get through. Even if the 2nd playthrough is on a slightly different version.

I replayed FFX in the HD remaster on the Switch when I was 29-30, but that's because it was during lockdown and I had a lot more free time. I wouldn't pick it up nowadays.

Yeah, a literal "reimagining" of the game.

I beat the demo. Not bad for a demo! Probably about 4-5 hours right there.

I'm definitely getting this one for the Switch.

Also, if anyone is interested... the Switch version of "Dragon Quest X: Offline" WITH all of its add-on content has been completely translated into English and is able to be played in emulation. And it works great!

I had bought Infinity Strash in a sale a long while ago but just now began playing it and it's so fun. I can't believe this got mediocre reviews, it's great. It's an action RPG set in the Dragon Quest world, the story is up there with one of the best in the series. I haven't had this much fun in a long while.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YjEyChYYZQ0/maxresdefault.jpg

I really need to get XI. I haven't been able to find it in shops, used or non-used in the last couple of years. I guess I'll have to go online or just buy it digitally.

I'd never even heard of that. Looks OK but the gameplay seems... un-DQ like?

Just make sure you get the Definitive Edition. Such an amazing game. I still say it's the best JRPG I've ever played, and by far. It took it a while to "Get" me but when it did, so so riveting.

I'm generally surprised how much you guys like Dragon Quest given its as "anime" as you can get aside from classic Final Fantasy. I do love turn based RPG's too but those have gone out of style lately.

Also surprises me how many people like Dragon Quest but don't like Pokemon, when they're very similar.

Older DQ fans are just the ones who played the Dragon Warrior NES games, but I'd say a lot of Pokemon fans did become DQ fans because of Pokemon. I know I did, Dragon Warrior Monsters was a Pokemon clone and then Enix released Dragon Warrior I&II and III and Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 all on the GBC.

Well Infinity Strash is an action RPG, so a different genre from traditional DQ, you level up but it's an action game. But it's really well done, you have a party, it's cool to actually move and fight in the DQ World. It has really fun bosses as well, the story is really engaging about the Dragon Knight species.
I think it got bad reviews because people expected a traditional RPG, but it's also not the first time the franchise does a spin-off.

I like anime...

I was introduced to DQ around 2017 by buying DQ8's remake for the 3DS. Someone I used to talk to online was a huge fan of the series and he loved that game in particular as well. So I shrugged and bought it one day after spotting it in a shop. I decided to give it a shot.

And I loved it.

I've never heard of DQ as a kid. As a young adult looking up the highest selling games for each system online, I did notice there were some Dragon Warrior games in the tops for the NES and the SNES. But they were either Japan exclusives or did not get European releases. So that was the first time I heard of them.

I just beat DQ8 (on 3DS with a high res textures and orchestral music mods) and wow, what a game. I only vaguely remembered bits of it from beating it ages ago on PS2 so this was a nice treat.

Definitely it is 2nd only to the even better DQ XI. It's nice how DQ XI, III, I, II, and VIII form one big story.

See, I told you! Great game, indeed.

How does VIII connect to the Loto Trilogy?
I thought XI only made vague references to other DQ games, not that it was directly connected.

I mean I remember fans coming up with theories on how IV-VI could connect to the original trilogy but at least back in the 2000s the general theory was that VII and VIII were stand alone.

It's more connected than ever. With the additions to the lore in DQ II HD-2D Remake in particular it all gels together:

* In DQ II HD-2D remake Rubiss reveals that Ramia travels between worlds and every time she does, her appearance completely changes.

* It is inferred in DQ II HD-2D remake that the Will of Darkness (from Calasmos in DQ XI) directly puppeteered Hargon and PROBABLY Zoma as well.

* In DQ II HD-2D remake after you fight Malroth you fight Malwrath, which is a manifestation of the Will of Darkness from DQ XI using the remains of Malroth as a puppet. It has the same font and says exactly the same things that Calasmos did at the end of DQ XI.

* In DQ VIII Empyrea reveals she was actually born as Ramia (and we saw her birth in DQ III), but in DQ VIII's world the humans named her Empyrea.

* Books in-game in DQ VIII (like the ones the hero can go up and read) mention that Empyrea has been going world to world, saving each one from a singular great evil. This must be the Will of Darkness, which was the raw essence of Calasmos.

* Empyrea confirms she has been going world to world saving worlds from the Lord of Darkness.

Basically what is in Rhapthorne is the same thing that was in Malroth. They even look the same (giant, bloated belly) and you fight them the same way, by riding Ramia/Empyrea through their energy shield and fighting them on its wings. So this elemental rage entity has been hopping from world to world across multiple games now.

VII is even connected to the Loto trilogy by way of the official mangas that have come out. Kiefer is a descendant of the Prince of Cannock.

As for the Zenithian trilogy, no, nothing concretely connecting them to anything else. There might be something to Castle Zenith in the later versions of DQ III having something to do with Zenithians but it's really a stretch. And I've read theories about the Zenithian sword being the Sword of Erdrick from one of the alternate timelines sprouting from DQ XI but it's pretty dense and a bit beyond me.

So they've been retconning references with the remakes then, interesting. Surprised they didn't sneak some reference in the DQVII remake then that just came out. You seem like a huge Dragon Quest buff.

I was huge into DQ in the early 2000s as a kid, posted on the enix.com forums all the time. The ongoing theory from back in that era was that there was a loose connection that the new world the dragon egg or whatever from the Zenithian trilogy was the one that gave birth to the world in the loto trilogy. Though new games just ignore the loto title so I guess it's the Erdrick trilogy now? This was before DQV-VI had official translations.

I was kind of expecting something like that in it but there's not, really. Unless you count stuff like the "Bonus Bosses" you can fight that are like the Dragonlord and Zoma and such.

Yeah. It'll always be "the Loto Trilogy" in Japan, so it's not like that is incorrect or anything. Though it's a minimum of "The Erdrick Quadrilogy" with XI as that directly leads into III (XI literally ends with Erdrick being woken up by his mother at the beginning of III).

Should be some good stuff announced today in Japan! Here in this video:



Today is the 40th anniversary of Dragon Quest.

Not only that, but there's a DQ sale going on in the Nintendo e-shop which sees all titles selling for their lowest prices to date. HIGHLY recommend everyone getting the definitive edition of DQ 11, such a great game, now only $20. Used to talk with Cure about that one a lot as we'd had parallel playthroughs going. Will be thinking of him when we see a proper trailer for 12.

Well that announcement was bullsh**. "The Dragon Quest XII you've been waiting for for 10 years was actually cancelled, and we're making a new one but it is way off and we have no idea when it's coming. Also, here's a new Dragon Quest Monsters game nobody wants."