"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

So what makes Dragon Quest IV better than all of the other ones?

TALOON.

I love the DQ series and the FF series and think they both have excellent, though different, gameplay.

Also

Taloon.

Alena.

Ragnar's purple 'stache.

Lots of stuff in IV is great.

Isn't Horii a compulsive gambler? DQ makes sense in that context.

I've never enjoyed playing Dragon Quest games. I love the setting and characters and scenarios, but never the gameplay. I think this thread is making me realize why exactly that is.

Treasure hunting is the best thing. Anyone who would complain about it doesn't deserve to be here.

The thing is though, and I say this with all seriousness, I don't see how this is valuable. I like the idea of getting a better at a game the more I play it until I get to the point that I can bend it to my will. To me, difficulty is only valuable to the extent that it makes eventual mastery more rewarding. You've paid your dues; now the game opens up to you. I can slide through whole dungeons in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door without taking a single point of damage because I've played the game so much. That's my reward for working out the timings for Superguards and putting together badge combinations that maximize my damage output. If I did all that and the game still had the capacity to randomly fuck me over anyway... Well, I don't think my experience would be improved by that added tension.

(That's not even mentioning the fact that such randomness is far more damaging to new players than it is to experienced ones.)

If Super Mario Bros. levels had a 1-in-20 chance of spawning endless waves of Hammer Bros. and Lakitus, no one would play it. It would be more challenging and more tense, but less fun.

That's about the sum of it, yes. About the only way I can imagine someone enjoying the prospect of potentially getting completely destroyed arbitrarily is if they have a sadomasochist streak a mile wide. What's fun about losing, especially when you're well-prepared and know what to do? Nothing, as far as I can tell.

I too like games which reward skill and planning. Any game that lets me take control of the experience via extreme competence is okay in my book. Which is why Harvest Moon DS is my favorite HM game (I can break that sucker so hard, I end up with a farm so tricked out by the second day that most players would have trouble rivaling it by the second year), and why I can't stand the newer HM games that go out of their way to prevent you from taking any advantages.

In short, I define "fun" as learning the system and turning it to my advantage. DQ games don't allow for that with their huge emphasis on randomization, thus they're not as "fun" for me as games where I can do that.

You guys are completely overstating the amount of randomness in Dragon Quest. You're rarely arbitrarily "destroyed".

- Eddie

You should really try out Megaman Battle Network or Ar Tonelico 2.

Speak for yourself. Getting arbitrarily destroyed at least once every play-through (frequently 5 or 6 times) is pretty much a guaranteed thing for me. And that's all the more offensive since I tend to over-level in DQ games in an apparently quite vain effort to mitigate the randomizer abuse problems.

It doesn't have to be common to be annoying. Even if it only happens one time in fifty, that doesn't make that one time any less infuriating. Just knowing it can potentially happen is bad enough for me, really.

I would add that mitigating the randomness is part of the gameplay. Listening to everyone here makes it sound like every so often, a DQ game will just randomly determine that your party just dies while you're traversing a dungeon, which isn't the case.

"Gold Batboon chanted the spell of Sacrifice." Total party wipe. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. That's what the spell does, with a 100% success rate. It makes a spell like Defeat, that just arbitrarily kills some of your party, look reasonable by comparison (which of course it's not if you have a party of 4 enemies spamming it).

No other sentence has ever filled me with as much rage as that one. Particularly fun after a long slog through the Road to Rhone.

The excessive randomizer abuse from games like the DQ series once inspired me to make an RPG Maker 2003 "game" called For Developers Only. It's basically hell incarnate: you have a 3% chance every second of an instant game over due to arbitrary means (a dragon eats you, rocks fall everyone dies, or a grue eats you), any attempt to go "off the rails" (literally) results in death by landmine, any attempt to stay on the rails also results in death by landmine, trying to cancel out of shopkeeper windows without buying anything or not saving at save points results in game over, talking to certain NPCs results in game over, every enemy has a random super-attack that's assured to instakill you, and the end boss that you can fight at any time is literally unkillable since he starts using a move called Cheap Shit constantly and doing about half your HP in damage to everyone per round. I never released it anywhere, for obvious reasons, but I like to think of it as a sort of microcosm of everything that's wrong with RPG development.

Something for the Micro LP thread? That sounds like fun to see.

If it didn't have unskippable cutscenes or loads and loads of pointless text, you can't really call it that.

The third step on the rails subjects you to a 5-minute slow crawl of the Wikipedia entry on randomizers. By the time it's over, you generally close the text box and get eaten by a dragon.

That'd be hard to showcase in LP form since I don't have any way to record off of my DS. Though if I ever do find a way, I will certainly consider it.

Care to elaborate a bit on that game breaking? My only preexisting knowledge of Harvest Moon DS is that it rehashes Mineral Town's visual style and its localization brought some fatal glitches to the mix.

But speaking of Harvest Moons, I really like Magical Melody. The world map design's a bit...random-ish, but if you play your cards right (making friends with the mayor and head carpenter) you can buy up half the game world for your farming empire.

...If this thread's becoming too flooded with "Not Final Fantasy 4-II" topics, we could move this discussion elsewhere on Talking Time. ^^;

In other news this thread was quoted in the SA FF4:The After Years LP. oh hi BlitzBlast.

Dragon Warrior II was a long time ago. Hell, Final Fantasy IIj and IIIj (in the alternative reality where they may have existed) had their own brand of bullshit, but a lesson was learned and today? Sacrifice/Kamikaze isn't as powerful and they've given more ways to deal with it other than Stopspell and Sleep.

Regardless, death is part of Dragon Quest guys.



- Eddie

I think part of why people have a problem with instadeath abilities or circumstances is that it breaks the flow of the game.

Think about it. If you were to pick up a book, you can read it beginning to end; only outside circumstances would ever halt you, and even then, you can pick up right on the same sentence if it would suit your own fancy.

No matter how games handle total wipes though, you're set back. If you can save anywhere, anytime, it might just be a few steps. Most games don't have that luxury though - back to the last city or save point with you, bucko! And this happens on the game's terms - you have little or no control over it.

This isn't like just setting down a book. This is like if the book you're reading randomly falls out of your hands, and it didn't have any page or chapter numbers - even if you can just skim things, you still have to retrace steps you have already taken... And on the way, before you're even back to the same point in bad cases, it falls out of your hands again.

Nobody likes going through dungeons multiple times without the game state changing and putting something new in there. (Especially if, along the way, you took a few side paths to get treasure... And said paths only return to the main path at the point it diverged. That means having to go through the same hallway FOUR TIMES, even if you've only wiped once.)

When it comes to taking natural, ordinary damage until you die, then that's death on the player's terms; it was the player's fault for holding off on that cure/potion/herb. Even if the damage is dispropotionate but predictable, for example being caused by the player attacking when a visible/knowable aspect of the game state is in play(like attacking D.Mist in its Mist form), then it was the player's fault for not recognizing and reacting to the game state's change.

I haven't played DQ/DW or anything(except Dragon Warrior Monsters, which I suspect to have an entirely different and more forgiving battle system), but what I'm hearing is that those games are no different from the metaphorical book I came up with. Occasionally, for reasons outside of the player's control, the player finds him or herself set back by about 2000 steps due to a party wipe that just sorta... happened. No equips or anything exist to stop that from happening again, so it's not like it was the player's fault for not having any mystical premonitions about events to come.

More than being merely a merciless setback, it is a waste of the player's time. Some families restrict how long a kid will be allowed to play his or her game, and meaningless deaths could mean the kid won't be able to try again for a whole day. This may be a strange point, but it is something that should be considered in all forms of game design; you want to appeal to a wide audience? Then you leave room for the player to play as efficiently as necessary, and not waste their time. This is why save points come up every 20 steps these days(if save points are even needed!), and why skippable cutscenes are slooooowly starting to become mainstream.

And before I close, I would have to point out that Roguelikes are aware of this - it's the player's lack of foresight that kills them in those games most of the time.

Instant-death circumstances are a game design flaw at the most fundamental level. This has nothing to do with childish debates about "oh this game is better because it doesn't kill you every two steps." I don't know how frequent deaths are in DQ/DW, personally, but the fact that they exist is enough for me to not want to play. I value my time far too much to want to deal with that crap.


I'm not saying any of you defending the game is wrong, mind you - maybe it is the spirit of the series, maybe it isn't. I just feel that, if what is being said in this thread is true, then the game is designed using rather... dated ideas.

Dragon Quest has never particularly jived with me. Over the years I've tried playing several games in the series, and none of them really made any sense to me except for III because I like games that let me construct my party. I can't say it's because of any arbitrary randomness, but... eh, I dunno. I maintain that the best Dragon Quest game is actually Gaudia Quest.

The secret best Dragon Quest game is Pokemon.

The best Dragon Quest is Rocket Slime

Edit: relevant to this discussion:

Final Fantasy has issues too. In most installments, you don't need to play well to succeed, you really just need to play. I beat most of the series as a kid with absolutely no understanding of what I was doing. I'd just spam attacks and spells that did lots of damage and the bosses would die.

If you're looking for non-bullshit difficulty in a Final Fantasy game, you're looking in the wrong place.

I'd just like non-bullshit difficulty period, thanks. I'm merely pointing out that both flagship JRPG lines have their problems. FF games tend to be way too easy, while DQ games tend to be slightly too random.

I wouldn't say FF games are way too easy, just that it's possible to make the game cry uncle extremely early if you understand the game mechanics, with the legendary example being FFVIII's "get 100 Waters at the beginning of the game, junction to Squall's Strength, break the game". Otherwise, the game is of moderate difficulty.

I don't actually mind game-breaking mechanics though. If a game-breaking tactic makes the game too easy for you, the solution is easy: Don't use it. If the game's too hard for you and no game-breaking tactic exists, though, your options are to keep trying until your fingers bleed.

'Difficulty' by RNG is the most bullshitty of bullshit difficulties.

After being ambushed by a couple of enemies with a multi-target instant death spell and wiped out before you get a turn, you'll think differently.