LogFAQs > #883947146

Raganork posted...

It's his money, but paying $85 to play another in a long line of RPGs that all play exactly the same? Guess I just never understood the series.

It was actually pretty cool when it was Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior I, when there weren't a ton of alternatives. DW was pretty much THE game that introduced me into the world of video game RPGs. But it never sold all that well in the West - which is why Nintendo wound up giving away a ton of unsold copies free to anyone who subscribed to Nintendo Power. They were expecting Japan-levels of excitement and sales, and they got... chirping crickets.

And then DW2 came out, which was a much weaker game (and got frustratingly hard at the end, which made the game as a whole less enjoyable), and which wasn't released in North America until a few months after Final Fantasy (which was a much better game in pretty much every possible way). Which sort of made things even worse.

DW3 was actually the best of the first three by far, but by that point the franchise was already treading water in the West, no matter how popular it was in Japan. And DW4 wound up doing so bad that they just stopped porting it over entirely until after Playstation revitalized demand for all things JRPG years later. For all the love that the Japanese have for the series, it almost died off completely here and Final Fantasy basically became "our" RPG.

But the DW/DQ games don't really play "exactly the same" - each game tended to introduce new elements or refine ones from previous games, so that, while the gameplay was familiar, it wasn't necessarily static. And "let's constantly innovate for the fuck of it" isn't necessarily a better design philosophy anyway, considering the fact that while it helped give us some awesome Final Fantasy games, it's also given us some incredibly shitty Final Fantasy games.





Fun fact that absolutely no one other than Shadow will care about: I stole part of the plot of the original Dragon Warrior game for my first Changeling character I played online - my Sidhe knight wound up fighting a dragon and saving a princess solely because that's what you do in DW1. A lot of elements of that character were basically rooted in fond childhood memories, because that's sort of the whole metaphorical point of Changeling (even if I almost never, ever actually PLAY it that way).


---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family