Yonosa Wrote:Finally just uploaded the game, My brother took my DS without permission for the day since I don't play it all that much he seems to do what he pleases with it...Unacceptable.
What is the basic Dragon Quest story all about?
The way I avoid this is by having all the games on my DS in Japanese. When I went on vacation and there were 8, 9, and 10 year olds staying with us this greatly confused them. It was funny.
There really is no basic Dragon Quest story. Pretty much all the Dragon Quest games have their own stories like the FF series does. Though, unlike the FF series, there are separate arcs to the DQ games. The Zenithia trilogy of 4, 5, and 6 makes up one of those.
I like Dragon Quest more than I like Final Fantasy at this point. The difference between them is mostly in the basic design. In Dragon Quest the gameplay serves the story whereas in FF the story serves the gameplay. From about Final Fantasy 7, Square decided they sort of wanted to be making interactive fiction or interactive movies. So there was a lot of eye candy. The stories were pretty good, but unfortunately the gameplay tended to be bland or too easy. There tended to be less of an adventure feel and more of an on-rails feel.
Dragon Quest on the other hand, is more about making the adventure gameplay fun and challenging outside of the story. While Final Fantasy games tend to have more bells and whistles like sphere grids and materia, the Dragon Quest games are about perfecting the classic RPG battle genre where you proceed in rounds of attacking and healing. Because everyone knows this system already and has been playing it for years, the DQ games tend to make battles that much harder to compensate.
There's also a lot more to the overworlds in Dragon Quest. Most of the Final Fantasy overworlds are specifically designed to control the pace of the story, and the special places are few and far between. Dragon Quest does this differently. Almost every overworld zone in Dragon Quest has a few secrets here and there, and if you take the time to explore then you're usually rewarded with better items sooner or more money sooner. Beyond grinding to level up, Final Fantasy tends not to have much of this. If an FF game does have it, they kind of do it in a way that feels like you would have needed a strategy guide to ever discover it. Dragon Quest does a pretty good job of letting you know when you're near a secret area by putting buildings there or a small dungeon.
So Dragon Quest goes after more of an adventure feel where there's quite a bit to do outside of the main storyline in terms of sidequests and exploration rather than FF's more directed approach to story and gameplay.
They both have their merits. FF stories tend to be pretty complicated while DQ stories tend to be pretty simple. Though, I find both series fulfilling for different reasons. Outside of Final Fantasy Tactics, I like the gameplay more in DQ, the stories more in FF.
Inside Japan, Dragon Quest is more popular by a large margin. It's the sort of gold standard of game in the classic JRPG genre. It's not surprising that it's this way when every year there are about 10-12 different new JRPG's trying to get a slice of that pie. The reason people still keep buying DQ games is because they tend to be really well produced games. There are usually few bugs, pretty good graphics, a good soundtrack, and well-written dialogue. A DQ game is always a safe bet, and now that they're only being released like once every 3 years, a lot of Japanese are chomping at the bit to hear the opening DQ theme in a new adventure.
Edited: 2009-07-12, 9:57 am
