Dragon Quest

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Finished the DQ7R demo. Here's some thoughts

1) The changes to the opening chapter are mostly okay. They've trimmed away a lot of the back and forth and completely cut the stuff with the armor pieces, but at least there's actual puzzles (albeit easy ones) to do this time around. I still think the original PS1 game's opening is the best but it's a really hard sell nowadays.

2) The art style is less jarring in-engine. For some reason the footage they showed off had very flat, bright lighting but in-game the lighting is much more subdued and things look far less Dreamworks.

3) Name changes. I've mixed on these as with any game, but there's an argument to be made that the proper translation of Dragon Quest requires punny names to match the vibe of the JP original. I don't like the change of Rexwood to Ballymolloy though and the whole shift to this weird Irish potato nigger accent spew.

4) Leveling changes are good. I didn't like the way vocation leveling worked in the original because you could get locked out of vocation points if you leveled too much. Now it looks like they've altered things to where you're still able to get vocation points even if you've outleveled an area.

5) Speed. Battles move so fast now. Enemies will now do their turns all at once if they're next to each other in the turn order for even more speed.

6) Leaning into the diorama presentation is something I didn't expect to work but absolutely love. Maybe I'm just a diorama loving autist.
 
Fcret said:
3) Name changes. I've mixed on these as with any game, but there's an argument to be made that the proper translation of Dragon Quest requires punny names to match the vibe of the JP original. I don't like the change of Rexwood to Ballymolloy though and the whole shift to this weird Irish potato nigger accent spew.
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They're so, so bad.

I dunno where the idea that the translations had to be full of retarded puns came from, like yeah the Japanese version has puns but puns land a lot harder in Japanese because there are so few unique sounds in the language. It would make more sense to create a non serious tone and weave in some jokes that land in English without absolutely raping the script, making all character and town names shit, and continuing with the fucked up spell names they've shoved into the games since DQ8.
 
Baraka Obama said:
They're so, so bad.

I dunno where the idea that the translations had to be full of retarded puns came from, like yeah the Japanese version has puns but puns land a lot harder in Japanese because there are so few unique sounds in the language. It would make more sense to create a non serious tone and weave in some jokes that land in English without absolutely raping the script, making all character and town names shit, and continuing with the fucked up spell names they've shoved into the games since DQ8.
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It was one of the things they did with DQ9's localization back when DQ was returning to the West after like 10 years of exile. In that time the US branch had been taken over by clout chasing theater kid types who wanted the clout of working "At Square Enix" on a game like Final Fantasy because it was a huge name, not because they liked JRPGs. So when the Japanese branch ordered the US branch to start localizing Dragon Quest, and Dragon Quest was this niche JRPG that wasn't a huge CGI spectacle that looks great on a portfolio, they had to "spruce it up" to get some clout.

Thus, the too cute names. DQ9 had all kinds of references to DQ history, like the Inn from DQ3 is in DQ9 copied wholesale, the class changing place from DQ3 is copied wholesale, etc etc. But they just fucked up all the names to be cute. Like we lost "Dharma Shrine" in lieu of "Alltrades Abbey" so they could make the villain named "Jack." Jack of Alltrades. Who becomes a monster -- "Master of Nu'un." Jack of All Trades Master of None. Ludia's bar became "Patty's Party Planning Place" because they fucking looooooove alliteration. Alliteration is cruise control for wit.

DQ7 had some, but the only one I remember is a specific one. A town was randomly renamed Zere. Because later on, you find the town turned to stone, and it's called Zere Rocks. Only it's not the town, it's a copy of it created in stone. Xerox. GET IT?!!?!

This colored every stupid thing they did back then. DQ4/5/6, they redid all the regions with incomprehensible gibberish accents. But they couldn't force the Japanese branch to let them add voice acting to everything, so instead they had to dial them up to 11 in text. To the point that one of the villains literally speaks in Cyrillic cypher based ascii art. And they removed 90% of the script of DQ4 (the "party chat" system) to make room for voice chat that they weren't allowed to add.

Sadly this is now the DQ "brand" in the West -- and getting a bunch of clout chasing theater kids to admit they were wrong is literally impossible -- so we just have to put up with it. Fortunately they've slowly tempered it.
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
Sadly this is now the DQ "brand" in the West -- and getting a bunch of clout chasing theater kids to admit they were wrong is literally impossible -- so we just have to put up with it. Fortunately they've slowly tempered it.
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The good news is that fans of the series are chimping out more and more, and creators (not just of DQ, but JRPGs in general) are noticing more and more just what the supposed translators are doing to their works of art.

No idea if this will have any effect before DQ12 comes out, but mark my words, a storm’s a-brewin’.
 
Baraka Obama said:
I dunno where the idea that the translations had to be full of retarded puns came from, like yeah the Japanese version has puns but puns land a lot harder in Japanese because there are so few unique sounds in the language.
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The thing isn't just that all you Americans get annoyed by the fact that the dialogue is increasingly unreadable and the names are also increasingly obnoxious to you. Part of what the problem with the Japanese puns is less that they are not less cringy in Japanese as much as their word system is much more centered on a single character containing a full meaning.

Think about it. Japan has at least three words it can use to make puns with light as part of a name: 'Hikari', 'Hikaru', and 'Kou'. English has names that can do the same, but you know what those are? Just from looking at a random name list, I got Phoebe, Clara, and Lucy as the first three results. To us, they don't seem to be 'punny names' even though, etymologically, they come from words that mean 'light'. Does that mean they should be used instead of a name as blatant during a translation? Not really, because these works aren't set in the real world, and they might seem even less fitting in a setting like Dragon Quest, depending on the other names used.

My point is more that Japanese tradition has not changed the words that become names nearly as much as other languages have, which is why you can have people named Hikari whose kanji is the exact same as the 'hikari' used for 'light', but you don't see people making jokes about a 'Lucy' being 'bright' or 'light' nearly as much these days.
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
Sadly this is now the DQ "brand" in the West -- and getting a bunch of clout chasing theater kids to admit they were wrong is literally impossible -- so we just have to put up with it. Fortunately they've slowly tempered it.
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The real secret is that this is how most translations are handled. It's just that, for the most part, we don't notice it unless it's wildly obvious, but once someone points out a bad translation to you, you'll notice every single time the translator fucked with it. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't even think to expect, because who would go out of their way to do their job wrong? Oh, right.
 
Alright completed almost all of the bonus content in the DQ2 HD2D remastermake including downing Xenlon in fewer than 15 turns. I have to do it a couple more times to get all the scrolls but after that it's just true ending time.

It was good. Much more enjoyable than the first game's remake imo. Haven't played III HD2D yet but that's a title I'm much more familiar with (in comparison, I've only beaten DQ I and II one time each back on the GBC) so I'm in less of a rush to start it.
 
Gingervitis said:
The good news is that fans of the series are chimping out more and more, and creators (not just of DQ, but JRPGs in general) are noticing more and more just what the supposed translators are doing to their works of art.

No idea if this will have any effect before DQ12 comes out, but mark my words, a storm’s a-brewin’.
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Yeah, the last living member of the founding 3, Yuji Horii, was at TGS year before last and openly mocked the wokeshit alongside the editor at Shonen Jump that worked with Toriyama for years. Square Enix JP tried to nuke the entire interview off the internet and the wokies in the west tried to claim a single mistranslated word invalidated the entire thing, but it's archived out there. We'll see if it ever gets undone in future games -- these people think progress only goes one way so undoing their shitty political changes is literally unthinkable heresy to them -- but at least the creator himself was mocking it.

Heck IIRC DQ3 had it but then asked if you understood picking Type B meant Woman, and if you said no it sent you right back to the character creation process. All but saying "try again, retard" as it went.

As for DQ12, the worry everyone has is that they're basically dancing around the idea of making it "for modern audiences" which is codeword for "make it for Americans" which means edgelord bullshit, crappy writing, and action RPG slop. Some of the follow up hints that they're not going to fuck with the combat engine but it's very carefully written in such a way that they could and then point to the careful wording to say "we told you we were gonna do this why are you mad?" But recently they were shocked to discover thanks to Expedition 33 that people actually like turn based games, since I'm quite certain the Theater Kid Troupe was telling them the only games Westerners will play are CGI filled QTE infested ARPG "press A to win fight" fests this might have been quite the shock to them.

If the recent things -- Horii mocking them, them firing their DEI departments in both the west and east, and them mentioning turn based games favorably like they were shocked to hear about it -- are any evidence, maybe Japan's realized the pink hair fucks infesting their California HQs demanding they never talk to anyone not a pink haired fuck or "it's a heckin' racism, chud" are full of shit and should be ignored then fired. Out of a cannon.

UtadaWasabi2 said:
Why da nip obssess with this series so much bros?
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It's good and was the first JRPG. They basically took the best parts of Wizardry and Ultima and made a game that catered to their sensibilities.
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
Yeah, the last living member of the founding 3, Yuji Horii, was at TGS year before last and openly mocked the wokeshit alongside the editor at Shonen Jump that worked with Toriyama for years. Square Enix JP tried to nuke the entire interview off the internet and the wokies in the west tried to claim a single mistranslated word invalidated the entire thing, but it's archived out there. We'll see if it ever gets undone in future games -- these people think progress only goes one way so undoing their shitty political changes is literally unthinkable heresy to them -- but at least the creator himself was mocking it.
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AFAIK the new trend among JP game devs is that they've realized that "making games for the west" is retarded. Westerners who like Japanese games like them because they're Japanese. So I imagine we'll be seeing a lot reversions away from much of the wokeshit injected into modern jarpigs (the homegrown wokeshit notwithstanding - I understand some of the changes made to DQ over the years are the result of either the result of JP business decisions or JP fan pressure).

HTTP Error 404 said:
As for DQ12, the worry everyone has is that they're basically dancing around the idea of making it "for modern audiences" which is codeword for "make it for Americans"
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What they mean by this is "make it for the Americans that exist purely in the mind of marketers who spend too much time on twitter and bluesky"

It's important to point out that even back in the day, Dragon Warrior did phenomenally for what it was in the US. All of them were late NES games of a niche genre and I think each of them still sold around 100k copies (the first game managed to clear half a million). That's insanely good for what they were and how late they came out (Dragon Warrior III and IV came out in 1992 ffs, both almost a year later than Final Fantasy IV's US release). Dragon Warrior VII, a sprite-based PS1 game, moved 200k copies the same year the Gamecube and Xbox came out. Dragon Quest VIII was a best seller in the US to the point where it got a Greatest Hits release.

There's no real need to finagle with things to make the series popular in the US. Just keep up a consistent release schedule and stop hoping for the "breakout hit" like you got back in 80s Japan - no franchise works that way these days.

Also - what's weird to me is how much talk there is about needing to bump up the numbers in the US when it's Europe where Dragon Quest has traditionally been neglected. Maybe focus on getting dubs in more languages than English and Japanese.
 
Looks like the early reviews for VII Reimagined are out. Some highlights:
1) Complaints about the game being too easy. It seems like you no longer need to rez people out of combat since characters are restored to 1HP after battle if they're down. Battles during main story are all pretty straightforward.
2) Complaints about the game being too long despite roughly 40 hours being shaved off the main story runtime.
3) Graphics are good and performance is good.

WRT 1, I think the changes for rez are bad. You're supposed to feel harried by a party member being down but I guess since fast travel is free and unlocked immediately it doesn't matter anymore. For battle stuff, in my memory there was really only one difficult part in the original and it was the boss fight after you unlock classes. The rest of the game was pretty easy because of how much shit your characters accumulated by mastering the classes.

WRT 2, the reviewers are cattle. It should be more than 100 hours and the reaction to the cut down version perfectly illustrates why the idea was stupid - people are still going to be mad because they're impulsive goycattle who can't sit down for a classic long adventure. They should have just ignored these people and kept more of the OG runtime intact.
 
Fcret said:
in my memory there was really only one difficult part in the original and it was the boss fight after you unlock classes.
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The hardest bosses are:
  • The one in Falrod, usually you can just try a few times and get lucky.
  • Just before unlocking classes... for a variety of reasons, but by the time you get the SageRock as long as you use that often you'll be ok.
  • HellCloud, especially if you leaned on Maribel for anything. Even by this point unless you were very careful or grinding constantly you wouldn't have a lot from classes.
In the 3DS remake I remember all of these still being issues, except that classes progress faster although you don't "accumulate" anything from them.

Urinalists are going to complain about game length no matter what they do.
 
The constant purge of difficulty is a bad thing, it's part of what lead Final Fantasy down the road from being a JRPG to being a glorified rhythm game. Hopefully they don't keep down this path.

Reminds me that a constant fear of DQ12 is they're going to go ARPG with it, or otherwise "modernize" the combat. It's also supposed to be a lot more gritty and dark because they think Westerners won't buy games without that. (See also: talking protagonists, voiced everything, etc.)
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
The constant purge of difficulty is a bad thing, it's part of what lead Final Fantasy down the road from being a JRPG to being a glorified rhythm game. Hopefully they don't keep down this path.

Reminds me that a constant fear of DQ12 is they're going to go ARPG with it, or otherwise "modernize" the combat. It's also supposed to be a lot more gritty and dark because they think Westerners won't buy games without that. (See also: talking protagonists, voiced everything, etc.)
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I thought they'd already said DQ12 was going to be more of the same. While Yuji Hori is in charge, I don't think they'll do anything radical. Sadly this will likley be his last game as director given he's in his 70's and both Sugiyama and Toriyama have died.
 
Jason_Cruiser said:
I thought they'd already said DQ12 was going to be more of the same. While Yuji Hori is in charge, I don't think they'll do anything radical. Sadly this will likley be his last game as director given he's in his 70's and both Sugiyama and Toriyama have died.
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I believe they've written it in such a way that if it does have changes -- one way people are taking it is they might be implementing the DQX (MMORPG, similar to FF7R) combat engine -- they can point and go "why are you upset we've always said we were planning this."
 
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