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.
"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.
8 Comments
I would like to rephrase an aspect of my previous comment: not the "viscous nature of species that live and fight for as long as land has existed for territory, dominance, and food", but rather the viscous nature of a system that enforces proximate species to compete violently over territory, dominance, and food
I think it's a great point of view and very relative to the almost literary nature of the fables found in the JRPGs. However for me it is difficult to see it that way for myself, since I relate video games more to architecture than to painting or literature. Of course there are both (and there are excellent stories) but within the amazing mix of arts that exists in video games for me it is more evident that spaces play a more important role than almost anything else, and when creating a world (no matter how untrue it may be) the way in which it is built physically and diegetically is fundamental. I would like to believe that JRPGs are still abstractions (rather simplifications) as in the mid-80s or 90s, but with the move to 3d a lot of effort has been put into the detail of the art, of the character modeling, in the writing and worldbuilding, but not so much in combat systems, which for me, due to their more static and simple nature, seem better to craft moments similar to a theater than to simulate a real battle (which does not happen in Dragon Quarter or Nocturne, for example).
To be honest, the games that I prefer are others that do not make me deal with 1000 random battles to tell me a story instead of showing it to me and that through those battles my character evolves more than just getting a skill that translates into a new animation that causes more damage.
I apologize for the calm rant but despite the fact that some of my warmest and most essential memories (in addition to some of my favorite games) belong to jrpg, I have so many problems with the forms of the genre that I don't know where to start lol @dwardman
anyway I was thinking of making a list of my favorite JRPGs, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the subject
To be honest, the games that I prefer are others that do not make me deal with 1000 random battles to tell me a story instead of showing it to me and that through those battles my character evolves more than just getting a skill that translates into a new animation that causes more damage.
I apologize for the calm rant but despite the fact that some of my warmest and most essential memories (in addition to some of my favorite games) belong to jrpg, I have so many problems with the forms of the genre that I don't know where to start lol @dwardman
anyway I was thinking of making a list of my favorite JRPGs, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the subject
i don't really care about that dissonance in jrpg because i believe that while videogames itself are lies, us, the players, are the ones who decided how much of the lie we believe - and i'm all for it.
with that said, i respect this game so much. can't play it for now but i'm in love with it for a long time. it's fascinating how much dragon quarter puts effort in make this lie plausible and messes with the "genre" archetypes probably just because the creators thinked first about doing a game than doing a jrpg.
with that said, i respect this game so much. can't play it for now but i'm in love with it for a long time. it's fascinating how much dragon quarter puts effort in make this lie plausible and messes with the "genre" archetypes probably just because the creators thinked first about doing a game than doing a jrpg.
In fact, I think I mentioned in another review that videogames, as almost all artistic constructs are lies with real concerns, and yes, absolutely, we choose how much of that lie we decide to believe. It's a shame, but in my case the Japanese RPG lie doesn't work for me anymore @heatten
oh, i just read your comment now @Ardwyw. understand your feelings and actually like the vision of jrpgs being more like theater - ACTUALLY, i've been thinking about videogames being more like theater: the feeling of believing how much we want for the sake of fiction and while the interaction not being exactly as much as games, we are more, physically, close to the scene and it affect our cartasis in a way that videogame does - think that in the end you are more an accomplice than the character itself.
@ardwyw I have a very similar opinion to you regarding disdain for rpgs that involve battles that have little context or compatibility with the story, and I believe that the big original jrpgs, dragon quest and final fantasy, are some of the few that manage to retain meaning and significance behind their random combat systems. I’ve written about it in a previous review I think you might have read, but I believe dragon quest to be based and constructed around battling as gambles for survival and adventure, with the narrative supporting that, while final fantasy (while originally similarly about simulated adventure and resource management) after 4 became about theatrically exploring the personalities and feelings of the characters through mechanics in a language of play.
Most rpgs I find copy either ff or dq’s style of random combat without understanding those subtexts or without creating a subtext of their own. The jrpg genre as a whole beyond those and some outliers like dragon quarter and SMT as we mentioned, is an exercise in emulating the text of those two series’ flavors lacking in subtext and meaning. I’m generally of the mindset that everything in a game should contribute to its overall message.
As you said I don’t consider the battles of games like final fantasy and its imitators (almost all jrpgs in the 3D era, to be honest) to be real battles in the same sense as the more difficult dragon quests and their commitment to difficulty and minimalist strategy and playing with player psychology, but rather a kind of theatre.
It’s very interesting to note that the lead designer(Takashi Tokita) of final fantasy 4, the game that sparked this trend, was a student of theater with a background in theater acting, and he put much of his theater experience and philosophy into the storytelling of the game. This was eventually further developed with the director of final fantasy 7, kitase, coming from a film directing background and influencing the style of the game’s philosophy of performance even further by adding camera, blocking, and editing techniques into the language of that game’s expression. Final fantasy 4 and 7 are some of my favorite games in the medium, but many of its copycats borrow its techniques without understanding why they were used in the first place, so it’s through this criticism I find myself agreeing with you very much.
On the topic of navigation and architecture, I agree with you very much here as well. As a recently graduated and generally new designer myself, I’m working on the game I started as my undergraduate thesis project, in which every scene/section of the game uses a different control scheme and camera style to create a different relationship the player will have with the environments they are in. I think the unified system of control in games right now with regards to simple movement and 3rd person free rotation camera as kind of really boring and it homogenizes the feelings player have to environments; it makes the player treat them all the same. I’m trying to experiment a lot with systems of movement and control that are influenced by the scene and relationship between space and player. I hope I am able to keep this expression through navigation a constant in all or most of the games I make going forward
I really enjoy the disjointed nature of control the ps1 final fantasies use for example, and I find that a lot more interesting than some of the late ps2 and ps3 jrpg forms of exploration.
I would be really interested to see your list of favorite JRPG’s and I appreciate reviews like this that make me think differently about game genres.
Most rpgs I find copy either ff or dq’s style of random combat without understanding those subtexts or without creating a subtext of their own. The jrpg genre as a whole beyond those and some outliers like dragon quarter and SMT as we mentioned, is an exercise in emulating the text of those two series’ flavors lacking in subtext and meaning. I’m generally of the mindset that everything in a game should contribute to its overall message.
As you said I don’t consider the battles of games like final fantasy and its imitators (almost all jrpgs in the 3D era, to be honest) to be real battles in the same sense as the more difficult dragon quests and their commitment to difficulty and minimalist strategy and playing with player psychology, but rather a kind of theatre.
It’s very interesting to note that the lead designer(Takashi Tokita) of final fantasy 4, the game that sparked this trend, was a student of theater with a background in theater acting, and he put much of his theater experience and philosophy into the storytelling of the game. This was eventually further developed with the director of final fantasy 7, kitase, coming from a film directing background and influencing the style of the game’s philosophy of performance even further by adding camera, blocking, and editing techniques into the language of that game’s expression. Final fantasy 4 and 7 are some of my favorite games in the medium, but many of its copycats borrow its techniques without understanding why they were used in the first place, so it’s through this criticism I find myself agreeing with you very much.
On the topic of navigation and architecture, I agree with you very much here as well. As a recently graduated and generally new designer myself, I’m working on the game I started as my undergraduate thesis project, in which every scene/section of the game uses a different control scheme and camera style to create a different relationship the player will have with the environments they are in. I think the unified system of control in games right now with regards to simple movement and 3rd person free rotation camera as kind of really boring and it homogenizes the feelings player have to environments; it makes the player treat them all the same. I’m trying to experiment a lot with systems of movement and control that are influenced by the scene and relationship between space and player. I hope I am able to keep this expression through navigation a constant in all or most of the games I make going forward
I really enjoy the disjointed nature of control the ps1 final fantasies use for example, and I find that a lot more interesting than some of the late ps2 and ps3 jrpg forms of exploration.
I would be really interested to see your list of favorite JRPG’s and I appreciate reviews like this that make me think differently about game genres.
PLEASE STOP USING THE HORRIBLE AMERICAN ART BOXES THEY ARE TOO OFFENSIVE
dwardman
3 years ago
But then, every story is a lie in that it ignores the aspects it is not concerned with, and I think the best JRPGs or say, "pleasant" video games are like storybooks or fairy tales focused on an airiness similar to dreams and landscapes and to express something through that language.
Simulation games and western RPGs excel at the opposite, systematically exploring navigation, hardships, and similar modes of experiences a little more grounded than the more metaphorical nature of Jrpgs.
I am glad that Dragon Quarter exists to interestingly bridge the gap in its own way and comment on it. It reminds me a bit of SMT Nocturne for similar atmospheric critique of RPG landscapes and scenarios but Nocturne still remains fairly more metaphoric and abstracted compared to Dragon Quarter's space and resource-based combat and economy of loss