Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 169: Dragon Quest I & II

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

Jeremy and Bob go international to examine the origins of the world's most influential console RPG series. First, we stop in Nagoya to talk Dragon Quest with Alex Fraioli. Then, USgamer's Nadia Oxford beams in from Canada to lament the cruelty of DQII.

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listen to this live, but we are recording it live in Japan, in Nagoya, Japan. Actually, is that how you pronounce it? How do you pronounce? Yeah, Nagoya. Okay, cool. Oh, who's that? Oh, hi. I'm Alex Freoli. Where would people know you from, Alex? Oh, dear. Their nightmare, like, mostly the nightmares. Open their closet at night. Waking up screaming. A long time ago, I used to do some freelance work for one-up. If anyone remembers that. That's correct. And then I, I, came to Japan and I opened a video game bar and

that's where we are right now. That's pretty much, yeah, that's the progression. But I think people probably know you from your podcast, No More Woppers, which you co-host with Retronauts regular Ray Barnhold. A beautiful young boy named Ray Barnhold and I, we do a show called No More Woppers. It's, yeah, it's basically just me talking about life in Japan

and him talking about life back home and, you know, it's how we deal with our stress. Is it called No More Woppers because it's so hard to find a Burger King in Japan. Yes. I knew it. I'm not the only person here. You're not the only person here. There's another person here. Hey, it's Bob Mackie. It's my first time in Japan and anime is real. It's true. Yeah, Gio dude. We're friends now. Yes, we haven't walked across a scramble crossing yet, but I could see the wistful look in Bob's eyes as we pass through Shibuya.

It's embarrassing how many things I know just through video games and anime. You've played persona. There's no escaping yet. Yeah. So anyway, we are here at Alex's bar, critical hit in Nagoya, which everyone who is in Nagoya ever should come visit and drink from, you know, like get a drink at, I guess, and play some video games because, man, there's a lot of video games here. I have several video softwares. Yes, your collection dwarves mine. I only have, like, Game Boy stuff. You have everything. You even have strategy guides in case someone comes in and gets really drunk and stuck at Final Fantasy 10, they're set.

It happens from time to time. I'm sure, I'm sure. So, yeah, we're going to talk this episode, at least in the first half, with Alex, about Dragon Quest, because I hear tell Alex likes him some Dragon Quest. I am a little bit of a fan. It's a fun series. And this episode is going to be time to launch around the same time that Dragon Quest 11 hits the U.S. So if you're listening to this now, it's probably September or thereabouts. So hello to the people in the future.

I hope the world is okay. Yeah, so, you know, with Dragon Quest 11 coming out and the RPG history series that I've been writing for U.S. Gamer, I think an important component of all this is to step back into the dim and distant year of 1986, which sadly I still remember, and talk about the origins of one of the most important video game series of all time. Thank you. So Dragon Quest, where did you guys first encounter Dragon Quest? Or as we unwashed Americans knew it in our filthy way, dragon warrior? I was, gosh, I was in the second grade, I think. I was seven or eight or at the time, or however old you are then. And my brother was a freshman in high school, and his friend went on vacation.

And he's like, hey, Chris, borrow my NES and all my games. And my brother's like, yes, I will do that. And so suddenly we had an NES in our house. And imagine like getting all at once Mega Man and Contra and Castlevania and Ninja Guiden. That must be nice. They drip fed that to me. Yeah, I was an old person.

I was there from the start. My parents, they would not buy us one. And then we got to borrow one. And included in that trove of games was Dragon Warrior. And that was my, it wasn't my first exposure to RPGs because I had been into fans. Fantasy Star before that. But it's what really hooked me on RPGs because I had just been used to, you know, action titles up to that point. And a game that I can actually play, you know, leisurely. That's, that was a new thing for me, really, at the time. And Dragon Warrior kind of was the first example of a game that stuck with me for that reason. As a second grader, were you alarmed by the volume of text in the game? Not so much the volume of text. And the these and the that. There we go. Yeah. That's.

that kind of as a kid I'm like mom what are these words I don't know these letters I know how they sound but I don't know what this means Right So how about you Bob I think it was the I'm sure we'll talk about it

But it was the Nintendo Power deal Where you would get a free copy If you subscribed in was that in 1989 No 89 was when the game came out Okay It was probably 19901 Okay it might have been 1990 And I think it was the first RPG

I'd seen at that point A neighbor had it And I believe Nintendo Power was very popular In my neighborhood because it was a very working class town and the prospect of getting a free video game just for buying a magazine, no one could pass up. So it was like nothing I'd ever seen before

and I think that's why I was really fascinated with it. I would just go over and watch and play through it and I was just alarm like, you have to read while you play this game. That just struck me as an oddity. But that might have been just what hooked me from the beginning, just how different it was from everything else. But I guess that wasn't the case for what happened sales-wise

to Dragon Quest one. in America. Right. Yeah. So as for myself, I was a dutiful little Nintendo Power subscriber and I already had a subscription to Nintendo Power and therefore I did not qualify for a free Dragon Warrior. Instead, I asked for it for Christmas in 1989 and received it, much to my surprise. And when I first put it in, I wasn't really sure what to think of it because it was really ugly. The music was kind of shrill and it was really slow. And I had seen some RPGs before that, you know, watching other people play stuff like tunnels and trolls or whatever. So I wasn't totally alienated by it, but I was really kind of put off by how slow it was.

But, you know, it was a Christmas gift and it's not like I had a huge steam backlog or something. So I went ahead and played it and kind of got into it and, you know, went through the first quest area and eventually rescued the princess. And that wasn't the end of the game. And that was the point at which I was like, oh, wait, this is really interesting. Like, the standard video game quest, you know, to play five hours and rescue a princess. Like, that's just the start. That's like the first half of the game.

There's more to it than that. That's really interesting. So I got hooked on it. And even though I didn't really, I don't think I really got what an RPG was, but I just kept bumbling my way through until I defeated the dragon lord. And then I never played another dragon quest game again until many years later. What's interesting to me about that first half of the game is rescuing the princess really is optional. Like, you have to do it to get the, whatever the item is, the charm.

You get her love and you find the thing in the swamp. Wayland's love. Yes. But you can go through the whole game without even rescuing her. And you come back at the end with the orb of light. And the king is just like, eh, good enough. Like, whatever. You can also save her from the dragon and then not take her back to the past.

palace. So you're carrying, there's a special sprite when you rescue the princess and you're carrying her through the world. You can actually go and defeat the dragon lord if you don't save and don't return to tantalil, no, Tantigil castle. And I've seen YouTube videos to people. I'm sure you'd need to either be very lucky, very, very patient, or use save states. But you can fight the dragon lord by carrying Princess Gwilin into the castle. It's not so hard, because you can do the princess thing at any time. You can just level on up and then get the princess and go to the dragon lord. But

for me as a kid, the thing that made that funny was, as an immature child, if you have the princess and you sleep in an inn when you wake up, the innkeeper says it looks like you had a fun time. Or something to that effect. Yeah. I did not know that. Oh,

that doesn't surprise me, though, because there is an element of sauciness to the Dragon Quest series that is still present to this very day. with your puff-puffs and your casino money girls and so on and so forth. Yeah, once the early modern Englishman at the door, all the sleaze came in. I guess it was an okay trade-off. But that was something that was remarkable about the original Dragon Warrior

was that Nintendo localized it and they put a lot of effort into it. You didn't really see people trying to construct sensible grammar at that point in video games, let alone give it a, you know, like, embellished sort of Shakespearean-ish Bob, you're the English-lit expert, so you can be very specific about this. I can shout it everybody. It's not old English.

It's not Middle English. It's early modern English, which is what Shakespeare wrote in. But it's not important at all. I just spend money on student loans every month to yell at people about that. Well, I'm glad this is one of those opportunities where it pays off. Three times a year. Do you think Dragon Warriors should have been in Iambic pentameter?

Oh, no. Good. No. I mean, they've done that with some of the more recent localizations where you see buffed up text like for certain characters and certain towns. Oh yeah. I think there's,

so yeah, there's a town in Dragon Quest 11 that I've seen where it's like a Japanese-type town and everyone speaks in haiku. That's pretty clever. As long as it doesn't get in the way of communication. No, and it's actually, from what I've seen,

it's actually accurate haiku in that there is a lot of nature, imagery in it, which proper haiku uses. Because I was just playing Dragon Quest 4 on my phone on the way over here and the Scottish accents are just miserable. You have to read the dialogue out loud in your head to know what anyone's saying.

They took it too far, but they pulled back. Yeah, they went overboard with Dragon Quest 4 and I think once they got feedback from users who were like what did you do? I don't understand anything. They dialed it down. So more recent games have

lots of dialects to, you know, reflect the the dialects in the Japanese, but they're not, they don't get in the way so much anymore, and that's good. So let's talk a little bit about the origins of Dragon Quest because, you know, we are starting here a series of deep dives into the Dragon Quest series. So we might as well kind of lay the groundwork. And the groundwork starts, I don't know, where do you think the groundwork starts? I remember Enix at the time, I think, I don't know if they were working for Enix the time, but Yuji Hori and Koichi Nakamura.

And Yuki Nobu Chida, is that the guy? They won a contest, I believe. So I think they won individual contest at the time. Okay, so let's go back to the dim in an even more distant year of 1983-ish, 82. Enix is not a developer. Enix has always been a publisher, and they kind of got their start in gaming on PCs, and they would take promising young developers. and basically fund their games.

And so after a while, they started doing these contests where you could submit games to Enix and they would judge them and then the winners would get their game published and apparently get a lot of money. And one of the winners of one of their contests was a guy named Koichi Nakamura. And he created a little platformer game called Door Door.

And it won and became a pretty big hit on Japanese PCs and it got ported to a bunch of other systems like Famicom. And I think he got pretty good. pretty wealthy off of it. And so he started his own studio called ChuneSoft, which is named for the character that started in Doordor, Chune. And so, yeah, that was one

contest. And then the other contest was, like you said, Ujihori and Cheetah. I can't remember his full name. Yuki Nobu Chita. And they created a game called Forget it. It's the Portobia serial murder case. Wait, I thought Ujjjori made a tennis game

first. That was the first contest he wanted. Something called like love match or something like that yeah that sounds familiar yeah i think uh when i did a episode a long time ago about this i remember reading the history of that that it was his first like contest win for enix and that's how he got into the game got it so they i guess they established their own studio which his name i don't actually know his studio now is called armor project but i don't know if that's what it was at the time um okay so you're right yeah i i did forget about that but yeah he created the tennis game and then they built their adventure game and the adventure game was the big deal because it was

kind of the start of a pretty popular genre in Japan, the, like the graphical adventure, like their take on it. And, you know, it was pretty much a standard PC graphical adventure with a little windowed image in it and then kind of like a menu to work through. But I kind of feel

like the revolution there was when they brought the game to Famicom and they had to make it work. And if you've read the book, I Am Err by Nathan Altis, there's an entire chapter dedicated to like, this, or not an entire chapter, but a big chunk of text dedicated to this game that never came to the U.S. and about how complicated it was to take a PC graphical adventure

and turn it into a Famicom game, especially that early on, you know, before you had expanded memory, because, you know, the way graphics worked on NES Famicom was they had to be tiled, so they couldn't just, like, draw a house. They had to create the individual tiles of a house. They had to create like the tiles for the borders of the window and that sort of thing. So it really forced them to kind of rethink how everything worked. Also, they were no longer able to have people play games on a

keyboard, on a computer. They had to control everything with two buttons and a D-pad. So that forced them to rethink the interface. And the game was a big hit. And I feel like that really laid the groundwork for Dragon Quest. Anyway, I've been talking a lot so you guys can take over. No, I feel like this could be I don't know, an exaggeration, but I feel like in a way he's sort of a will-write-esque figure and the fact that he created two very strong genres while drawing from earlier ideas.

But the Japanese graphic adventure game that still lives on in things like Ace Attorney and Dangenrampa and other things like that. And obviously, the console Japanese RPG still follows many of the traditions that Dragon Quest set out, especially Pokemon, which is huge still. It's never not been huge. Right. And Dragon Quest itself is still very much Dragon Quest. It has not changed. But, yeah, Dragon Quest was a big breakout in Japan.

And I feel like the design of the game was built really heavily around what they did with Portopia. It's basically combining a role-playing game with, you know, like an ultimate-style role-playing game with the graphical adventure window format. But that was like the combat window. And that's kind of a big deal because if you look at RPGs that came before that, they were either, you know, stuff like Falcom's games, which were very sort of janky and real time. And then you had stuff like wizardry, which

was a huge influence on them. And everything was windowed and kind of ugly. And Dragon Quest had a much nicer visual style, and it just felt more immersive. It did a good job of combining a lot of different things. Where does the Black Onyx fit into all of this? Black Onyx, I think, was

1984. And that was Hank Rogers, a Dutch guy who came to Japan, was like, people here seem to like importing wizardry. I should make a game like wizardry in Japanese, even though I don't speak Japanese. And he did. And it was a pretty big hit. And, yeah, Yuji Hori and Kuiji Nakamura both were pretty big wizardry fans and Ultima fans also. But supposedly they went to an Apple expo, Macworld or whatever. I guess it was before Macintosh. And saw wizardry in action, we're like, yes, this is awesome. So they

got really hooked on that and stuff like Black Onics and decided to decided to sort of recompile the genre in their own image. And the result was Dragon Quest. I've been talking a lot. So I'll let someone else take over you. I just didn't want to neglect the Black Onics because I feel like I just popped to my head. And I often feel with all of our shows, when we try to do like a fossil record of genres and things like that, it's often who does it best instead of who did it first.

and Dragon Quest really did do it best. Oh, yeah, yeah. It definitely wasn't the first of anything to speak of. But it was the most, like, evocative of what it was trying to do. Yeah, and, yeah, a big part of Dragon Quest success came down to Akira Toriyama, a famous and beloved comics artist, Manga, in Japan, who at the time was, had he started to start a Dragon Ball? I think that was, like, 86-ish. Dragon Ball was already underway at the time, yeah.

Yeah, so he had had a big hit with Dr. Slump, which you're a big fan of. Oh, yeah. And then Dragon Ball started, and that was a pretty big hit. So I don't remember exactly how they hooked up. I know Koichi Sugiyama, the composer, like, wrote in and said, I like your video games. Can I write music for you? I think he filled out a questionnaire that came with, I want to say, a Mahjong game. And, yeah.

And at the time, like, just a quick dive into Sugiyama's deal, he was already, like, he had already had a career at that point he would he did music uh he wrote pop songs he did he scored godzilla films like uh he was and he was in his uh 60s he was more or less retired and they're like no you know what do more music for us he's like yeah yeah it would be like if danny elfman today wrote to someone and was like hey i want to write music for your video game like to you know to an indie artist or something like let's let's let's do that that'd be pretty great i mean actually uh i i think uh trin resner is a huge fan of pixel junk monsters. Wow.

He's like, he like texts Dylan Cuthbert occasionally. I saw Dylan's phone when I was interviewing him. And he was like, yeah, check that out. There's Trent Reznor, just like, hey, what's up? Amazing. So, so I guess that kind of thing happens. You know, people play video games, I guess even more so now than it used to be. But, but yeah, I still don't know how Toriyama got involved, I guess.

I was curious. Was there an existing relationship between Enix and Shonen where Toriyama was being published? I think that's how it got connected. Yeah. And that was definitely how Dragon Quest became big because when it first launched, it was kind of like,

it did okay, but it was one of the, like Pokemon, it didn't really take off immediately because it wasn't obvious what it did well and what was so cool about it, but word of mouth kind of took off.

And then Shonen Jump started promoting it in the magazine. And they were like, hey, here's a game, you love this Dragon Ball. We'll check it out. This is Dragon Quest.

It's kind of like Dragon Ball, but with a quest instead of a ball, same guy same dragons it's cool there there is a ball though there is a ball of light but it's not a dragon ball okay that's true and the dragons do not grant wishes unless your wishes to die no they just want to wreck you this may sound stupid but i have to wonder of course it's an RPG there are dragons and RPGs but i wonder if that was intentional like oh yes dragon ball about dragon quest toriama connection yeah to me the biggest visual difference is that uh dragon ball is more focus on like the like a Chinese style dragon and dragon warriors much more like the

European Western style dragon yeah well the monsters the monsters in Dragon Ball look like they're from Dr. Slump where they're just crazy creatures yeah those those kind of go away after a while in the manga like once you get away from young Goku's era you stop seeing like the giant dinosaurs and stuff and it's just more like hey here's a here's a really puny alien from space that's going to get big and wreck everyone I uh you'll see that in TQ 11 when you play that soon one of the things I love more than anything else is two things Toriyama dinosaurs and Toriyama

robots. What about Toriyama vehicles? Ah, it just seems cramped man, I don't know. There was a great figure that we saw was of Bulma and young Goku in the little capsule car. Yeah, I like that figure a lot more than the Bulma figures where she's like incredibly what are you doing?

No. That's not in the source material. No. Not until later. I have, so I don't know if you remember this. The last time I was on your fantastic program was TGS like nine years ago It was a long time ago Sweet God Almighty

And I Was not the SIGA Genesis episode? I think it might have been Man, that's 10 years You still haven't done A sort of a familiar episode? Not yet? Okay

Is that what we should have done here? Yes. No, I like both. I mentioned that Karatiyama lives He's like 10 minutes north of here In a little town called Kiyosu And at the time

You could go to his house And you could You could bring the doorbell and his elderly mother would come to the door, come to the gate, and you would hand a thing to her, and she would take it inside, and he would sign it, and she would shuffle on out and give it back to you.

That no longer happens. I'm sure people abuse that. Yeah. But I do have a Toriyama update, if anyone is interested. This is a Toriyama news flash. So, yeah, he lives in this town called Kiyosu. It's a tiny town that is famous for literally nothing else other than him. He's the guy who lives in a castle, right?

More or less. Okay. Yeah. He does have a gigantic house. And he keeps threatening to move away. And the local government just keeps cutting his taxes until he stays. And they've done this. So many times he basically pays no tax to the Kiyosu municipal government. So yeah, that's a tip for anybody. If you get big enough, try that power move. Hmm. Work for the president. Yeah, once Shonen Jump magazine, a comic magazine that comes out here weekly, started promoting Dragon Quest, it got really big. And by the time Dragon Quest 3 came out, it was a phenomenon.

And you've heard all the lies about the government stepping in and taking action. Like I said, their lies. But, you know, it was a cultural phenomenon. And it's never really gone away. I don't know how well 11 sold here, but I feel like it did pretty well. It sold very well. Okay. I mean, considering the general health of the console industry in Japan right now,

it did was that like the best-selling game of besides monster hunter or something uh yeah yeah 2017 uh i i would think so i i don't pay attention anymore to numbers so much i just whenever i go game shopping like game shops always have the top 20 ranking of games and i i remember dragon quest 11 stayed at number one for a very long time um yeah i mean it's it definitely kind of reaches back toward um the the dragon quest eight style and in and that i think you know is is a natural through line from dragon quest one whereas some of the more recent games like 10 was an mmo nine was almost an emm. it was like a baby memo like a local memo it was very monster hunterish um but yeah like it's it's kind of gone back to those classic console roots and that is

that's what the original dragon quest defined people get angry when you mess with that like we saw with, when they unveiled 9 originally, it was more of like an action RPG. And fans are just like, no, no, you're not doing that. Right. It's like, yeah, sorry, our bed. I'm pretty sure they just turn that into fantasy life. They'll make, they said, we'll make our own Dragon Quest with fishing.

Pretty much. And baking. In fact, forget the hookers. Would you say, so Dragon Quest always changes with the times, would you say that 11 is the game that is best suited for 2017 or 2018 in terms of what an audience wants in terms of, because obviously 10 was built upon the foundation of the Wow era World of Warcraft. The 9 was both Monster Hunter and the DS phenomenon.

I think Dragon Quest reflects the times in its own way. So if it really were the game that everyone wanted now... Battle Royale? Yeah, it would be great if you're all slimes. I'm sure there will be a Dragon Quest Battle Royale game, but they won't do that in the main line. Like, that's, you know, they've gotten really good about using the spinoffs to experiment. So you have your action RPG and Dragon Quest Heroes, which is, you know, a Muso game, but it has a lot of, like, a strong RPG feel to it that feels authentic to Dragon Quest.

And, you know, the Minecraft clone and Dragon Quest Builders and so forth. It's a great game. I was kidding, but they did make a Minecraft game, so who knows. But I feel like Dragon Quest 11 is, it's responding to the people who wanted Nino Cooney 2 to be good. and they were like, we can do that. Sky did. Yeah, that one kind of hurts because Nino Kuni 2 is by people who made

Dragon Quest games that were very good, like Dragon Quest 8, and Dragon Quest 11 is someone else doing their stick better than they do now. The thing about DQ11 is, like, as Bob mentioned, like having a place in 2017, 2018, I

work in this bar and I see people come in who play Dragon Quest 11. Maybe they don't have a PS4, they want to play it. there's a very nice young woman who comes in she's been plugging away at the game for like a couple of months and she's almost finished on 3DS on PS4 Oh okay

But I there is like There is a visceral response From like some young Like I get a lot of young people in here as well Like 20 to early mid-20s And there's like The modern young gamer is not okay With a traditional RPG sometimes

I've had people express outrage Like where's the voice acting How come there's no voice acting? What's with this MIDI music? Like that's, you don't get it. Like, I, and then I have to explain what Dragon Quest is them. Like, the whole point is it's, it's supposed to be traditional. It's supposed to, it's, you know, carrying on this, this tradition.

Right. Well, I mean, it's kind of stuck in a funny place because you have tradition, but you also have the need to, like, grow the audience. They are riding that line. I feel very, you know, it seems precarious. But, I mean, it's still selling well, so I don't think people mind too much. Yeah. But, you know, Japan is aging. So those old people.

won't be around forever. And then what happens? I guess there's not any young people to take over. So that's the whole problem. End of that country. Yeah. So anyway, back to the original Dragon Quest. Why don't we talk a little bit about just the design of it and kind of, you know, what it was? I've talked a lot, so someone else do that. Well, I mean, the original idea was that I forget the metaphor that horror used, but it was a game that anyone could finish, as long as you sort of played it long enough because no matter how, I mean, once you play enough, you will naturally, like, mathematically be strong enough to go wherever you need to go and do whatever you need to do.

Yeah, well, it's important to clarify in the sense that when you die in Dragon Quest, you lose half of your gold that you have on hand, but you don't lose any experience. So if you keep throwing yourself at the Dragon Lord over and over again, you'll eventually keep leveling up and hopefully eventually get enough money to buy some better armor like by the top end stuff

there's not a lot of gear to buy in the game and games are much more punishing before that in terms of death especially RPGs yeah yeah and that that was kind of I think that was a big deal like that was a big step toward making

Dragon Quest accessible was the fact that oh I lost it the Dragon Lord but I did gain a level this foray into his castle so I can keep going and every time I go into the castle I'll beat more of those horrible things

that are trying to kill me like there's like blue dragons just hanging out in his castle right yeah yeah so you fight enough of those you're going to level up and eventually you level up enough and you'll have enough spells that you can stop the dragon lord i think also losing that gold will also encourage the player to say oh i need to get some of this back and fight monsters and maybe buy another weapon so they are actually encouraged to level up more and it also encourages them to spend like instead of just hoarding gold to say oh well i have enough to buy a better sword so i should probably do that now in case I get completely spanked.

Especially, I think they introduced the concept of the gold vault in three. So one and two, it's that you have to spend it or you risk losing it. And I think the fact that you do keep experience when you die is what appeal to me as a kid. It's like I didn't like as a second grader, I don't have a concept of a developer respecting my time. But that's what it was. It's like you played for a while. You died. You can keep the experience.

It's fine. And that's a big step away from something like wizardry because wizardry was infamously punishing. And I'm pretty sure the Robert Woodhead interview episode will have gone up by now. But the, you know, the first three, well, the first two wizardry sequels required you to play through the preceding games. And all of them were really hard. But you needed, you needed to like build on from that. And when you lost, you lost. That was it. You had to go back to your save file, back to town. So each foray into the dungeon was extremely dangerous. You go further and every time and take bigger risks.

So, yeah, like, it was a, it was a game that you did not beat in a weekend because it was just too hard, too punishing, and there was no forgiveness. But Dragon Quest, you might be able to beat that in a weekend because, you know, if you had, like, you know, 12 hours free, 15, that's enough time to beat this compact little game and you lose a few times and it's okay, patch you on the back and takes away half your money and sends you along your way to fight the Dragon Lord again. It's super playable on phones. I don't play a lot of RPGs on phones.

I usually play games designed for phones, but they've made it very, I don't know, even more accessible in terms of, you know, how you move around, what you can do. So, I mean, if you have like a week of commutes, you could probably get through Dragon Quest 1 on the train or on the bus or whatever, really easily. Yeah, I brought along Game Boy Advance here and a copy of Dragon Warrior 1 and 2. That's so good. Yeah, those are good. It's a really good port because it's based on the Super NES remake. The one thing I don't like about it is that the viewpoint is really zoomed in because of the scaling. They didn't change the size of the sprites.

So you kind of need to know where you're going because it's really easy to get lost, but that's like the one complaint I have. The movement speed is a little slower for me. They fixed that in three on the Game Boy Color, but the first one you kind of plot along, but it's not a huge game anyway, so it's not a big deal. And Dragon Quest 1, 2, and 3 are a trilogy. They really kind of stepped away from the trilogy concept after that. I've heard Dragon Quest 11

really kind of reaches back to the olden days There are some loose ties to the original trilogy but nothing I think they've kind of everything is self-contained now they've kind of given up

on tying them together I think they realized that oh there are going to be three or four or maybe five years between these games now so let's not do this anymore yeah

what was it like 18 months between one and two something maybe even shorter it was like a year and then yeah like 18 months like when Chunsoft was was doing

programming. We mentioned Koichi Nakamura and Chunsoft earlier, but the first five Dragon Quest games were developed, like they were programmed by Chunsoft, and Nakamura, you know, was like the main guy. He's now the president of Spike Chunsoft. Like, they did the development, and then after five

it switched to Heartbeat. I'm not a fan of their games. No, they're very drawn out. I hear six is really great on Super Famicom. It makes you wonder how much input the, I guess, contractor developer has on those games, because I feel like they have a very specific stamp on those two games that I do not like.

And I've spent so much time with those games. It's really hard to say because, like, the fiction they present is that Yuji Hori is like, you know, everything emerges like Athena from his skull. They stick a hammer in his skull or an axe in a skull and the game springs out fully born. But, yeah, I don't know. I really like to tune soft games because I feel like they built on each other in a really great and cohesive way. culminating in five and then you know they shifted over to make the mystery dungeon

series and that started out as Dragon Quest like a Dragon Quest roguelike the first Dragon Quest spin off really and became like its own standalone series starring its own protagonist Sheeran I will say there's somebody at NX it might be Hoary that has the power to make level 5 RPGs good

like very good because I've played so many level 5 RPGs and there's just something there that someone should just get rid of that and I don't see that in Dragon Quest 8 and 9 Yeah, the level five dragon quests are spectacular. They're excellent games. And I agree.

Like every other level five RPG I've played except Fantasy Life, I'm just like... Yeah, Fantasy Life is pretty good. And if you treat Fantasy Life as like a failed Dragon Quest 9, then there you go. But yeah, it is interesting because there clearly is a singular vision behind the series. And Hori is still extremely involved. Like he's not, you know, single-handedly making the games. but he really supervises the story and the world development and so forth. And at the same time, you definitely can see the input of the developers who are contracting on the games.

So it seems collaborative. And I think it helps keep the franchise fresh. Like Dragon Quest 11 is very much like Dragon Quest 8, but it's also different. But it's also internally Square Annex developed. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know if, like, who from Square Enix helped out with that? I'm not sure. Because I know Kazia Nino directed Dragon Quest Builders, the guy who created Trauma Center and Etrin Odyssey.

Like, he was the director on Builders, but I don't know if he had any involvement with 11. The director is Takeshi Uchikawa, and I don't recognize that name. Nor do I. But yeah, it is very much, but yeah, it is very much collaborative. and it's kind of weird because the game seems so conservative. It always kind of makes me wonder, like, why do these games take so long to put together? But they do have a lot of text.

Yeah, I think it's also just that it's that Japanese, the perfection of simplicity. It's very much a Japanese aesthetic. And when people ask me, like, what's the appeal of Dragon Quest? Why do you like it so much? Why do you like it better than Final Fantasy? I always point to, I think a couple years ago, Tim Rogers did a video about why Dragon Quest is such a phenomenon in Japan.

And the example he is, is like, Final Fantasy is like, what if Lord of the Rings had motorcycles? Dragon Quest is like, what if fairy tales were really good? Because that's what it's, it's that simplicity. And when Dragon Quest 11 was in development, I remember Square Nix put out, they put out a call for scenario writers. And the application was write a fairy tale.

Like come up with something simple, but that is engaging and is like fantastical. Yeah, a lot of the Dragon Quest games really take that approach. You didn't get that in the early games so much, but basically your journey is a series of vignettes. I think you really saw that especially in the heartbeat games and in Dragon Quest 9, where you go to a place and it's sort of like a self-contained story. And sometimes there is, like sometimes there's a very happy outcome and sometimes there's not. And you go into these stories, sometimes thinking like you know how it's going to turn out. And maybe you kind of predict some of the general shape of the plot, but you never know. Like, is this going to be a happy outcome or is this going to be where you go away thinking, oh, that was really sad? I would say maybe with three that was very implicit, but with four, it was explicit in terms of the episodic storytelling. Yeah. But two, it was like, find these two people, collect these things and then kill the guy. Make this person not a dog anymore. Yeah. But you don't really realize who you are at three until the end. Right. Yeah. But I do like that sort of vignette-based story approach. I

think it works well because it, you know, it doesn't arrest the momentum of the game, but at the same time, it doesn't make you feel like, it doesn't make the overall story hard to follow. Like, there's kind of this overall plot and you're moving toward it and you'll get like little connections to the overall plot within the vignette. But, you know, 10 hours, five hours. And you've, you've wrapped up one little storyline. And it's, you know, it's part of your background. I feel like seven and to an extent. and Dragon Quest 10 did that really well because those games are pretty much all vignettes

and that's why like to the point where, and this applies to the series overall I think the last boss of every game every game is almost like it's almost a throwaway boss like it doesn't matter here's another giant thing with like horns coming out of his knees

again like okay it's the journey is the real reward that's what I take up. The friends we made along the way. Yes you were Dragon Quest the whole time. The slimes we killed along the way. some generic, I mean, I mean, cool looking boss, but it's just, though, it's kind of like, it's just, it's kind of like the devil or Satan. And just like, he's the source of all evil and the monsters follow his orders.

And if there's something going wrong, it's his, his problem. So it's like, it's kind of like you're just fighting the devil in every game. Right. Like our manifestation of the devil. Yeah. And I think nine really kind of leaned into that with the post game stuff where it's just like, go into a dungeon and fight your favorite boss from a previous game. And it's going to be vastly stronger than you.

So go find it. find some metal slimes. That's something worth mentioning, too, is just the iconography that Dragon Quest introduced. Like, it got so much right out of the gate. You can really see, you know, like elements of those early games, the original game in the current games, in a way that you cannot in something like Final Fantasy. Like the... of climbing stairs or the spell sound effects or level up sound effects. Like, they still use the Famicom sounds. But it's more than that. Like, there are enemies, the little happy slimes, the Drakeys and the Wyverns,

and even the shit, you know, the way dragons look. Like those have been rendered in 3D now, but they're still those original Toriyama designs. And they don't look dated. They don't look like, oh, these are drawings that are 30 years old.

They're still just like, these are fun, charismatic takes on classic RPG monsters. They're just great Toriyama design. It's really good for merchandising too because if you want to say, I want to buy a chocobo, oh, these are the ones from 13.

I don't like these. I want to buy the ones from five. or six or whatever. But like you said, the consistency is great. As much as I like to see different interpretations of like Shiva and Ephreth, it's also very comforting to see like your old friends that haven't changed. Eventually, those Final Fantasy summons,

they go in some weird directions. Like lesbian shivas turn into a motorcycle. I'm like, there's some weird, some fetish pandering going on here. And I don't even know what it is. But I'm very confused and I don't think this is good. Maybe if the whole game was about that, sure. Yeah.

Like, you know, just just embrace that as they embrace each other. I agree. I don't know. Final Fantasy goes in some weird directions. But I guess that's kind of the one-two punch for Square Nix's that they have your comfort food in Dragon Quest and they have just like, here it goes, no one knows what the hell this is going to be.

It's crazy Final Fantasy. Oh, it's an action game now. Oh, it's uncharted. I'm just glad that there have been no more dead zones in terms of Dragon Quest releases. I feel like they're just releasing everything now. Because after eight, it was just like, well, we give up. Yeah, there was a while in the U.S. that it looked like they were going to cut it off at the knees. But they brought over builders and heroes and heroes two and now 11.

So I feel like they're not bringing over everything, but they're bringing over the ones that they're at least taking a chance on the big ones. I understand why 10 didn't come over here. Oh, yeah. I'm disappointed because it's the one MMO that I probably would have played. But, yeah, you can't even play it through VPN. And I've tried. I played it for a couple years. It is really good.

It's solid. It feels like, like story-wise, it feels like an offline Dragon Quest. And guess what? In an MMO, if everyone's a Dragon Quest fan, everyone's pretty nice.

They're all polite. Yeah. No one's a jerk. I can see that. Yeah. I can see that. All right. So I think we need to wind up

because your bar is about to open and people are going to come in and they're going to scream at us. That's right. Who are these nerds in here? Get them out. There should be nerds in this video game bar. So this will be the end of our conversation on Dragon Quest 1,

but hopefully we can continue this podcast episode with some other conversation on Dragon Quest 2 with other cool people. So if not, then that's the end of this episode. But if so, great. Look forward to the second half in a few minutes. In the meantime, Alex, tell us about yourself, promote yourself. All right. You kind of did it at the beginning, but do it some more.

I'm a vigorous young go-getter. Yeah, if you live in Nagria or if you're visiting Japan, come on down, visit Critical Hit right off the beltline. You can check us out on Twitter at Critical Hit Bar or on Facebook.com slash Critical Hit. Bar. I'm on Twitter as Petui. That's P-I-T-O-H-U-I. And check out my end. Ray, is it Ray Barnold? It is Ray Barnold. That's how you say. I think Raymond, if you want to be formed. Raymond, David Barnholt, and I. We do a show called No More Whoppers. Please check it out. Don't start from the beginning. What happens to the beginning? It's awful. Oh, okay. I like, I like those rough starts, though. Yeah, I don't think we need to introduce ourselves. Yeah, it's fine. We're going to do a second half.

It's cool. So we'll just roll right into Dragon. Quest 2 with a mystery guest whose name will be announced after this musical break and advertisement. Hey everybody, it's Bob, and if you listen to one of my other podcasts, What a Cartoon, you know I love Batman the Animated Series. In fact, it's so good, we decided to start the What a Cartoon podcast with one of the best episodes of Batman, The Animated Series, Heart of Ice. In my opinion, there is no better interpretation of Batman. Take that, Christopher Nolan. And in fact, I can't wait to watch all of Batman the animated series. N.H.D. on DC Universe. What is DC Universe you might be asking? Well, it is the ultimate

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Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network,

and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. All right. And when I say back, I mean, back from Japan, we're no longer, we're no longer in Nagoya, we're no longer in Nagoya, Alex Frioli at his bar critical hit. But instead, back in the comfort, would you call it comfort, Bob? Comfort at the Retronaut Studio.

It's a type of comfort. It is familiar. It's, oh, who is that on the, what the hell? There's a voice. It's a ghost. A mysterious voice. Are you the ghost of the bank vault that we record in? Yeah, I'm afraid so.

How does it smell over there? I've been to one podcast studio and it smelled pretty bad, but it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of camaraderie. It smells okay when we first get here, but there's no ventilation. and no air conditioning, and downtown San Francisco, and like the rest of the city, gets pretty warm. So it can be kind of rank by the end of the recording session. I know Ron Gilbert was very offended when he came. He was?

He was like, yeah, we apologize for the smell. I couldn't remember that. Well, he's still in good terms with me, though. Okay, that's good. He didn't hold you personally accountable for the stench. But who the hell is this? Who are you ghost of the bank vault voice, whatever? I am actually a corporal person.

I am Nadia Oxford. I kind of know people. I kind of know you, I guess. I guess we've been friends for a long time. Kind of? Geez. Come on. Yeah, we've been friends for a very long time.

We've been working together for years. Very, very long. Before the internet was even the internet practically. Yeah, was Nadia a, I'll give Nadia's biography, by the way. Not, Nadia. I do have a question, though. Nadia, were you, did you first work with Jeremy in like the early 2000s at OneUp, or was there something before that?

Oh, gosh, I think even before One Up, he had a zine that I wrote for. Oh, we were both on the zine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. I totally, I couldn't remember. That's why I wanted to ask. My empire has so many tendrils. It's crazy.

You created these monsters, Jeremy. It's true. But, yeah, like, I've known Nadia on the internet for ages and ages. And one of the things I know about Nadia is that she really loves Dragon Quest. In fact, her Skype avatar is the Sabre Cat from Dragon Quest 5. I'm afraid we're not talking about Dragon Quest 5 right now. That's the best Dragon Quest. Ooh.

We're talking about the worst Dragon Quest, in my opinion. And that's Dragon Quest, too. But you've got to get through two. No, seven is the worst, Jeremy. No. I know seven drags on. It hurt me. It hurt me.

I realize, and I have not subjected myself to the whole thing, but it's a different kind of pain than Dragon Quest 2. Dragon Quest 2. Dragon Quest 2 is like the guest that overstays its welcome, and you're kind of like, you can leave now. Maybe like last week actually would have been good. But Dragon Quest 2 just comes into your house and like, you know, it's basically the thugs from the beginning of the big Lobowski. a pee's on your rug and that's your head in the toilet. My metaphor or analogy, I'm not sure which one it is.

Is it an analogy or metaphor? I think it's probably analogy. Okay, my analogy is whatever. Let's fight about this. I have a master's degree. I don't know. Dragon Quest 2 is like a beating and Dragon Quest 7 is a lingering terminal illness

that will eventually kill you. Okay. My analogy is that Dragon Quest 2. I actually like Dragon Quest 7, so I'm going to leave it alone. But Dragon Quest 2 was kind of like when I was a kid, I would have sitting in bed crying because it had growing pains that hurt so bad, but I knew they were necessary. I do want to hear at some point during this podcast. I know Nadi went to Japan recently and did like the Dragon Quest experience.

I saw a ton of pictures from you. She got into a party and killed slime. That's amazing. I never did the, this is off, this is slightly off topic, but they have a Dragon Quest VR experience in Japan. I assume that's kind of like the Dragon Quest arcade game, something along those lines. It's sort of like the model. super enhanced version of Dragon Quest swords or whatever that game

was told. Yeah, the arcade game was really similar to that. That's the one thing I couldn't do when I was in Japan and maybe next time, but it's like you pay a lot of money to just be in a VR Dragon Quest experience, but man. I would do that and probably barf everywhere, but it would be worth it. Okay, so Dragon Quest 2 is the Dragon Quest

game I have played the least of all the numbered games besides 10. I thought you had beaten Dragon Quest 2, Nadia? A long, long time ago, but it's not one of the ones I go back to. Right. Well, why would you? Kind of, yeah. So, okay, so I guess we should talk about why we're being so mean to this game.

And I think it's easiest just to say it's because the game is mean to us. Like Dragon Quest 2 is, you know, hard in the very old school video game kind of way and kind of misbalanced. Very. It's a very ambitious game and the creators kind of tripped over their own feet. In fact, there's an anecdote that I read online that when they initially playtested the game, they had created like this kind of system to make sure that enemy encounters were going to be on par with your party at that point in the game. But they didn't account for large groups of enemies. So it was actually like impossible to win. And they actually had to go in and add some code to the game to prevent certain late-game enemy groups from being more than three at a time.

otherwise the game was unwinnable. So that is the kind of game that we're dealing with here. Do you feel like their intent was similar to Nintendo's intent with the second Mario Brothers game in that you played the first one now here's a much harder experience because you're ready now for this? There might be a little bit of that in there, but I really didn't get that impression. Yeah, I think it was really, oh, go ahead, Nadia, sorry. Oh, I was just going to say, it just seems to me like they wanted to do everything, of course, bigger and better and you can see it right there in the game itself when they send you back to

Alefgaard and it's yeah it's a much smaller clone of what you go through in Dragon Quest 1 but just like the fact that it was there and the world itself was something like four times bigger than the original game and when I heard about this it just blew my time of the mind because to me the original Dragon Quest was like bigger than Eurasia so it's like wow four times bigger oh my god and Alifgard is there wow yeah Dragon Quest 1 was really kind of like baby steps into role playing and I feel like this was where they really wanted to make a proper RPG in more of the computer RPG style mold. And they, you know, they definitely looked to wizardry for Dragon Quest 2.

And that had been a big inspiration for the first game. That was like what got U.G. Horan everyone interested in RPGs. But with this game, they were like, well, you know, wizardry does all these things and we should do that too. Well, wizardry is notoriously vicious. Like, it is a brutally hard game. And, you know, the creators were unapologetic about that. we're like, yeah, you have to beat the first game in order to be able to play the second one because you want to take your party and otherwise you have no chance.

So, yeah, I think it was less of the creators saying we want to punish players and more the creators of Dragon Quest too saying this is what RPGs are supposed to be like. They are supposed to be just absolutely nasty, you know, deeply destructive games where, yes, you might encounter an enemy group late in the game that wipes out your entire party in a single move. That just happens sometimes. Friggin bomb crags. And it's actually, I would say,

it's one of the most brutal RPGs at the start. It is, as I recall, it was one of the first RPGs I ever played that gave you the poison status. And that was, you could get poisoned by early enemies very early on in your first major sort of quest which is to find the Prince of Middenhall. and that's basically every time you take a step in your poison you lose HP and you can die

and if you want antidote herbs of course need to have a few on hand and they cost a lot of money and so you're using that money instead of buying upgrades for your armor and your weapons and it's just it's a real process and you only have so many inventory slots too yeah yeah that's right yeah so we should talk about what Dragon Quest 2 did that was admirable though, because it wasn't all just, you know, brutality. No, no, absolutely not. Like these things came, I think, out of the desire to make, you know, as we said before, like a big, proper RPG that was more than just one dude killing one monster at a time.

Right. So, Dragon Quest 2 was a very quick follow-up to the original Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest 1 came out in May of 1986 in Japan, and Dragon Quest 2 was actually slated for release in December of 1986. That was like, what, that's like seven months? That's very little time. They ended up delaying it for a couple of months because they kind of got in over their heads and were like, oh, this game actually is not beatable. So they revised it and it ended up shipping a couple of months late. But still, that's nine months after the original came out.

It's a baby. Yeah, exactly. So that's a really ambitious cycle. And like you said, the game is four times bigger than the original Dragon Quest. is a larger ROM. And they also made not just the quest bigger, but the experience bigger. This was no longer just a single protagonist fighting enemies one-on-one. Now you built a party over the course of the game, three characters, and you would fight

groups of enemies, not just one enemy, but sometimes up to like six enemies. Oh, yes. And if you had certain enemies I could call in reinforcements, like the army ant I think would call in sometimes dozens of reinforcements before you could finally kill them all. Those slugs really do that, too, in the jellyfish. Yeah, there's a lot of enemies in Dragon Quest that do that. And it's actually, you know, in the more recent Dragon Quest, it's something I enjoy because you don't feel like you're always on the brink of losing.

It just kind of keeps battles dynamic and makes you say, like, who do I prioritize? Do I go after the really dangerous enemies who hit hard and have high hit points? or do I go after the little guy over here who's not really going to do that much to me but he's just going to keep calling other guys in and it's going to drag out the battle. So, yeah, it's one of the things Yeah, it's one of those, definitely.

But it's one of the things that I think is kind of a trademark of the series and, you know, there are a lot of trademarks that started here. But, you know, you do have the team of characters and in this case, you know, this pre-Dade's Dragon Quest 3.

So the character roles don't really line up exactly with sort of what we think of as modern Dragon Quest roles. But, you know, even here you do see the way the series has a tendency to kind of assign skills like magic spells very arbitrarily and divide them up to different characters. So, yeah, Nadia, why don't you talk about the characters that you acquire and sort of like the what they're like and so forth? if you don't mind. Well, I think the, oh, I don't mind at all. Thank you very much. The first character you acquire is actually the prince of a kingdom. And I always thought that was an interesting sort of story you follow.

You are a prince of a kingdom, a descendant of Erdrich from the Dragon Quest lore. And we hear about how your cousin's castle in Moonbrook has been raised to the ground. Oh, no, enemies are back. We have to do something about this. You're sent out to find your cousins and defeat, I think his name is Hargon, the evil bringer. person and there's a really interesting cute little prolog at the start of the game when you start a new game that shows you what's going on

and it's very, very old English and very fun. Yeah, I believe I was going to say that, I believe they added that for the American version. That was not in the just like in Dragon Warrior 3, they added that intro with the hero's father fighting the dragon. That intro was badass as hell. Yeah,

they did do a lot of tweaking for the U.S. versions, I guess because they had bigger ROMs available. Yeah. And they felt like, you know, we need to lure the players in. They kind of, every American Dragon Warrior game was a little better

than the Dragon Quest version that had preceded it. But, you know, there was like a three years time difference. So they had time to go in and do some tweaks. They did try hard. But yeah, the prolog

is something added for the U.S. version. Okay, I didn't know. There you go. I learned something today. But you start as the prince who is more of a tank character. He's got the proficiency with the sword. I don't recall if he had any magic at all,

but if he did, it was very, it was quite minimal. He's the only, I think the only Dragon Quest protagonist, like hero character, who does not have any magic spells whatsoever. That is bizarre. Right, right. He is strictly just there as a damaged sponge. He is definitely a damaged sponge because you find your cousin next in line who is kind of a mix of the two. He's okay with the sword and he has some decent magic.

I think he has some healing magic. Yeah, he's kind of what you would see is like a priest class character in later Dragon Quest where he's, where he's not super fragile, like a, you know, a wizard-type character. He does have some proficiency, but he can't equip the best armor. He can't equip the best sword. Yeah. And he can't use the best magic. So it's like, you know, a sort of jack-of-all-trades master-of-nun character.

Yeah. And the third character that is the glass canon, is your female cousin who you actually have to find her because she was turned into a dog by the bad guy. I was actually, oh, sorry, not a guy. I was just going to say that was actually one of my first That was a really proud moment for me Because I was quite young when I play a Dragon Quest too And quite stupid And I figured out that this

That this character was this dog that was following around I'm like oh she must be the The cousin that was turned into a dog Because when you go to the castle of Moonbrook You can talk to the ghost of her father Who says you know talks about her fate So I actually figured out okay I have to find this mirror That turned her back into an actual person

And yay I did it And then she becomes your your magic slinger, your black magic slinger. She has a lot of powerful spells. Yeah, I really love that she's turned into a dog. It's a very whimsical Dragon Quest thing. And also in the, this is going to sound weird, but in the Wii game Fortune Street. So that is the like weird Japanese monopoly made by who?

Is it a Chunsoff that makes that? I don't actually remember who develops it. But it's, you know, it's like definitely an inext tradition, Ida-Dakken Street. That's been like a series of theirs for a long time. So the Wii one came here. It's not very good, by the way. It's not great. But it has Dragon Quest characters and it has Mario characters in it.

And the Princess of Moonbrook is in the game. And all of her dialogue is basically dog puns. And when I was playing it, when I was playing it, I was so, I was just like, I am the only one of five people who understands why this, this female character is talking inexplicably like a dog and using all dog puns. There's no explanation in the game. You just have to know that is her origin in Dragon Quest 2. She was a dog, or she was turned into a dog.

So just something fun in that game. Wow. I love Dragon Quest localization. It's just off the wall. Okay, yeah, I mentioned that the protagonist, the hero character, the prince of, what is he, Mittenhall? Is it a Kahn-Haw? Are you talking about the first guy you recruit? No, no, your main character.

Oh. Okay, so the Prince of Mittenhall is a damaged sponge, but he kind of has to be because when you first encounter the prince of Panic and the Princess of Moonbrook, they both start out at level one. And by that point, your characters have already risen in levels. And there's no real easy way to bootstrap these other characters to get up to your level. So they are always going to be way behind you unless you deliberately go out and kill the hero and fight a bunch of combats with these two fragile characters to bring their levels up, which I guess is a thing you could do, but it seems extremely not fun.

So throughout the game you're going to have this one guy who's like physically very durable kind of standing in front of these two characters who are going to die if you look at them funny. Yeah, I mean usually well this is not a four character party but usually in this kind of

a setup you're given two magicizing characters one normally a healer and then an additional character who is also a physical fighter but they don't have that fourth character that would make this game much more playable. It is these these two characters you play with they die all the time and

that means leaving a dungeon going all the way back to where you started it's very frustrating I I had a lot of problems in this game and it's probably the one I played the most outside of Dragon Quest 7 just because I had this as a kid and it was just kind of poking at it every day to figure out how far I could get without

just being obliterated Wow did you actually have the game a copy of it? I did yeah like I think it was the whatever Christmas Dragon Quest sorry Dragon Warrior 3 came out I wanted that for my for Christmas, but my parents couldn't find it anywhere so I got Dragon Quest 2, or Dragon Warrior

2, and it was a lot of fun, but man, it just kicked my ass, and I never finished the NES version. I can understand why. I think the later versions were a little bit more balanced, but no, the NES version was pretty brutal. Yeah, just a sort of lack of guidance, because this

game has a ship in it, and ocean travel, and at a certain point in the game, it's just basically, like, find the seven things across the entire world. You're sort of just, Dragon Quest 1 is fairly linear, but Dragon Quest 2, it's sort of just like, well, figure it out. Once you have a ship, you figure it out. And there's ship travel, there's whirlpool travel, there's just, it's easy to not know where you are or what to do next. And there's lots of, like, weird little puzzles as to how to get the seven things or the six things.

I forget exactly what they are. Yeah, I think they're called Crest of Rubis or something like that. Rubus being the deity who was introduced in this game. I think we didn't have a good kind of god character until that point. Yeah, who is the, there's a real Dracula on the box art. Is that, is that the main villain of this game? I think that's Hargoth. And then he's trying to summon Malroth.

Yeah. Hargon trying to summon Malroth. Yeah, he's not the most memorable villains in the series. I know we mentioned this on that recording from as of this recording months ago, but at this point in his life, Toriyama, the artist, was way putting universal monsters in Dragon Ball, and that's why I love just seeing Dracula on the cover of this, because it really puts it in time as to when, like, Frankenstein was in the Dragon Ball

manga, like a version of Frankenstein. That's interesting. Yeah, and, you know, the American box art for this is, it's not a recreation of the Japanese box art, but it takes all the Japanese character designs. It takes a Kiratoriama's designs and is like, okay, but what if these characters showed up on the cover

of a novel that you buy at a, you know, at a convenience store? Like, you know, a sort of cheesy fantasy novel. So, of course, you know, Princess of Moonbrook is wearing a very short frock that has her bosom exposed partway. And the Prince of Kanakou is like this kind of floppy-haired teenager and Toriyama's art is now like this super beefy dude with long server hair, you know, kind of Thor looking. Yeah, okay, whatever. Yeah, on the Japanese box art, I'm not sure if it's translated via the sprites that well, The both male characters have goggles, too.

They both are wearing goggles. So that could have been a Toriyama fixation as well during this time period. Yeah. I always love that, the fact that not just with Dragon Quest 2, but Dragon Quest 3 and I think 4 as well, if you look at the box art, if you look at the instruction manual art as well, they actually take Toriyama's actual drawings from the original instruction book and recreate them with those beefy-ass sort of American characters. And I love how to keep certain traits. Like, you always see the sort of loto there the way it should be. The Xenetian sword shows up in Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior 4 the way it should be. And I just love that sort of thing. I didn't appreciate those boxes until I grew up.

Yeah, the addition of the extra characters does change up the dynamic of the game. And this is actually why I never played Dragon Warrior 2 back in the day, because I really liked Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior 1. And then when the sequel came out, I was like, wait, you have to deal with three characters once. I know I've mentioned this before in the show, but the idea that I was going to have to, like, split up my resources between three characters and manage three characters. I thought that just doesn't seem fun to me. Of course, that's, you know, like, that's dumb. I didn't know, but I...

It was a new idea for NES players, though. Yeah, it really was. It was. Yeah, Final Fantasy, I hadn't played quite yet at that point. And then once Final Fantasy came out, I was like, oh, I don't want to go back to Dragon Warrior. It's so much more primitive. No. I'm sorry.

I was one of those people for a long time. I got over it. I'm better. Rocket slime showed me the light, so everything is good now. But, yeah, it really does change up the dynamic of the game because you do have to manage resources. You do have to consider, like, you know, how am I going to act in battle? There's a certain amount of automation that happens in the Dragon Quest games when you're dealing with groups of enemies. And even now, like in Dragon Quest 11, enemies show up and they appear in groups.

So you might have like three different kinds of enemies, but if there are multiples of one enemy type, they are treated as a group. And there's a certain amount of sort of AI intelligence, a certain amount of artificial intelligence that the computer uses to determine like which of those characters within the group will you attack. And the computer always kind of tilts things a little bit in your favor. You're always going to attack the enemy that's most advantageous. So there's like two enemies in a group, and one of them has very, like a lot of hit points remaining the other is very weak. The computer is going to make your character attack the enemy who can be taken out with a single hit if there is one of those available. And I think that started here. I'd have to go back and check again.

But, you know, as much as the game is very unfair and cruel in a lot of respects, there is still this kind of sense of like the computer is working a little bit in your favor. It's trying, yeah. Your characters aren't completely, you know, total bozos in combat. They can exercise their own tactics to a degree. And I think you see that most in Dragon Warrior 4, where you're – once you get to the final chapter, which is the majority of the game, and you play as the hero, your companions are computer-controlled. And that's something they changed in later remakes and stuff. Is there auto battle in this Dragon Quest for your team? I don't think so.

I think they added it in the Super Famicom and mobile versions, but I guess it's not in this one. That's something that they would eventually put on to the games. I don't know. I did not think to look for that. No, I don't think it was there. I think it might have started. I know it definitely wasn't in three, so I think it started in four. Yeah, I mean, I used to consider that a sacrily.

It's like, no, I want to choose all my options, but now as an adult, I love any RPG with an auto button. Oh, me too. At first, I was the same way. I was like, there is no way I am not controlling every aspect of my party. Then I'm like, oh, you want to go for it? Be my guest. Oh, you want to use a stick to attack that dragon? Go for it, man.

It's better than hammering A. You can just stare off into the distance until the battle music is over. Yeah, I get frustrated with the auto battle characters when they unleash really devastating attacks that they don't need to. It's like, hey, we're just fighting some slimes. You don't need to kaboom them all. That was a nice of magic points. I actually have to set the thing to not healing me every time I lose a hit point. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think I set all of my. find in the later games to never heal. I'll do the healing. It's fine. Don't do that, please. Hey, everyone is Jeremy. Lately, I've been playing a lot of the Scribble Knots Unmasked Remake, a game where you solve problems with the help of DC comic stars like Batman and Wonder Woman. So needless to say, I'm totally ready to do.

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DC Comics. It includes fan forums, interactive encyclopedias, and even rewards for simply being a member. DC Universe is available on all your favorite devices, including iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire. It's more than just a streaming service. It's your universe. DC Universe is only $7.99 a month. Or better yet, you can grab an annual membership and save 20%. Join the Ultimate D.C. membership today at D.C.universe.com. So, Noddy, you mentioned that Dragon Quest 2, Dragon Warrior 2, whatever you want to call it. is set after the original Dragon Quest and that you're descendants of the descendant of Erdrich? Yes, yes, you are.

So it's like basically the Hero Dragon Quest I, like he had a lot of kids and they scattered to the four corner or three corners of the earth or something like that. A descendant of a descendant is still a descendant. That's true. Well, I was trying to get the point across that you're the descendant of the character in the first game, but he's also just referred to as the descendant of Erdrich. Like Bible begatts. Yeah, exactly. This is like totally the book of, what the heck is it? Deuteronomy.

So, yeah. So Erdrich Begatz. Exactly. Is there, this character have a name in this game? No, the heroes never have a game. No, the heroes doesn't have a name. Not even 11? No, they're always named hero.

Okay. If you look on the back of the boxes, the character's name is always the number of the Dragon Quest game written out. So, like, nine in I&E for Dragon Quest 9. And apparently Uji Hori always names his character, George. Huh. Or Georgie. George, the great savior. Yeah, I asked him that when I met him.

I was like, so what do you call your character? And he was like, George, it's always George. So, you know. Well, there is St. George, the Dragon Slayer. I don't know if that's it. Huh. Yeah, maybe. I don't know.

But what I think is interesting is that, yes, your party members all descend from the original games hero but they're not the only descendants here you also run into the descendant of the dragon lord who is like that's right yeah like oh sorry about grandpa

he's like living and hiding you know it's like you know after World War II all the Hitler's changed their name so they wouldn't show up in the phone book I think it's kind of the same thing he's like yeah yeah let me help you out on this quest I feel really bad about about grandpa you actually that's right when you go to

Alefgaard, you can, of course, see Charlotte Castle, you're like, oh, I'm going to get in trouble go in there, and it's the same setup, it's a lot of fun, and you go in there, and yeah, the grandson of the dragon lord is just sitting there, chilling on the throne, and you talk to him, and he says, oh, hi, I'm the grandson of the dragon lord, and he tells you, he's

actually the one who tells you about Rubus and the crust, if I'm not mistaken, so he really gives you a hand up. That was very nice of him. Yeah, so it's a fun little kind of inversion, and you did see this a lot. You know, return in an NES sequel to the stomping grounds of the first game. Castlevania had it. Castlevania 2. Zelda 2 had it. I feel like there were a couple of other games, but, oh, Kirby's

adventure even. You know, you return to Kirby's Dreamland. And it's black and white. So this is kind of that grand tradition of like, hey, we're bigger and better now. So let's go back and see how humble we used to be. But in this case, it's actually very important. I guess in Zelda 2, it's also very important because that's where you get there's some sort of really critical power up. I can't remember what it is. Oh, maybe the hammer. I think you go into, yeah, you go into like a cavern and you get the hammer, I think,

and then that lets you take shortcuts throughout the world. The big thing in Dragon Quest 3 is that you discover the world of Dragon Quest 1, and that's when it's revealed that this is a prequel, which is one of the coolest reveals in a game period. Yeah, and that's actually, that Alfgar is more to scale with the original, which is really amazing. I will say we're not building a case that you should play this game. But so original release was on the NES.

If you want to play it, I think the mobile version is bad. It took them a while to figure out how to make these mobile versions good. I think maybe three is probably the first one that's even approaching good. And then four, five, six are the three or the DS game. Just put on a phone and those are fine. But I will say go search out the ROM for the one and two remakes for the Super Famicom. I feel like that is the ideal version of two and that is where I actually finish the game

because they made the difficulty more fair and they also added some like quality of life features. The Game Boy Color one is great but it's really hard like the text boxes are just way too big. Yeah. It's hard to play. Yeah. So my thought is if you want to play you know like legitimately the Super Famicom remakes

those are what they use to create the Game Boy Color versions and that did come to the U.S., so you can buy Dragon Warrior 1-2 for Game Boy Color. But, yeah, the screen scaling is really, like, I find even the original Dragon Warrior is really tough, not just because of the text boxes, but just because when you're in the map and you're traveling around, you have such a cramped view of the environment that it makes exploration a lot more tedious. That's the one downside, really.

I will say that it is fan translated, by the way. It's been fan translated forever, and you're not hurting anybody. So if you really want to play it... I mean, I've got those on, like, fan-burned cartridges, that in Dragon Quest 3. Yeah, oh, the Dragon Quest 3 remake is also great for SuperFit. It's very good. It's so pretty. Yeah, I actually rediscovered Dragon Quest through the Game Boy Color when those remakes came out.

And Dragon Quest 3 for Game Boy Color, that was also... I know it wasn't the ideal port compared to the S-NES ones, but it was as good as we had at the time. And it was definitely better than nothing, that's for sure. Except for that terrible box art for Dragon Quest 1 and 2, that was just... said. Yeah, I, that's how I really got back into Dragon Quest, was through the, the Game Boy remix that came out in the early 2000s. Yes, it was like 2000, 2001. Yeah, I really got back into the series then.

You were ahead of the curve. Like I said, it was rocket slime that made me say, wait a minute, this is good and fun and happy, and I love this. That's right. I guess if I had played, if I tried to get back in with Dragon Quest 2, I would have been like, oh, this is mean and evil. It hates me, and I hate it. This is why I hated it. Exactly. But, yeah, there are some things I like about Dragon Warrior, too.

And I think, you know, if you wanted to play this game on an emulator and save scum some of the later sections, that might be the way to go because, yeah, I mentioned the enemies that can take you out in a single move. It's the kamikaze rocks, right? The kamikaze, yeah, the bomb crags, they will take you out. They're actually very unnerving enemies because they will skip a turn either or destroy you. And when they skip a turn, they grin at you. You don't know what's coming. Oh, yeah, it's like, it actually says out of the text boxes. That's one of my favorite things about the Dragon Quest games is that they still, you know, even with like the flashy combat of Dragon Quest 9 and 11 and 8 and so forth, like they still give you text boxes to tell you what's happening in combat.

And they have fun with that. It's like enemies will like preen or they'll stare off into space or they'll get dazed or, you know, whenever your characters gets in source or something, there'll be fun descriptions of what's happening. there. And so, yeah, I think the bomb crags are a good example of them using that text display to do something that you couldn't do in something like Final Fantasy where you don't have that information. Yes, yes. If an enemy was always just very kind of never took itself as seriously.

Right. Yeah. It has that the Akira Toriyama cartoonish whimsy to it. Yeah. That makes a big difference. I could be misremembering this because I haven't played this in a while, but my memories of this game as a kid are, there are so many towers in this game

and they're so confusing and the enemies are just the worst in those towers. So I feel like that is the real endurance test of Dragon Quest, the many towers you have to go through. And that was a new feature, I believe the only dungeons in the first game were caves until you got to the dragon, Lord's Castle. Yeah. And this was, I think, it might have been

the game, it was either this or three where you had to jump off the tower wearing a certain item to get across a river and it's just so obtuse. I don't know how figured it out. I think maybe someone tells you, but it's just so weird. At the very least, there is a nice little

parachute for you in terms of if you're really getting pounded in a tower, you can just jump out of it and then just be back on the map and be fine. I like that feature. I used it a lot. Yeah, it's a good way to level up your characters to just kind of take the emergency exit

up in the sky. One thing I will say about Dragon Warrior 2, it has one of my favorite soundtracks of the Dragon Quest series. It was just very ambitious as far as time. It's probably burned into my head because I played this so much, but whenever I'm still

plugging through Dragon Quest Builders, by the way, it's a very long game, but I love when those songs pop up in that game. Oh, I love the remixes. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, I feel like at this point, Sugiyama doesn't really write new music.

It's just like every game is just remixes of the old music. I mean, Dragon Quest 11 all the way through, it's just remixes all the way to the end. The downside of that is when those are remixed and put in things like builders and Dragon Quest Heroes, you realize, oh, this is a 45-second loop, and that's all you're getting. My parrot loves it because it's very repetitive, but I eventually have to put a podcast on.

He starts whistling along to it, which is cute. So parrots love Sugiyam. Please record that and show it to me. So as much as we've been kind of bagging on Dragon Quest 2, I do want to say, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, you don't get Dragon Quest 3 without Dragon Quest 2. This was where they were figuring out a lot of things. Dragon Quest 1 was basically just like them saying, let's make something that's kind of like an RPG. This was them saying, let's make an actual RPG. Dragon Quest 3 was them saying, let's make an RPG that is good and fun and has its own really distinct personality and doesn't make people feel sad for playing it.

And also the biggest friggin RPG you've ever seen in your life. That game is, I mean, especially for the time, it's huge. I'm still impressed by how big Dragon Quest 3 is. So am I. I mean, that's really why I love 3 because it's so huge. but two was my first major Dragon Quest experience and playing that game as a kid and just not knowing what to do and poking around,

I just felt like it could go on forever. I felt like I felt the enormity of the world, especially when just wandering around aimlessly with that ship and just stumbling upon new islands and wondering what's on them and then being afraid. Yeah, they kind of throw that to you at the very start of the game actually when you can visit your very first travel gate in the castle

and when you take it, you end up on an island. You can't do anything, but you can see there's a town on an island on the other side. And you're like, wow, okay, I really want to get there. I thought that was a really interesting way to get you hyped up for exploring. Was this the first RPG to give you a final boss that isn't the final boss? Because you get to Hargon and you defeat him, and he's like, oh, I'm sacrificing my sad corpse to bring back Malroth. And then you have to fight the actual final boss, which is now just like, oh, yeah, every RPG does that.

Yeah, I mean, Dragon Quest especially, they just kept doing that. There's always like, there's always like some dipshit wizard guy. you fight whatever he summons or gets absorbed by or whatever after that. Yeah, I feel like this was, you know, that was a fresh idea. I don't know if, I don't know if there were any computer RPGs that did that at the time. I have not actually, like, beaten Ultima 3, but, you know, I feel like it was a pretty fresh and interesting idea, the idea, the concept that, oh, you've been going after this guy all this time, and he's not actually the bad guy.

Yeah, that's a bad fantasy would really get into doing that too, but. Yeah, so you kind of have that little bait and switch. a nice twist when you're a kid playing this for the first time. Like, wow. This is also, so this game sets up a lot of traditional things in Dragon Quest that weren't in the first game. And one of them is, this may sound minor, but it's pretty interesting. And just the variety of keys that you have, which is now a Dragon Quest staple where it's

like there are certain degrees of keys. And once you are at the end of the game, you get the key that opens everything. You just go back through the world and unlock every door. The princess's best spell is just the ability to open up a key hole. Oh, really? Yeah, she has a spell. That's like, that's her best spell. Is it any keyhole?

Finally, you can open up any door. Because there are certain, like, the prison doors are important because there are certain, you know, quest things you need behind prison doors. There's like silver keys, prison keys. It really established that system. I believe in Dragon Quest 1, you just bought keys and just used them as items instead of just finding an all-purpose key for this type of lock. Right.

That's like a level 25 spell for her. So she has to get really far into the game to get that. So it's kind of like an ending. Finding the keys was one of the like the big things for me because I remember seeing all these doors that were locked and I couldn't access them. It was driving me crazy. And I'm like, oh, where's the gold key? Where's the gold key? And then you finally find it and you just feel so accomplished.

And I think the other keys come quickly after that. Yeah. And I think from this point on, they really do a good job of just in the first castle that you start in or the first town that you start in. They're just all of these doors that you can't get to get beyond just to just to make you think, God, I really need to come back here. I really, and there's usually powerful stuff in the very first place you start that you just can't reach until much later in the game. It's like a Detroitvania or something. Oh, my God, no. This is Dragon Quest, too, the first Metroidvania?

That's right. You're in your first. Yeah. So anyway, Dragon Quest 2 is an important game, but one that's really difficult to revisit. I would like to see them remake it. Yes, I like that. To put together the original trilogy in a package for Switch or PS4 or something with some quality. of life improvements.

That'd be nice. Yeah, I get the impression that Dragon Quest Builders 2 is based on Dragon Quest 2. It is, yes. So that's kind of a remake. But actually, well, given how much I loved what it did

with the Dragon Quest 1 story in Dragon Quest Builders, I'm curious to see if they're going to do a Dragon Quest 2. Oh, yeah. Do we know any more details about that? I believe it's out in Japan. I just curious.

It's not out yet. Oh, really? Okay. I thought it was, boy. But it has been announced for US release on Switch, which is nice. Mm-hmm. And, yeah, I don't know

how they're going to build off Dragon Quest 2 story because the first game you know you have the choice at the end but you don't really have that in Dragon Quest 2 so you don't have that you know the timeline split thing which which link are you now so it'll be interesting to see

exactly what they do with that. I hope the boss fights are better in that game though. That's the biggest bummer about builders is the game is not built for boss fights so they have to it's very stupid I don't think it's stupid but it is frustrating that you fight like a golem and all your hard work is destroyed by that bastard.

Oh, my God. It's hours of my life. You spend about, I don't know, 15 hours building a town, and then the boss fight is designed to destroy everything you did. And you really... It does create, like, a really profound sense of loss when, you know, more so than, like, this boss is an actual threat. It's destroying all the things you've done.

Like, it's frustrating, but also kind of good. Like, it actually makes the boss as really intense and really... threatening. I don't know. Yeah. I agree with you. It does make you really feel like you're fighting for something like. When you replay the game like I did on the switch, you're like, all right, I'm building these triple-thick walls all over the damn city, which is what you're supposed to do. I know where the golem's coming from. I'm going to do everything in my power to destroy him. All right. So final thoughts on Dragon Quest 2? Well, it's, I will say, I rented it, this is the first time I played it. I rented it. And I brought it home, and I played a whole bunch

of it and I saved and then my battery died because apparently I guess someone had rented it before me and saved scummed or something but yeah so that was a thing that happened I would constantly get up to a certain point in the game everything would be erased I'd try again and again and again it was like

that stone being rolled up the hill with the Greek men. That's terrible yeah I still went at it though so you say it's the um oh sorry Nadia oh I was just saying that was so there you go I was quite dedicated to the game I kept on replay

it and replaying it for as long as my rental period allowed. So we're still on the same page that it is the worst Dragon Quest game? The worst numbered Dragon Quest game. The worst numbered one, yeah. I feel like, how long is this game? It's hard to put that into, I mean, there's no, there's no timer. Is it like a 15-hour RPG, a 20-hour RPG?

I think you describe a game like this in percentage of your life. I'd say like 3% of your life. I would say it's probably pretty digestible if you play that Super Famicom version or the Game Boy Color version, and you cheat a little bit if you want to just have the experience. And don't feel bad because this game is not balanced very well and is not designed super great. If you want to just have the whole Dragon Quest experience, play all of them, I feel like it's a

game from 1987, 86. Yep, 87. So think about that and think about how long a game from 1987 is, and it's not the longest game you'll ever play. But it is interesting from a historical standpoint just to see how they were really building off of a very, very, very. simple experience and not really knowing what to do until the third game. Yeah, I would say if you're any sort of a Dragon Quest fan, it's just a really interesting

damaged bit of connective tissue to visit. But I would say take the trip anyway. Yep. All right. So that wraps it up for this look at Dragon Quest 1 and 2, this retrospective. This, of course, was a tie-in with the RPG history feature I've been working on for U.S. Gamer. So you can check that out.

There's fresh information from U.G. Horry in the Dragon Quest entry there. So usgamer.net, it's where you go to read stuff. But you also go to Retronauts.com, where Bob and I post stuff on the regular. And, of course, you can get the podcast there at Retronauts.com, as well as on iTunes, the podcast One Network, and so on and so forth. And Retronauts is supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. That's how we pay our bills and buy our food and so forth. So please support us $3 a month, get you early access to podcasts.

More than that, you get bonus stuff like T-shirts and books and other cool things. Do T-shirts are great, by the way. Yes, Castle Tully designed those. They're so great. I want one. I would like one, too. I'm still waiting on the shipment to come in. Do I have to support us for that?

You do, yes. Oh, man. You've been holding out, Bob. Anyway, so, yes, that's the Retronauts thing. Follow us, like us, support us, love us, or just listen to us and tell your friends about it. That's okay, too. As for myself, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on the internet at various places where Jeremy Parrish appears, such as Twitter, where I'm game spite.

Even though I'm not actually that spiteful anymore. I'm a nice guy. You are. You're very mellow. Game mellow. And there's Bob over there. Bob tell us about yourself. Hey, everybody.

I am Bob Mackie. You know me. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. I have a bunch of other podcasts via the Talking Simpsons podcast. podcast network. If you go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can find out how to support me there. That's where I get most of my income. And we do a lot of work there,

like the podcast Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon where we look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. And we have tons of bonus exclusive series on the Patreon like Talking Critic and Talking Futurama and all of our exclusive stuff will live there. There's dozens and dozens of bonus podcast

there if you sign up at the $5 level. So go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons to find out more. And those two podcasts, Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, are both free. So if you just want to listen to them and see what they're all about, you can find those on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And Nadia, tell us about yourself. Yeah, sure, why not. My name's, of course, Nadia Oxford.

I'm at USgamer.net is where most of my writing is these days. And you should also listen to the Acts of the Blood God podcast, which is by Kat Bailey and myself. And we talk all about RPGs, including Dragon Quest. That goes up every Monday, I believe. and of course you can subscribe on where podcasts are sold as Kat typically says at the end of the show. All right, and I guess that will be it

for this episode. So check back in a week and there will be another episode. It's a crazy thing we do. It's called Publishing Weekly. And we'll talk about Dragon Quest 3 next time I can get John Ricardy curled into a studio. I promise we would talk about Dragon Quest 3 with him.

So whenever that is, we'll talk about the next game in the series. And hopefully we'll have Nadia back on the show before that. So thanks, Nadia for dropping by. Thanks, everyone for listening, and we're gone. Goodbye. And caller number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10.

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that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are. and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.