Dragon Quest

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I don't like sizes because I want 3 big boy monsters (BossTroll, GreatDrak, Gigantes combo ftw). Maybe there's a way around that in the games and I never figured it out? Yeah the key system was so cool. With a little more effort and variation, you could have nearly infinite mini-adventures. I know people nowadays are jaded by procedural generation but it was implemented well in Monsters 2. I used to write short stories about key worlds and their history, all their heroes and legends and various monsters tamers from other worlds coming and going.

Also, I really hope DQXII brings back one feature: hitting your head when you zoom indoors. It really bugged me that you could zoom under roofs in XI and I hope it comes back. It's such a minor detail I know, but stuff like that is what gives the games soul and XI made me very sad.

Yeah, you can change the size of monsters somehow in Joker2/3 I think? I don't remember if it's only sizing up, however -- definitely remember seeing some Size 4 Slimes and the like in the online arena while it was still up, and I really seem to remember shrinking some of the Size 3/4s down to at least 2?

As for Zoom... DQ12 won't have hitting your head when zooming for the same reason Skyrim wasn't allowed to have RPG mechanics, and why DQ7R is piss easy compared to the previous DQ games.

Cavemen who would have mocked us for playing these games played Morrowind or Oblivion and couldn't grasp the concept of to hit rolls, armor, et cetera. So they screeched like trained howler monkeys, shit all over the franchise, and went back to Halo. Instead of going "welp, market segmentation" the brainchildren in charge nowadays went "what if we just sanded ALL the edges off EVERYTHING and made ALL our products generic formless grey slop for EVERYONE to enjoy?"

That is to say, DQ12 won't be allowed to have something like that becuase Square Enix has been making games for the lowest common denominator BY the lowest bidder employees for a decade or more now. Difficulty is too much to expect in a JRPG, and as I've mentioned in the thread before, I really expect them to get rid of Turn Based Combat becuase "huuuuur don't you know they really wanted to do the thing I like but those old icky 'retro' systems like the PS3 couldn't handle Action RPG. Look, I can press X to not die!"

I'm going through 7R right now. With all of the Dragon Quest games I've played I did half of them in english and half in jap so far, the english ones were the old Monsters games on GB, 11 and currently 7R. I did 1-4 in Jap.

7Rs script is so bad its unreal, its unbelievable that someone looked at it and said "Yeah this looks good". Its been a lot of years since I played 11 but I don't remember it being so bad with the written in accents as 7R. I thought the island where people were German was bad, but I just made it to one where they're French and I can't believe what I'm reading.

Remember, if any of us did that faux accent shit, we'd be immediately canceled for Turbo-Racism.

I have no clue about the DS games but I heard they were awful for it. These are from just wondering around the town. There was a scene when you enter the town or a building that some forced dialogue happens and it was worse than all this.

Spoiler: 🐸

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The DS games had villains that spoke in fucking cryllic ascii art. Like seriously, they spoke in Russian characters they slammed together to make look like English characters. It was quite literally unreadable in significant places.

DQ11's last boss had a thing in Japan where he spoke backwards. Like, his text would be rendered "siht ekil." Doing that in English would be too hard, so IIRC they just "localized" it as A L L C A P S W I T H S P A C E S and a slow animation?

 

[Baraka Obama]

I have no clue about the DS games but I heard they were awful for it. These are from just wondering around the town. There was a scene when you enter the town or a building that some forced dialogue happens and it was worse than all this.

This is consistent with the 3DS version.

So.

Bad.

So bad.

But man DQ4 DS takes this to a whole 'nother level. The first chunk of the game is translated closer to Ulster Scot than English.

 

[Grub]

and why DQ7R is piss easy compared to the previous DQ games.

I was all set to play this. I had it downloaded. I was going to play the switch version on my phone. The file size was decently small and It actually emulated pretty well but then I went and read about it before I started it and it sounds even worse than the 3ds version.

That is to say, DQ12 won't be allowed to have something like that becuase Square Enix has been making games for the lowest common denominator BY the lowest bidder employees for a decade or more now.

Personally I think it started with Dragon Quest IX when they got rid of random encounters and continued on with that for the 3ds DQ VIII port and VII remake. I noticed a big difference in the way I played through dungeons and it just wasn't fun. It was the same when I tried the 3ds version of VIII not long ago. I just couldn't get into it just running around all the monsters on the field pretty much only fighting when I chose to. It just felt kind of ridiculous. I ended up playing this version of VIII instead

https://sites.google.com/view/dq8mr/home

Which somehow manages to be better than any version square's officially released apart from the platform it's limited to. Like why can't square release a remaster of the game like that?

As for Zoom... DQ12 won't have hitting your head when zooming

Kind of continuing off the other guy's comment about DQXI, I wonder if that was a change they made for the definitive edition or whatever it's called. I wish someone would translate the 3ds version of the game. It seems different enough that it would be worth it. From what I've read a bunch of stuff was changed from the 3ds version for the western release to make it easier.

 

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Personally I think it started with Dragon Quest IX when they got rid of random encounters and continued on with that for the 3ds DQ VIII port and VII remake. I noticed a big difference in the way I played through dungeons and it just wasn't fun. It was the same when I tried the 3ds version of VIII not long ago. I just couldn't get into it just running around all the monsters on the field pretty much only fighting when I chose to. It just felt kind of ridiculous. I ended up playing this version of VIII instead

DQ9 was originally going to be an ARPG, so that tracks. They only changed it back after 2ch lost their shit on them. If you want to play what they were going to make, try Fantasy Life for 3DS and the Switch/PC sequel, Fantasy Life i. Admittedly, it's very fun, but I'm not sure it would have been DQ, even with a few years work.

 

[Contemporary Jazz]

Personally I think it started with Dragon Quest IX when they got rid of random encounters and continued on with that for the 3ds DQ VIII port and VII remake. I noticed a big difference in the way I played through dungeons and it just wasn't fun. It was the same when I tried the 3ds version of VIII not long ago. I just couldn't get into it just running around all the monsters on the field pretty much only fighting when I chose to. It just felt kind of ridiculous.

In IX it took a little skill to dodge monsters on the field at least. They easily outran you unless you went in tight loops and could come out of nowhere off screen, especially in close quarter dungeons. Then in VIII 3DS you just press L and R and poof any monsters away. It made metal slime farming absurdly easy which was fun for a few minutes but then was like cheat codes. In XI you can just get on a horse and slamfuck your way through the world. With a little wariness it wasn't difficult to go through an entire dungeon, entry to boss, without an encounter.

How about this, Kiwi friends? What would your ideal Dragon Quest game look like (mainline or spinoff of your choice), with no regard for budget, time, administrative meddling, etc? Dream big!!! For me it's

• graphics of VI and 4:3 aspect ratio, released for the PS2 for its DVD capacity but ported to PS5/Switch/PC for modern fans
• vocations, skill trees, weapon specialization, all monsters recruitable including bosses and unique party chat for all of them, plus 100 new monsters as well as every single old one ever
• item world from Disgaea for infinite upgrades, key world from Monsters 2 for randomized stories and new monsters to recruit (random keys drop from the 100th floor of any given item)
• level cap of 9999 and stat cap of 99,999,999 of course
• 1% chance of key world opening portal to one of ten DQ games, each w/20-30 hours of new story minimum and famous DQ characters recruitable (and w/party chat of course)
• post-postgame after beating all ten DQ worlds where you fight Yaldabaoth after a thousand floor megadungeon with no savepoints

 

[Grub]

DQ9 was originally going to be an ARPG, so that tracks. They only changed it back after 2ch lost their shit on them. If you want to play what they were going to make, try Fantasy Life for 3DS and the Switch/PC sequel, Fantasy Life i. Admittedly, it's very fun, but I'm not sure it would have been DQ, even with a few years work.

I tried it. Didn't really like it.

How about this, Kiwi friends? What would your ideal Dragon Quest game look like

I liked the unguided exploration and vocations in VI. I would say I guess ideal, a Dragon Quest with a big world with lots of secrets and stuff to find with little or cryptic guidance with good side stories and vignettes. A vocation system at least as in depth as the one in VII. With maybe a DQ V level main story though that's less important.

 

[Ygolonac]

The day can't come soon enough where translators / localization staff are homeless while AI does a better job writing the translated script and dubbing it.

 

[Cryogonal2]

The day can't come soon enough where translators / localization staff are homeless while AI does a better job writing the translated script and dubbing it.

The big problem here is trust. If we could just trust them to do their jobs correctly without compromising whatever they were hired to localize, nobody would have any reason to have an issue with them or the work they do. But for some reason, they just can't stop screwing with it. They can not stop themselves from embellishing upon what's already there, and I can only assume it's caused by a mix of racism and envy. "Japs can only write isekai novels and high school romance/battle mangas, while MY masterpiece is ignored by all. Nobody actually wants to read/watch this trash, so who cares if I punch it up a bit? It's offensive to my culture, anyway." Lovely Complex, MGS 1, Dragon Quest, it's the same fucking story every time Keep in mind these are only the cases where the fuckups are obvious, but not so glaringly obvious like Prison School. The translator just thought their own ideas were superior to the author's or they just didn't give a fuck. Who gives a fuck if you think Lovely Complex is a bog standard manga and anime, who gives a shit if you think Snake should sound cooler, and who the fuck would ever want to decipher those oh-so-quirky racial stereotypes that makes reading most of the dialogue an absolute slog? You were hired to take blocks of text from language A, and translate it to language B. Stop pretending that you're a writer. You will never be a writer. Of course, there's no possible way any of this would ever come back to bite them in the ass. Their company doesn't give a fuck if they botch the hell out of a translation, they only care if the translator says the quiet parts out loud in a way that affects the bottom line - and it almost never does!

The translator also doesn't understand just how badly this affects the reader's trust in what they're reading. Even something small like a character saying "sus" instead of "suspicious" makes the reader immediately think "That's not what the character said. I just remembered that some guy translated this. How do I know this character's actually saying this other shit, and that it isn't just the translator having a laugh?" How do I know that, in Yakuza 3, Rikiya actually refers to himself as "The Fighting Viper," referring to the SEGA fighting game "Fighting Vipers?" I can tell you with certainty that those bosses in Final Fantasy 6 aren't named Larry, Curly, and Moe. I don't even need to look that up.

If I could trust companies to use AI for translation correctly, I think I'd be more accepting of that alternative. However, there's two options when it comes to that: Unmoderated AI translations like what we saw with Amazon's Banana Fish dub, or moderated AI translations where an english speaker oversees the AI's translations and makes sure it's accurate. Problem with the latter is that you still have to deal with the same kind of person that likes to fuck with the thing they've been given to translate, and they have a reason to fuck with it now that you've introduced something that poses any amount of a threat to their job.

 

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My favorite take on the AI translation thing is when one of those franchises with lots of waifus got fucked with in the US. The Japanese heard their Waifus were being disresepcted by the filthy gaijin so they brought in Linguist experts who confirmed "yeah, they're basically just rewriting the entire game" and then the Sony Leaks hit and included something like "we need to force Japanese culture to change so we can be better slaves to gaijin cock like good little globalist slaves."

So supposedly, as the story goes, one of the Japanese company's offices got lit on fire (no, not KyoAni, this was IIRC a Sony office) and within like 3-6 months they had created some Machine Language (AI based, in 2026 buzzwordspeak) Toolkit for localization that, and this is key, is ran by the Japanese, not foreigners in California that keep going "no you don't understand if at least 52% of all your characters aren't obviously nonwhite Americans will NEVER buy your game plus we find depictions of attractive women VERY problematic" to them. Mantra.

E: Found it:

https://x.com/zuisei21/status/1737324356790112411

Is it real? Is it bullshit? I don't know.

The coomers are already doing this on sites like MangaDex, translating manga in hours, but they don't have a workflow system like Mantra as far as I know. OCR tech is instant now (Cloe, for example) and there are even tools like Poricom (for translation workflow) or Mokuro (for reading manga while being able to mouse over for help with words) that do entire manga pages at once.

We're... months, not years, out from all of these lolcowlizers being completely out of work, forever, barring maybe 1-2 managers who will be Japanese because the Japanese don't fucking trust the gaijin mongoloids.


Having said that, also -- I do know that some dude plugged the Netflix Japanese subtitles for the new Ranma 1/2 and it produced a VASTLY better localization:

https://x.com/linkasobi/status/1842634391584923769

https://x.com/linkasobi/status/1842691855722361181

Official on the left, AI translation on the right.




And that was 2 years ago. The tech, at that time, was the worst it will have ever been. I imagine it's infinitely better now. Plus, we already have AI voices, Youtube is literally dubbing things. Again, 2-3 years ago tech to take your voice and change it to another language while still being your voice is a thing. It's only a matter of time before we get Japanese VAs speaking in AI-generated English reading AI-generated scripts.

There's a reason all these faggots are freaking out and it's not just becuase you can now push a button and get a furry commission they used to be able to charge $1000 for.

 

[Cryogonal2]

We're... months, not years, out from all of these lolcowlizers being completely out of work, forever, barring maybe 1-2 managers who will be Japanese because the Japanese don't fucking trust the gaijin mongoloids.

That's what they said years ago, like in that 4chan screencap. "By 2024" my ass. I'll believe it when I see it happen all at once.

 

[HTTP Error 404]

That's what they said years ago, like in that 4chan screencap. "By 2024" my ass. I'll believe it when I see it happen all at once.

If my experience is any example, they won't advertise it. It'll just be done behind the scenes, both by them doing so and not telling anyone, as well as the professionals using AI while claiming the work product is entirely their own. IIRC, Crunchyroll has already been caught out with AI based subtitles or something, and Netflix used AI to dub an anime which caused a fucking meltdown (partially cause it didn't have the lolcowlizer droppings they wanted).

 

[Gingervitis]

The coomers are already doing this on sites like MangaDex, translating manga in hours, but they don't have a workflow system like Mantra as far as I know. OCR tech is instant now (Cloe, for example) and there are even tools like Poricom (for translation workflow) or Mokuro (for reading manga while being able to mouse over for help with words) that do entire manga pages at once

At the risk of derailing the thread are they with more specialized terminology or older games? Because I want to play Wrestle Angels (a PC-98 game about women’s pro wrestling) and read Quick Start (a 4koma about cute anime girls playing tabletop rpgs). The former has no translation for any game in the series, and the latter’s translation has been incomplete for over 10 years.

 

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At the risk of derailing the thread are they with more specialized terminology or older games? Because I want to play Wrestle Angels (a PC-98 game about women’s pro wrestling) and read Quick Start (a 4koma about cute anime girls playing tabletop rpgs). The former has no translation for any game in the series, and the latter’s translation has been incomplete for over 10 years.

With a PC-98 game you're looking at an emulator (or recompiler), and at that point you might as well just pull the game's script and reinsert it after translating it. Which might be easier than it sounds, depending on how it was created.

What some people are doing is translating the screen output. There's a youtuber out there that does it with Super Robot Wars games:

He talks about his setup in some of the streams and I think he has a video laying it out. IIRC he pumps the video output to Google Lens.

Quick Start... Best bet would be using one of those OCR tools to get the script into text files, and either reaching out to a translation group or looking into DeepL or one of the LLMs. The big ones are all bilingual now and handle translation pretty good.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

I hate pixivniggers who only tag general DQ tag so much its unreal. Wading through mires of porn to find gold because author uploads in 84-picture threads and would not tag all of them.

 

[Dammit Mandrake!]

level cap of 9999 and stat cap of 99,999,999 of course

Make it as bullshit hard as Etrian Odyssey, too. Just for the fun of watching people seethe.

 

[The Paleblood Vessel]

I have no clue about the DS games but I heard they were awful for it. These are from just wondering around the town. There was a scene when you enter the town or a building that some forced dialogue happens and it was worse than all this.

Spoiler: 🐸

View attachment 8611884View attachment 8611888View attachment 8611890View attachment 8611897View attachment 8611903View attachment 8611920View attachment 8611921

It's been a while since I laid eyes on the frog speech in Chapter 4 of IV DS, but this is indeed much more horrific than anything in XI or the DS version of VI which I recall being the least damaged of the DS translations. DS IV in general was worse though, where Chapters 1 and 2 are so bad and incomprehensible I thought (before I found out the truth behind the lolcowlizers working on this series) either that I had a fucked version of the game or that someone on the team wanted to take the piss out of Scots and Ruskies and somehow managed to get away with it.

 

[Not 6 Foot]

DS IV in general was worse though, where Chapters 1 and 2 are so bad and incomprehensible

Back when having an R4 was the thing everyone did I got my hands on 4 DS and uhhh... Couldn't understand why everyone loved this game where I could barely read any of the dialogue without having to stop and parse.

It reminded me of the Australian dolphin in Breath of Fire 3, but at least they offered a, "translated," version of his dialogue immediately after because that was all part of the joke of the scene.

 

[HTTP Error 404]

The accents are bad in NewDQ localizations.

The random changes to shit so Theater Kid Lolcowlizers can insert shitty jokes are worse.

It is not, nor ever shall be, "Alltrades Abbey." It is not "Patty's Party Planning Place."

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a fucking congitoweapon that destroyed entire generations' ability to creatively write. (Hateful dykes taking over publishing and education didn't help either.)

 

[Banana Hammock]

I've been putting off the 1 and 2 remakes for a while, because 1 for the NES was short and kind of shitty, but after beating VII I had a craving for more and bought it since it's currently 25% off. Honestly? It's pretty good. The better graphics, bigger world, and handful of cutscenes make a big difference. Still very short, of course. I'm at six and a half hours, and I probably have maybe another five or six left. That said, it's definitely worth the $20 (two games for $44) I paid for it.

 

[Banana Hammock]

I'm at six and a half hours, and I probably have maybe another five or six left.

I stand corrected. It was closer to nine hours left. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of that was grinding metal slimes and gold golems because the bosses after the green dragon are all beef gates.