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This Week in Anime - Dungeons & Dragons & Wizards

I'll never understand why Dragon Quest stayed popular when it was really only good early on in console RPG history; and even then, there were other games were pushing forward in ways DQ never has, from FF having villains that weren't just generic demon lords to Megami Tensei having demon fusion as the main way to improve the party. And then you get to the 16-bit era, where both V and VI are barely worth playing in the face of other, better RPGs, and things haven't changed in that regard for later consoles.

Even if you want a basic/simple experience, there are better options. I truly do not get the appeal of this series beyond Toriyama's designs.

Yuji: Back then, we had an option to add Ninja and Samurai like how “Wizardry” did. But the issue we had was that the players are Japanese unlike “Wizardry”. If we went with a Japanese style world, it would break us from the immersion as it would look too much like a fake.

So for “Dragon Warrior” we had to go to western sword and magic style world to separate the Japanese players from their reality and let their imagination guide them into immersion. Lack of knowledge can help with the realism of a fictitious work.

To be honest with you, I do somewhat agree with you on that. I kept wondering why JRPGs (not all) kept staying in it's well generic 2D turn-based (well there have been some that do real-time) gameplay and I kept wondering why most JRPGs didn't evolved or learned from current western RPGs gameplay like I never seen a open-world JRPG that plays like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls, or Fallout. I have seen some western RPG titles made by indie developer that outdo their mid-tier or generic JRPG titles when it comes to gameplay and innovation. I'm not sure why Japanese developers aren't taking inspiration from those when long time ago they did using Wizardry and Ultima as inspiration.

I'll never understand why Dragon Quest stayed popular when it was really only good early on in console RPG history; and even then, there were other games were pushing forward in ways DQ never has, from FF having villains that weren't just generic demon lords to Megami Tensei having demon fusion as the main way to improve the party. And then you get to the 16-bit era, where both V and VI are barely worth playing in the face of other, better RPGs, and things haven't changed in that regard for later consoles.

I learned this from Jeremy Parish a few years back at Portland Retro Game Expo. Put simply: folks in Japan were hungry for RPGs, but because so many of the major RPG franchises (Rogue, Wizardry, Ultima) were both in English and on hardware that wasn't released in Japan, they were unavailable to most enthusiasts. There was this genuine mystique about the genre. Dragon Quest wasn't the first RPG released in Japan, but it was one of the first ones that was widely available. And having Toriyama's artwork, after he had made himself a superstar of a household name off the back of Dr. Slump, just made the games even more of a draw.

It's true that other games are way more daring with regards to mechanics than Dragon Quest, but it's a lot like Doom in that way: the basic experience is just that fun on its own, and trying to bolt on newer, trendier mechanics just overcomplicates it. Again, for most people in Japan, Dragon Quest was their first experience in playing an RPG, and it's an experience that families have come to share with each other. So there's actually a lot of resistance to any kind of "update" to Dragon Quest. It's my experience that fans in Japan don't expect every game in a given series to be a huge evolution, just to feel like it's part of the brand. So there's no desire for Dragon Quest to reinvent the wheel, it just needs to play like Dragon Quest.

It's fair to find Dragon Quest kinda dry, but even if the mechanics are simple (asset management, mostly), the games themselves are plenty fun. DQ3's job system is tons of fun, the vocations in 6 and 7 are nice and crunchy and the skill point system in 7 and 8 allow for tons of experimentation as well as a mix of narrative character development with mechanical development (like the Hero literally becoming more "heroic" as you invest points into his Courage skill and learn traditional "hero" moves like Zap, or Jessica learning to use Puff-Puffs in battle through her Sex Appeal skill).

That, and it's mostly the stories people love. Sure, DQ5 and 6 aren't as mechanically deep as Romancing SaGa or even Final Fanasy 5... but folks really love the story of DQ5's hero, his relationship with his father, and how he starts a family of his own.

It's fair if you don't like them, but people come to the DQ series from a different angle than you. It's the narratives that suck them in and keep them there.

An Unchosen One wrote:

I'll never understand why Dragon Quest stayed popular when it was really only good early on in console RPG history; and even then, there were other games were pushing forward in ways DQ never has, from FF having villains that weren't just generic demon lords to Megami Tensei having demon fusion as the main way to improve the party. And then you get to the 16-bit era, where both V and VI are barely worth playing in the face of other, better RPGs, and things haven't changed in that regard for later consoles.

I learned this from Jeremy Parish a few years back at Portland Retro Game Expo. Put simply: folks in Japan were hungry for RPGs, but because so many of the major RPG franchises (Rogue, Wizardry, Ultima) were both in English and on hardware that wasn't released in Japan, they were unavailable to most enthusiasts. There was this genuine mystique about the genre. Dragon Quest wasn't the first RPG released in Japan, but it was one of the first ones that was widely available. And having Toriyama's artwork, after he had made himself a superstar of a household name off the back of Dr. Slump, just made the games even more of a draw.

If we're going back that far, we should start with the meat and potatoes behind all these games: Dungeons & Dragons.

Dragon Quest has quite a few things going for it to "explain" its popularity. So much so it often feels like the question should be... why does the popularity need to be explained away in the first place?

Like, yes, the Western Fantasy setting is precisely as exotic in Japan as it isn't over here, but that setting is probably the least of the series' selling points. The accessibility of its systems and mechanics makes it very accessible to players of all ages, making it an ideal entry point for the genre; the art style isn't just evocative, it's iconic, and the series is as legendary for Toriyama's designs as anything else; there's a ton of humor -- of joy, really -- packed into the moment-to-moment gameplay that makes it nearly impossible to play any of these games without constantly smiling; an art style and sense of humor that's juxtaposed beautifully with the often tragic or melancholy storytelling, with just enough of the fantastical in it to be evocative of those darker fairy tales from before "happily ever after" was invented; and perhaps most crucially of all, each game in the series is very consistently all of those things. With any new Dragon Quest game, you know what you're getting -- and for all the perceived conservatism of the games' design, this is a series that *does* take risks -- sometimes very big risks, sometimes risks that completely reshaped the entire industry.

And for all the other JRPGs that "do it better," I don't think any of them could be argued to do it consistently better.

And I feel like you can get a pretty good feel for what makes the series popular simply by... picking up any of the games and playing 'em for a bit. These games are beloved by so many people for so, so many reasons. There's no real mystery here, they're just really good games.