LogFAQs > #883953440

Raganork posted...

I've played DQ7, 8, and 9. From my experience, they all played pretty much the same, beat for beat.

I was mostly referring to the earlier games. I've dropped the series entirely myself, so I have no idea what the later games are like, or if they've finally settled into a mold they just never change anymore. But it didn't used to be that way.

But there's something else to consider that might be a factor...



Raganork posted...

I've played DQ7, 8, and 9. From my experience, they all played pretty much the same, beat for beat.

Maybe DQ11 is different, but after giving the series three chances, I'm very hesitant on trying another.

One thing to consider is that DQ always sort of built itself around the idea of trilogies. DQ1-3 is basically a single story - DQ1 is the middle part, DQ2 is the direct sequel that takes place two generations later, and DQ3 is a prequel that happens long before the first game. DQ4-6 are also a loose trilogy, as is 7-9.

If your complaint is that 7, 8, and 9 are all more or less the same, it might be completely intentional because they're tied together thematically. I can't promise that DQ11 would be super-different (again, I haven't played any of the games in the series since DW4), but it might be, because it falls into a different trilogy (even assuming they're still lumping them into trilogies at all - I know next to nothing about DQ11).

If you were interested you'd probably have to find someone who actually plays the games to get a more intricate breakdown, but I wouldn't just dismiss it out of hand as being just the same thing over and over, if only because there HAVE been changes to the series at various points (if nothing else, at least early on).

Then again, it's entirely possible the entire franchise went to complete shit via the Squeenix merger in exactly the same way Final Fantasy did, sooo... ~shrug~



Raganork posted...

the same Akira Toriyama art style that I can't stand

This, I can't argue with. Being a bit older, I didn't "grow up" with Dragon Ball Z like all the 90s kids, so I have zero nostalgia for his art style. And I've never really liked it, even as a kid (it's probably a good thing Nintendo changed the box art for the North American version of Dragon Warrior, or I probably never would have bought it).

(and on that topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdp9VFzimwc )

That, plus the complete lack of recognizable continuity, was also a large part of what made the Dragon Warrior cartoon hard to watch/enjoy when it was originally on (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7I-4qqHFrQ )

But Toriyama's art design was never a negative for the early games in the franchise, because it didn't translate well to pixel art anyway. And since you literally never saw your main character as anything more than a tiny blob, you were probably filling in your own mental image that looked nothing like his art style.

It's exactly the same way that Amano's style never bothered me in the original Final Fantasy games, because it only barely translated into pixel-art, whereas it probably would have bothered the fuck out of me in a more high-fidelity graphical environment. By the time the games reached a point where it would have started to irk me, they'd already switched to Nomura.


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