Category Archives: Dragon Quest

Party System


It’s that “too many games to play” time of year. I don’t deal with it well. I’m pretty poor at multitasking, in fact — I like to concentrate on one game at a time, and if it grabs me such that I feel like finishing it, I’m compelled to do so before I start anything else. Of course, I can take diversions into downloadable action games, or take one disc out of the Xbox 360 so that my friends can do that multiplayer deathmatch whatever thing they love to do in Reach, but mostly I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gamer.

Actually, sometimes I get so overwhelmed I don’t really play anything at all. I celebrated my birthday by partying a lot and going to a lot of music festival bands (fortunately, my result was a lot better than this), and in terms of gaming all I really did was beat Persona 3 Portable. You know, basically the game I already beat a while back when it was out on PlayStation 2.

Actually, it felt quite a lot different this time. Although it changed really nothing about the gameplay (although making those P4-style tweaks to the battle system was much, much needed), the gender swap changed lots about the narrative for me and the way I related to the characters. Remember that Kotaku article I wrote about that?

RPGs are kind of tough that way. On one hand, it’s a “role-playing game”; it’s meant to be the story of a character’s journey, and any good story allows different people to get different things out of it. On the other hand, the gameplay is most central, and in most cases there is an “optimal” way to do everything. Story-driven decisions can sometimes be directly at odds with the decisions you “should” be making to optimize your character’s strength or progress.

For example, in the case of Persona 3, your character starts dating another character and you’d rather they spend every possible day together — but because your “rank” with the game’s characters affects your power to create the Personas you summon in battle, it makes more sense to distribute your time equally among other characters, even those you’re disinterested in. In fact, it’s essential.

The conflict between what you’d like to do to create your story and what’s ideal for the gameplay is probably the primary problem with RPGs. That’s why open-world RPGs like Fallout 3 are so good; their format makes great strides toward alleviating that friction. By the way, I’m almost relieved New Vegas is so buggy — “oh, I’m waiting for a patch, that’s not out yet, is it, I dunno, I haven’t looked” takes some of the pressure off my queue of games to play by the end of the year.

The other main issue, particularly in the Japanese RPG format, is that you can make a million different character classes for the player to choose from, and each one still has an optimal set of equipment and attributes that renders all others useless. It’s puzzled me since the ’90s: You go to a new town and the shops offer a whole raft of equipment, but one is the best, period. Why not just buy that one? Oh, can’t afford it? If not for “better stuff”, then what are you grinding for, anyway? Go kill some whatevers until you get some more currency, solved problem.

It’s made that whole customizing and outfitting process seem very pointless, some kind of tacked-on relic that’s no longer relevant. I go through those motions and sigh, “oh, so this is one of the things they mean when they always say ‘Japanese design doesn’t know how to get up to date.’”

Not that I really believe that, of course. The Persona games could never have come out of the West, for example. And in fact, it’s a completely traditionalist JRPG franchise that’s taken the first approach to characterization and customizing that I really like, the first marriage of party system and leveling mechanics that I’m having a ton of fun with.

I dunno why I just assumed I wasn’t going to like Dragon Quest IX. I haven’t played a Dragon Quest game since I was a child, and that’s because I just assumed I’d have to be killing a million slimes in an endless dungeon and being all super old-school and shit. But I decided to give it a try, mainly just to do due-diligence, and am finding DQIX completely enchanting. With the Final Fantasy series having lost its way so badly lately, DQIX demonstrates a real opportunity for the brand to become the quintessential must-have fantasy RPG.

You have a main character, a Chrono Trigger-style silent protagonist, and the central story arc blooms neatly into many smaller side-threads that feel organic — something that I think Western RPGs lack, as you often find yourself feeling as if you’re fulfilling tacked-on errands for a character you have no narrative reason to support or be interested in.

And you generate your party as your own custom characters that you can swap in and out at any time, with no limitations to how many you can create within a given class (they cap how many characters in total you can create, but it’s a pretty generous number). You create their look and name them — which basically means you’re free to imagine whatever you want about who they are and why they’re with you.

I used to be turned off by these kinds of systems; I’d rather have a party of story-based and well-realized characters working together, than view my heroes as interchangeable dummies, the sum of their abilities and nothing more. But the world is rich enough that you want to make little people you believe could exist there, and it solves the “only one optimal choice” problem in a neat way.

Say you decide to make a Priest for your party; you conceptualize a little bit what you want that character to look like. But outfit them in the items that provide the best bonuses to their strength and defense and suddenly my floppy-haired staff and robe character looks awkward in the same kind of armor that another character is wearing. They don’t look like the character I’ve visualized; they don’t look like they’re going to be playing the role of healer in my party.

For the first time, I start choosing stuff that’s less-than-optimal from a stats standpoint because it just looks cool on the character; it makes them look how I want them to look. I want my Mage in a dress and heels, dammit, and if it makes her weaker — aren’t the magic users supposed to be more sensitive to damage than the hero is, anyway? I can deal.

It breaks the boring “upgrade to new equipment, sell the old equipment, repeat” cycle in a way that enhances my concept of my characters at the same time. I find myself hanging on to all the cute little robes and hats and armor plates and outfits there are, because I might want to use them on a new character. Seeing what kinds of new characters I can make up and add to my hero’s journey becomes a big part of the game’s fun. They all look so cute!

Also cute: NEW KITTEN. I decided on naming her Yorda. Shh, we can make fun of me later.

What Does A Gamer Look Like?


If you are a Brooklynite or you know one, the perception that Manhattan is like ugh so fucking far, impossible miles comprised of inconvenient steps, is familiar to you. Although Brooklyn is as much a part of New York City as any other borough (holding my tongue against the Staten Island jab, because they’ve had enough) , when discussing Manhattan destinations, we talk about “going to the city” as if it were a cross-country road trip.

In fact, it’s just a matter of train stops. It’s not that big a deal. But when I had to go “to the city” yesterday to see the U.S. launch of Dragon Quest IX at the Nintendo World Store, I fully-loaded my iPhone with brand-new music and brought my PSP (YES! I GOT ONE, present from a lovely friend) for the train ride, and in case I had to wait in line when I got there.

Incidentally, what is the etiquette around playing a PSP at a Nintendo launch event? What if you’re using it to re-play Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII at the launch of a Square Enix game? These are the things I wonder about, friends.

As it turned out, I did not have to wait in line, but I did play a fair bit on the train — the early train sequences in Midgar, incidentally. Semi-surreal; Cloud and his AVALANCHE rebel cohort trying to evade train security so they can take the railway to their scheduled Reactor bombing, while all around me the subway interior is decorated with lectures about “if you see something, say something.” The ride was punctuated by voice-over drones about “suspicious packages.”

You read the ‘Hey Baby’ post, and how unfortunately acclimated girls from my neighborhood get to long stares, unwelcome conversation-starters like “I like your bounce, Mami,” and generally aggressive strange men. So when the guy I sit down next to on the train begins staring at me and grinning stupidly, I simply ignore it, put my headphones on, and keep playing FFVII.

He goes on staring and nodding at me the whole time, this guy in ginormous baggy pants, askew ballcap, sporting a huge diamond stud — like, not my type. By the time we arrive at the station, I take off my headphones and begin putting them away, and glance to make sure this creeper isn’t planning to follow me or something.

But he goes, “Hey, Final Fantasy VII. Old school, that’s cool!”
I was floored and embarrassed, and all I could say was something to the effect of “yeah, it’s pretty essential, right?”

And he goes, “I was surprised. You don’t really look like a gamer.”

Ha. Not for one minute would I have guessed it was my PSP he was staring at, either. Damn, did I feel dumb.

I mean, here I’ve been writing for years about “broadening audiences” and “cultural diversity” and things like that, and yet I suppose I still had in my head an idea about “what a gamer looks like” (those dudes wearing turbans and capes and Slime costumes at the DQIX event, for example).

Do you?

I once wrote this article about the innate desire “we” all have, as part of a culture that’s been historically fairly small, fairly intense and fairly marginalized, to “recognize” one another in the public, offline space. When I wrote it, it was 2007; I lived in Manhattan. I felt very much like the only gamer in the world (if you’ve seen the piece I did for Kill Screen Issue 0, you might recognize some sentiments in common).

To be quite honest, I guess it feels different now, even a few years later. I went to an internet cafe in Williamsburg to print some stuff out and they had a bunch of TW@-branded mousepads there (although, to be fair, the clerk told me I was the only person who’d ever noted the reference). Many weekends I join friends from the local Silent Barn community space in playing and promoting Babycastles, the indie arcade they’ve got going on in the basement (I recently had the privilege of playing Messhof’s Nidhogg with a bunch of my friends whose usual purview is playing music). People at my local hangouts tell me my job is cool. I know one bartender with a Triforce on his arm, and another bartender with a Buster Sword on his calf — and that’s just at one restaurant.

We are proliferating. We should adjust our expectations of strangers.

Bonus material: While we’re on really old articles of mine, one about people who got way too into Final Fantasy VII.

Double bonus: I loaded my iPhone with new music, yes — if you follow me on Twitter you’ve been picking up the mixtapes I regularly post, but if you missed it, here’s volume 2 of my ‘summertime mix’. Due to the limitations of free hosting, it’ll only be available for a limited time, so if you’re remotely curious, grab it now and give an ear to these fantastic artists.

Triple bonus ding-ding-ding: Guess what else I did at the DQIX event? I interviewed Yuji Horii. You’ll get to read that ASAP.
[Slimes on the cobbles of Rockefeller Plaza]


[Today’s Good Song: ‘I’ll Follow You‘, White Fence (via noise narcs)]