Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 047: Dragon Quest VII and the Slow Burn

Episode Date: September 19, 2016

Jeremy looks at how this classic RPG's 3DS remake compares to the unhappy reputation of the original version. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, slime takes time. Dragon Quest has always been one of the great divides between East and West. After all these years, the series remains one of Japan's favorites. But in America, in Europe, its few successes have been hard-fought and terribly fleeting. Blame it on the long delay for localization back. with the original N.S. game, or on American's insufficient love for the whimsical art of a curatoriyama, or just on plainal persnicketyness. Dragon Quest is the very definition of big in Japan, even in the country's post-consul gaming days. And it's the very definition of

niche in America. If there's any one single Dragon Quest entry that totally embodies this divide, it's Dragon Quest 7. The best-selling Dragon Quest game in Japan, it didn't just bomb in the U.S., it's by far the most reviled game in the entire franchise among Americans. Hopefully that will change with the arrival of the game's 3DS remake here in the U.S. this week. Not only does the remake overhaul the PlayStation original's most reviled features, notably its graphics and its pacing, but its new home platforms should allow Americans to better soak in its qualities.

And this truly is a game that demands players take it at a different pace than usual, which probably has a lot to do with its unpopularity here. Back when it was called Dragon Warrior 7, Dragon Quest 7 sat at odds with what American console gamers had come to expect from RPGs, emphasizing narrative immersion over flashiness and thrills. Heck, the game's existence came about at a leisurely pace, marking the end of Dragon Quest as a frequent and regular video game fixture to one whose entries appear at sparse intervals. Inix announced the game in 1996 as a Nintendo 64 DD release, but a few months later, they changed course with the news that Dragon Quest 7, like Final Fantasy 7, would appear on PlayStation.

Where Dragon Quest 7 differed from Final Fantasy 7, of course, was in the time delay between announcement and release. Square promised a PlayStation Final Fantasy at the beginning of 1996 and delivered one to their Japanese fans a year later, with the U.S. localization hitting about six months after that. Enix promised a PlayStation Dragon Quest early in 1997 and delivered it midway through 2000. The American version hit more than a year after that. Remember that this was back when console generations topped out at five years rather than spanning almost an entire decade, so there literally was a generational difference between the two games. Final Fantasy 7 showed up right as PlayStation hit critical mass, and it felt absolutely cutting edge.

Dragon Quest 7 showed up as PlayStation began to wane, and it felt like a game you would have seen in the console's first year of life. It featured 16-bit sprites on primitive 3D backgrounds, included some of the worst CG cutscenes ever committed to a black disc, and generally felt like a relic. It launched in both Japan and America after the PlayStation 2 had launched in each respective region. But its delay was far more crushing in the U.S., where it appeared about a week before the Bleeding Edge Metal Gear Solid 2, and barely two months before Final Fantasy 10. Even more crucially, though, Americans lacked some very important context for Dragon Quest 7. Nintendo and Enix had localized all four NES entries, but the series undertook a major conceptual leap when it moved to Super NES that, Americans weren't prepared for. Dragon Quest 5 took the fourth game's emphasis on character

vignettes and ran with it, building its entire story around the life of a man who would go on to play a critical role in history. Dragon Quest 6 went a step further than that, shifting the narrative focus away from the protagonists and more toward the world surrounding them. Those two games set expectations and the conceptual inspiration for Dragon Quest 7, but they wouldn't make their way to the U.S. until nearly a decade after Dragon Quest 7. Instead, American console gamers freshly inducted into the world of role-playing games by grand and cinematic adventures, such as Final Fantasy 7, the Legend of Dragoon, and even Sweenitin 2, went into Dragon Quest 7 expecting something similar. What they received was precisely the opposite.

Dragon Quest 7 has become infamous for its pacing. Long-time Retro-Nuts listeners have very well heard many of the complaints lobbed in its direction over the years on this exact podcast. Typically, you don't encounter your first battle in Dragon Quest 7 until you're about three hours in. A ridiculously long time, even next to fellow Langerous, NX-published PS1 RPGs like Valkyrie Profile and Star Ocean, the second story. And even once battles become a regular game element, they evolve at a slow pace because your party doesn't reach the Dharma Temple, or the All-Trades Abbey, until about hour 30. It's only at this point, the point on the clock

at which you'd be venturing into the final disc of a Final Fantasy game, that Dragon Quest 7 actually begins to unfold. With All-Trades Abbey making the job system available, you can finally start to train your party members in different roles. And even after that, it moves along in a sluggish pace, with a multi-tiered class system that requires tons of grinding in order to unlock advanced roles. Dragon Quest 7 is the very definition of TimeSink. It doesn't help in the least that advancement in the game hinges on the acquisition of hidden relics scattered throughout the game's various worlds. You need to gather relics in order to unlock new areas, then scour those areas to find more relics with which to unlock additional regions. It's a slow, stilted, exploration-intensive take on the RPG, rendered in dated visuals.

No wonder it flopped here. A decade and a half of bad-mouthing directed at the game have piqued my curiosity. I never had the chance to play much of Dragon Warrior 7, so my impressions of the game had largely been filtered through the criticisms of others. But Dragon Quest 7 received a pretty substantial overhaul for 3DS. Developer Art Piazza totally overhauled the graphics, making it look essentially like the beefed-up cousin of Dragon Quest and More importantly, though, they changed the flow of the game, though not quite as much as I had expected. According to everyone who played the remake, that three-hour start-to-battle benchmark was cut in half. You could expect to start duking it out with slimes inside of 90 minutes.

Still a slow burn, but nowhere near as plotting as in the original version of the game. Imagine my surprise then when I sat down to play Dragon Quest 7 in English and found my first battle didn't show up until more than two and a half hours into the game. That's almost as long as in the original game. And the funny thing is, it was fine. At no point in those opening hours did I think to myself, my God, this was drawn out and tedious. When combat finally reared its head and my tiny party at last got to make use of the weapons they'd had equipped for the past few hours for no real reason,

it didn't come as some desperately needed release of tension. Instead, the first battle in Dragon Quest 7 happened right when it needed to happen. What everyone had neglected to mention about the game amidst their lamentations was that the slow start happens for a reason. It works as world building, and it's some of the best I've ever seen. The game starts off slowly in order to give players time to familiarize themselves with the main characters, and, more importantly, to get a sense of the world. The entire crux of Dragon Quest 7 is the act of restoring a shattered world back to its proper state, to what those hidden tablet fragments are for.

In order to communicate the significance of what you're doing, the game takes the time to really let you soak in the ideal of the world, as it is before the adventure unfolds. Everything is wonderful and peaceful, with monsters existing only on the open seas, and the only real tension in life coming from the question of how many fish will be caught in the year's ocean harvest. The problem is that this piece exists only for a tiny island populated by a town, a city, and a castle. There is an underlying sense that behind this tranquility, something just isn't right.

Dragon Quest 7 takes its slow approach in order to let you get a feel for the way peace corresponds to stagnation. It piles on the sensation that something isn't right, while forcing you to work against the desire of everyone around you to maintain that. sense of unnatural tranquility. You can definitely rush through the opening sequence of Dragon Quest 7 and cut your time to combat in half, but honestly that seems to be missing the point. I found my own playthrough took nearly as long as it would have in the original game because I didn't want to rush. I enjoyed soaking in the ambiance, savoring the growing sense of an ease, getting to know the town's fork, and when I finally opened a path to a lost portion of the world, it felt satisfying, even as the question of whether or not it was the right thing for me to do, underpinned it all.

when Dragon Warrior 7 first came out, though. Even putting aside the localization difficulties that afflicted the game's first US release, the new version's more convincing visual presentation makes a huge difference. But the real difference isn't the game, I think. I think it's me. Enjoying a Dragon Quest game demands a different set of expectations than, say, Final Fantasy. My brain wasn't really geared to appreciate that difference 15 years ago, probably not even 10 years ago. The slower, more vignette-based stories of Dragon Quest don't impress the way flashier RPG do. The drama tends to be more subtle, the stakes less obvious, the threats less menacing. But taking the time to soak in the initial mystery of Dragon Quest 7 gives the subsequent

plot twists so much more weight. It's hard to imagine another RPG series, spending a few hours of quest time on a town where, spoiler's ahead, a curse has turned the residents to stone, and the lone survivor dwells alone with a sense of guilt, and having failed to break the curse before time and the elements wore down the village's statues to the point where the victims would never be able to revert to human form and survive. But that happens here, and it's heartbreaking. I don't know if Dragon Quest 7 can overcome the original game's reputation and the American public's general disinterest in the series,

but I'm grateful Nintendo took a chance on localizing the 3DS version. Thanks to its refinements and my own maturation, I finally understand why the PlayStation Original was one of Japan's best-selling games ever. It's not a bold and brassy adventure, but there's even more value in its understated style. Attention, Retronauts, listeners, in person, and of course you would, we'll be doing a panel at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo in beautiful Portland, Oregon. On Sunday, October 23rd, we'll be holding the Retronaut's 10th anniversary panel at 3 o'clock p.m. in Auditorium B, and of course you will need

to be an attendee of the Portland Retro Gaming Expo to attend. But it doesn't stop there. Later that night, from 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock p.m. will be holding a private retronauts event at Quarterworld, located at 4811 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland. Attendance will be free, not counting Quarterworld's cover charge, but to get in, you must print out a ticket from the event's Eventbrite page and bring it along with you. To find the Eventbrite page, head on over to Retronauts.com or our Facebook page at Facebook.com slash Retronauts. It'll be pinned to the top until the day of the event. We hope to see you there, and remember, you must ask before touching us because we are very sensitive boys.

Remember, that's Sunday, October 23rd in Portland. Be there. Or not be there. Thank you.