Half of the review is obvious thoughts on the genre of the jrpgs to give some context

"This is a tiny tale of time"
A colorful punk brushstroke in the genre "JRPG". DRAGON QUARTER (DQ) was born as a response to its own saga and its own anthology, sticking to its more classic elements but readjusting the more established elements that seem to be stylistic features of a genre. that, at the end of the day, they are just comforts;
World.
Time.
Combat.
Movement.
economy.
Drama.
Difficulty.
Trips.

Although I have always had a lot of affection for the cities of Japanese RPGs, the worlds they build seem to me like a lie, not diegetically, but as a sensation entirely. Normally these "worlds" due to their abstract nature born from 2D pixels are flat fields painted with deserts, plains, gorges, whatever you want, but their scale and ability to navigate never changes or affects, perhaps by convention, perhaps because RPGs are already too numerical and schematized to add more nuances to a navigation that, although it has aesthetic detail, is a process between combats and drama, which are also insufficient to transmit something cohesive, since the combats are usually linked to the context of the drama. In JRPGS, the characters are usually forced to travel the world as they become a kind of misunderstood fugitives for whatever reasons, they are in constant tension, sometimes pursued or in a race against time and they are supposed to be travelers, with resources and cargo. limited. curiously, the player can take all the time in the world, can go wherever he wants (with relative freedom), the combat is relaxed with enough resources and time does not advance, there is also nothing that translates or symbolizes some kind of mental or spiritual fatigue, if there are mana tonics and potions and such but that shouldn't cure stress or fear. And one thing, the protagonists, usually kids with great hearts, eager or not for adventure and wanting to discover the world, ambitious but without a clear vision of how the world works and how they want to be part of it ... Or depressed boys because Their giant and extremely cool sword weighs too much or the spikes of their hairstyles are not very perfect, whatever.

All of this will sound like obvious points, but exemplifications of some problems that lead to dissonant experiences for me, which should be an exciting and emotional adventure through a magitechnological world in which danger and joy come together and innocence gives way to Maturity ends up being a smooth and comfortable walk through a flat field where everything is static and the drama tries to deceive me, and all because JRPGs are supposed to be like that, that's the way the genre is.


Dragon Quarter (DQ) seems to be aware of this dissonant base and chooses to eliminate the "JRPG world" and its approach as it is popularly known, but sticking to some of the rules of the game.
it begins by eliminating the world, it does not exist. There are no green meadows or blue skies as far as the eye can see with a city looming around the corner, because there is not even a sky in the world that DQuarter takes place. people are forced to live in an underground world as deep as it is depressing, there are hardly any resources or space, the air is almost a precious commodity and only a dictated community order is what seems to work. It is not a world, but a succession of interconected corridors neither freedom nor space, there are no real cities or safe havens at all. In the middle of this dystopia is the protagonist, a young cop named Ryu (like all the protagonists of the BoF saga https://bof.fandom.com/wiki/Ryu) disappointed with life and living in the shadow of his friend ( cliche). During a mission he discovers that the government is experimenting with a girl (https://bof.fandom.com/wiki/Nina), he decides to rescue her and flee with her, acquiring the power to transform into a human-dragon hybrid that it becomes almost invincible, but with a high price to pay for abusing it.
With this starting point DQuarter establishes a drama accompanied by its mechanics and its formalities.
We are fleeing from a government and its army with powerful generals (bosses) crossing a world full of monsters, so taking distance between the pursuers and the obstacles seems to be the most sensible thing, the director Makoto Ikehara and his team opts to raise the difficulty and design a combat around space and the management of movement and resources, but without a board or squares, all on a proportional scale and moving away from pseudonaturalist spaces where to position correctly and wisely use the skills to efficiently attack groups of enemies and exploit improvised strategies to generate distance with us and between them is the key to survival, (combat has more complexities, but it is worth discovering them for yourself). But the most important element and that symbolizes both the urgency of time, and the deterioration of the group (those things that JRPGs tend to ignore) It's the D-Counter mechanic, which regulates the player's usage of the dragon transformation ability, penalizing and eventually punishing overuse of dragon related abilities. If the D-Counter reaches 100% before a certain event in the game, the player will receive a game over, so they can go back to the last save point or start the game again keeping all the equipment and experience, however When starting the trip again, new scenes and dialogues will appear revealing little by little, and with each defeat the truth about everything that is happening and suggesting more consistently the value of accepting defeat as opposed to those JRPGs with blue skies that seem to want to avoid let the player experience it.
DQuarter replaces joy and color for oppression and lack of natural sunlight, it is a game that replaces the simplicity of the classic turn-based combat system with a complex balance of movement, combo strings of attacks with various properties and is not afraid of being difficult or brutal, or remind you that death constantly stalks you through a HUD number. is not afraid to deliver a Cheat Code in the form of mechanics or risky narrative approaches.
It's a gutsy game in a very stagnant genre and an imperfect (lol) masterpiece, and its end, could not be anything other than a sight of a blue sky.