Dragon Quest absolutely rips dude it's such a cool artifact of a half-formed genre. Having the only save point in the entire game be in the starting castle means slowly edging into new, scarier territory, and the consequence of dying being losing half of your money in a game where money really only matters for maybe the first half of the game lends a real feeling of danger to the world when you still haven't quite gotten to know it. Then, once you do have your sea legs, you start hitting the other side of the power curve and the back half of the game is, for the most part, pretty easy from a combat perspective.
Which is fine because this game has a lot of walking around talking to people, with cute little puzzles like figuring out where and how to use certain items or how to navigate screens in unexpected ways. None of them are DIFFICULT but they're fun to tease out and importantly they don't take very long. A lot of this game is just gathering information, finding the order to piece that information together in, and acting on it, and the world map is small enough that doing all of that never feels frustrating.
Plus, aesthetically, yeah man, DQ has had it from day one, huh?
It's not like, PERFECT. The combat IS basic, magic IS a little less actually useful than I would prefer it to be, the dungeon map design just being a bunch of random dark mazes is never gonna be my favorite, but in the scope of how well everything else fits together none of my issues with it feel like they coalesce into anything worth ruminating on when everything else about it is so overwhelmingly charming and pleasant.
I beat this game over the course of four evenings while I half paid attention to the tv show my partner was watching, and that's when Dragon Quest is best in my limited experience with them. Nice to know they've been the ultimate chill out games the entire time.
Which is fine because this game has a lot of walking around talking to people, with cute little puzzles like figuring out where and how to use certain items or how to navigate screens in unexpected ways. None of them are DIFFICULT but they're fun to tease out and importantly they don't take very long. A lot of this game is just gathering information, finding the order to piece that information together in, and acting on it, and the world map is small enough that doing all of that never feels frustrating.
Plus, aesthetically, yeah man, DQ has had it from day one, huh?
It's not like, PERFECT. The combat IS basic, magic IS a little less actually useful than I would prefer it to be, the dungeon map design just being a bunch of random dark mazes is never gonna be my favorite, but in the scope of how well everything else fits together none of my issues with it feel like they coalesce into anything worth ruminating on when everything else about it is so overwhelmingly charming and pleasant.
I beat this game over the course of four evenings while I half paid attention to the tv show my partner was watching, and that's when Dragon Quest is best in my limited experience with them. Nice to know they've been the ultimate chill out games the entire time.