You know how it is. The most an artist's death has gotten me to cry in a long time - the infectious creative energy I've felt lent down to me from his work is something that'll never leave me. And just like everyone else, I've found myself pouring through dozens and dozens of heartfelt tributes to the man's legendary career. But reading it all got me thinking...ain't the meat and potatoes reputation Dragon Quest has earnt itself kind of like, an error? An impossibility?
So, lemme ask you a question: when's the first time you saw something that made you think "Dragon Quest is cool"? I couldn't tell you what mine was, but recently finishing a full playthrough of the original NES Dragon Warrior pulled me back into the correct reality in which this series was not "generic", but an outlier in style. Toriyama's enthusiasm to play the hits puts the personality on display in its monsters maybe 20 years ahead of the curve. As an aside, I also recommend to anyone playing any older Dragon Quest to look up some scans of the old manuals; the effortless coolness of his artstyle had already bled into DQ's identity.

You could call this game a "grind", but the grind is the gameplay and the gameplay is good. Each individual battle is simple to solve in a bubble, but enemies are split between the ones you can defeat with or without expending resources - instantly spiraling the world into an ever-evolving puzzle to solve. Planning out a trajectory of travel immediately prompts a dizzying amount of dice rolls in your head: how many resources should I spend to gain EXP? How much should I dice roll running away, and how much magic will I have left to heal myself up considering both the expected and unexpected outcomes? Inner workings filled with perfect math to never quite satisfy things with a clear answer; but what raises this from good to great is how through my entire time playing the game, I always undershot my potential. Enemies that are apparently stronger than you can be taken down with perfect resource management, finding consistency in a haze of lottery tickets that makes you feel genius every time you take one down and keep a little more magic for the rest of the trip than your last encounter with the same guy.
And in comparison to how grinding is often characterized as a boring chore-like task, I think playing this game is way closer to exhausting - you can do a good run, and do another, and then lose to a Skeleton you've already defeated 10 times and now half your gold is gone. You probably haven't even made it halfway to the level you want yet! But for every moment of flighty confusion, there's also a moment where you get to level 3, gain heal, and kill the first slime you see in one hit.

and that's how they get you

Random encounters are most frequently characterized as one of those unsavory bits of RPG we chop off, but playing this helped click into place how much texture can be applied to identical floor tiles simply by the difference in looming threat. The invisible encounter sheet constantly shifting under your feet giving cool and hostile sensation to each step, and when you realize you can kill something that once scared you off, the level design changes. Reinforces the process of seamless non-linear exploration with an information game unique to the format - a grind made engaging by the real question being where to even grind in the first place. This is an RPG with no vestigial limbs. Every single part of an RPG you've questioned the integral elements of is present working in perfect harmony with each other; last year, I found myself actively frustrated playing a newly released turn-based RPG in which the mindlessness of each individual encounter serves no purpose. Without long-term resource management, of course random encounters are boring! Or, in contrast to RPGs where levels feel like guided progress, here, lower level enemies to begin to run away, breaking the consistency of previously successful sources of experience and gold. Now, with every moment of newly found strength matched by a push out of my comfort zone, I'm like "ohhh i get it now"

and they got me

This is all coming from a relatively young person's perspective (i turned 22 around when i wrote most of this happy birthday me :D ), so there's this tough balance to reach when it comes to simultaneously embracing that sometimes, traits of oldness are endearing to me, and making sure I don't sound like I am looking down on something, or it's a novelty.
In the past few months, I ended up playing a bunch of games from the mid-late 2000s, and it was easy to lose yourself in a sea of fifteen year old Gamefaqs threads, and chat with people just a bit older than me who experienced all these things organically in their childhood. Especially due to growing up with games from the same era, it was easy for me to imagine myself playing these as a kid, wondering how this could've effected me sooner. Dragon Quest on the contrast is for a bit older of a generation than me, especially with some of its strongest cultural imprint existing beyond language barrier. I played this alongside someone close to me - we honestly couldn't stop gushing to each other about how satisfying the sleuthing was as we kept a million notes marked down. There's a great moment in which a secret that's visibly hinted to you in one of the last towns has an equivalent but invisible secret in one of the first towns; this is one of the oldest games I've played with a strong design language. Things like this got us close to that ideal you hear of pen and paper hint tracking. Eventually, it became natural to feel like playing the game like this was making me fall into the past footsteps of someone else; it's hard not to romanticize it like we were 2 little kids playing the game lit by nothing but the humming static of a CRT. And even though I've literally known people not even a decade older than me that grew up with this game, it's immersing myself in a distinctly different time-frame from usual that makes that era feel so far away. It's that solidarity with a perspective just out of reach that starts positively haunting the game with the ghost of lived experience.

I was so enamored and ultimately blown away by the genius design of Cocoon. The mechanics in the game are pretty much the definition of "elegant simplicity", as the whole game entirely uses one button, but this one command allows you to interact with the world in so many engaging ways. And the world itself felt sublime to explore, with some outstanding environmental design that keeps your eyes wandering across the screen as though each area is a painting. The strange alien like technology mixed with imagery evoking bugs and the natural world I found endlessly interesting, and these elements are just as fun to look at as they are to engage with mechanically. Add on top of this one of the most gorgeous electronic scores I've ever heard in a game, and Cocoon is an utterly enveloping experience from start to finish.