Amandeep Jutla (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ajutla) wrote,@ 2005-01-16 00:37:00 |
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Yeah, that whole Dragon Quest VII thing.
(alternate title: In which I write a lot of words without actually saying anything.)
First, a little background:
Dragon Quest VII is a game, for the Sony PlayStation Computer Entertainment System, developed by Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama and Other Important People which came out in August of 2000, to the delight of millions of people in Japan. Dragon Quest is a Big Deal over there, even more of a big deal than Final Fantasy, and the thing sold. A lot. It sold so much that Enix Corporation decided that, hey, it might be an interesting idea to try to bring this shit over to America.
So, a little bit more than a year later: We get Dragon Quest VII, renamed Dragon Warrior VII because of copyright issues. I am excited about the game and buy it when it comes out, for forty damned dollars.
You see, to tell you the truth, I'd really been sort of a...rabid Dragon Quest fan, at the time. The first six games, I had thought, were pretty darned good. Dragon Quest V was a powerful game that told a simple, personal story. Dragon Quest VI was enjoyable and epic.
The only problem that I knew existed with Dragon Quest was that the games were something of an acquired taste. They require a particular sort of mindset to enjoy.
Now, I am going to start generalizing far too much:
We here in America, see, we love first-person-shooters. We love Doom. We love Halo. We love pretending to be a space marine or a freaky cyborg warrior who runs around and blows shit up. These games are fun because they are visceral.
Over in Japan, the average gamer is a bit different. They love Final Fantasy. They love Dragon Quest. Over there, they're into role-playing-games--into quiet, understated games that involve fiddling with a lot of numbers and much micromanagement. These games are fun because they are cerebral.
Now, to be sure, there is some cross-over. I mean, I think there are people in Japan who actually play Halo, and Final Fantasy does well over here. But Halo is not typical of most first-person-shooters in America. It is definitely a console game. It is slower and less frentic. It focuses on exploring a bunch of large (and really badly designed, but that's something else) levels, rather than running at high speed through a Strogg base that consists entirely of long corridors. Halo doesn't depend on quick-saving and quick-loading--rather, it is sort of what you could call the thinking man's first-person-shooter. The Japanese probably dig that.
The Final Fantasy games, on the other hand, as much as I love them, are pretty brain-dead. VI, my favorite game in the series by a long shot, consists of little more than a long, rollicking, story interspersed with "walking around" sequences and hundreds of "battles," all of which can be quickly finished by pressing the "A" button repeatedly. It would not be far off the mark at all to say that you can complete all of Final Fantasy X by placing a rubber band over your PS2 controller's analog stick so that it always points upwards, and putting something large and heavy over your controller's X button. The "game" in Final Fantasy is nothing more than an arbitrarily artificial artifice that exists so Hironobu Sakaguchi can beat you over the head with a sappy message. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se.
The thing is, though, that Dragon Quest is really not Final Fantasy. It is a different beast. Dragon Quest is less about "themes of life and death and memory, and also the tragedy of the Planet and Meteor, and Holy, and Huge Materia, as well as Sephiroth, who is evil, and other things that make no sense" and more about "causing numbers to increase." In Dragon Quest games, you are a random, anonymous teenager who has to spend hours walking around alone and killing tiny, cute slimes to get their gold. Once the quantity of gold you have amassed reaches a certain level, then you go spend it on equipment that lets you go a little further away from town, so you can kill more, slightly larger and less cute slimes with higher HP attributes, so that you can buy even better equipment and continue the virtuous cycle. If you are an autistic savant, some kind of freak, or Japanese, then you will derive much enjoyment from DQ. I kind of am the first two of these things, so I loved the hell out of the first six games in the series. They please me, even though they aren't ambitious fluff. They are games with few pretensions. They aren't out to rock your world and change the way you think of long-haired men with aliens for mothers and anger management problems. They're just out to make you feel good by bashing the hell out of slimes.
That's what I thought, anyway.
Enter Dragon Quest VII, the first Dragon Quest game to be sold in America for, you know, a lot of years. I bought the game. I put Disc One into my PlayStation Computer Entertainment System. I hit power, and waited, and started to play.
Three hours later, I turned that Computer Entertainment System off, put the game in my closet, and didn't touch it again. It wasn't so much that I hated the game as it was that it...failed, completely and utterly, to grab me. I figured I'd keep going later--I had saved my progress, after all, but I never did. For years afterwards, people talked about the greatness that was DQ7, how it was over one hundred hours long and really, really good and I pretended I knew what they were talking about. I wanted to get back to the game someday, but never bothered, and now three years have passed and I have played Dragon Quest VII for only three hours and I don't like this. I wanted to rectify this situation, so I figured, last night, to go ahead and do it.
And yet I still just can't get past those first few hours. I am simply incapable of it. I mean, I tried, I really, really did, but I just got angry and frustrated.
The beginning of the game is so inane that I simply can't handle it.
You wake up. Your mother gives you a sandwich. You take this sandwich to your dad. A guy tells you to go to Estard. You go there. You talk to the king. He tells you to find Kiefer. You wander around the castle and the town and don't find the fucking kid. You go back to Fishbel and there's a random guy standing near the dock who has nothing to do with anything, and he tells you to go to the ruins and meet Kiefer. You go to the ruins. You meet Kiefer. He gives you a scroll. He leaves. You leave. You go back to Fishbel. You show the scroll to Maribel. She says, why don't you show that to the guy in the item shop? You show the scroll to the guy in the item shop. He says, why don't you show that to the guy who lives underneath Estard? You go all the fucking way back to Estard. You give the scroll to that guy. MORE STUFF LIKE THIS HAPPENS FOR ANOTHER HOUR.
This is all before you enter a long, entirely pointless dungeon where there aren't even random battles to keep you sane. Somewhere in here, my mind turns to mush. It's not normal Dragon Quest. There are no slimes to be found. It's all very dead, and empty. I was told, once, that this was intentional: that Yuji Horii was purposefully messing with the player by not throwing battles at him, frustrating him, bothering him, and showing him that this Dragon Quest game is different from all the others because you don't fight a single battle for the first three hours; haha, I bet that threw you way off balance, didn't it?
Well. It did throw me off balance. It did this altogether too well. The first six Dragon Quests managed to keep me interested because, even though they were old and archaic with clunky menus and battle systems and stories, they came together. There was a certain je ne sais quois about them that made them bearable, enjoyable even.
But when I play Dragon Quest VII, the inherent flaws of the console RPG are laid bare before me.
Console RPGs suck.
This is a truism. They suck by definition. They are brainless, stupid, limiting, arbitrary games. Thus, the best console RPGs try to make you forget this.
Final Fantasy puts up a ruse. Final Fantasy X, as much as I may abhor and loathe it, was a game I actually finished despite its flaws, because even though it was a completely mindless game about bashing the X button and angling the analog stick upwards, it had voice-acting and good music and not unattractive polygonal chixxors. I can't, therefore, say that it's necessarily a bad game. It's one I don't like, but it's one I didn't put down after three hours. I put it down after sixty-five hours, instead. That's a lot of hours.
Dragon Quest put up a ruse, too, but its ruse was more holistic. There is something mesmerizing about wandering around the fields of a Dragon Quest and killing stuff. You learn to love the high-pitched "player character attacking" sound and the low-pitched "monster attacking" sound. You learn to love the sweet, sweet sound of a level-up, the "a spell is being cast" jingle, the battle music that you hate but that you burned onto a CD to listen to all the time because you're crazy like that. And the slimes.
There are no slimes in the beginning of Dragon Quest VII.
This might be why I don't like it, I don't know. I think it has more to do with the feeling of futility that hits me when I play it. The feeling--nay, the knowledge that what I'm doing really doesn't matter. Fishbel is a tiny, dead little town, with nothing in it but people who say the same things to you over and over again as you speak to them. Nothing distracts from this fact--there's no story, no excitement of slimes on the horizon. Instead, there's the quiet loop of happy, empty Sugiyama music and the "person is talking" sound effect that existed in some form or another in every Dragon Quest since the first one. The graphics are ugly and murky--they are, actually, a lot less attractive than those in Dragon Quest VI. It feels dead, to me. It feels totally awesome to millions of people in Japan, I know, but hey, people over there like tentacle-rape anime porn, don't they?
The problem is, Dragon Quest VII doesn't gloss over its nature at all. It makes no effort to even try to keep the player pressing those buttons. Instead, it says, "Look, man, I'm a long-ass game, and you're going to be playing me for hours. And hours. And hours. And everything you do is going to be just this stupid and pointless, but you'll love it because SOME NUMBERS WILL INCREASE AS YOU PLAY."
I feel like I'm wasting my time. Why can't my mom just go the twenty or so feet over to where my dad is and give him his damn sandwich? Why must I do it? Why must I show Kiefer's fucking scroll to people? Just because I can? What the hell do the "HotStone" and the "Pearl" have to do with anything? Why are there so many puzzles in this stupid hidden dungeon? Why doesn't the game tell me to do any of this; does it just want me to run around talking to random people until I figure it out for myself? (Answer: it probably does, yeah.)
You ask all of these questions to Dragon Quest VII and it doesn't answer.
It just sits there, the smug bastard. It doesn't like you, but it expects you to like it. It doesn't try to lure you in with a siren's song like Final Fantasy VI does, telling you, hey, look, you've only just started the game and you're in this really big armor and you can blow shit up and terrorize a whole city. Instead, it's just indifferent. I can't stand it. You do the fetch quests because they're fetch quests, not because they serve a higher purpose. It's not something I can stomach. Playing the game for even a little while is a kind of mental torture. My brain doesn't like it. It wants a reason. It wants justification. Instead, it's just numbed by the futility of it all, the complete lack of excitement. It looks forward to another one hundred and forty hours of this, if I actually keep playing. And then it switches off. My hands, on their own, using a kind of muscle memory, guide me to the local church, where I tell the priest I want to save. And I stop.
Maybe Dragon Quest VII isn't a bad game. In fact, probably it isn't a bad game. People seem to love it. I want to love it, but I can't. My brain won't let me. Every time I play the game, I get a headache, and I know that eventually my brain is just going to turn off in protest if I keep it up. It's warning me. It's got an eye on me, and now I'm on probation. I can't play Dragon Quest VII because my life will be endangered if I do. It sucks the life out of me. It makes me tired. It makes me want to kill myself.
I think it's possible that Dragon Quest VII, like The Sims, will be one of those games that I can play, but that I don't really understand, that I don't find myself able to wrap my head around. People like these games, but I really, really don't. I can't. They rub me the wrong way. They lack something that they need to keep me playing. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe, because I don't eat tempura all the time and don't live in a house made out of paper, I can't begin to see the appeal of Dragon Quest VII. But I think it's something more than that. DQ7 is a console RPG. It is too unapologetic about it. It is raw and bare, and it leaves me uneasy and bothered. Maybe I'm shallow, and I prefer the fluff of a Final Fantasy to this. Maybe I'm American and want to blow stuff up. I don't know. I wish I did.
I think I'm going to go play Halo now.
(alternate title: In which I write a lot of words without actually saying anything.)
First, a little background:
Dragon Quest VII is a game, for the Sony PlayStation Computer Entertainment System, developed by Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama and Other Important People which came out in August of 2000, to the delight of millions of people in Japan. Dragon Quest is a Big Deal over there, even more of a big deal than Final Fantasy, and the thing sold. A lot. It sold so much that Enix Corporation decided that, hey, it might be an interesting idea to try to bring this shit over to America.
So, a little bit more than a year later: We get Dragon Quest VII, renamed Dragon Warrior VII because of copyright issues. I am excited about the game and buy it when it comes out, for forty damned dollars.
You see, to tell you the truth, I'd really been sort of a...rabid Dragon Quest fan, at the time. The first six games, I had thought, were pretty darned good. Dragon Quest V was a powerful game that told a simple, personal story. Dragon Quest VI was enjoyable and epic.
The only problem that I knew existed with Dragon Quest was that the games were something of an acquired taste. They require a particular sort of mindset to enjoy.
Now, I am going to start generalizing far too much:
We here in America, see, we love first-person-shooters. We love Doom. We love Halo. We love pretending to be a space marine or a freaky cyborg warrior who runs around and blows shit up. These games are fun because they are visceral.
Over in Japan, the average gamer is a bit different. They love Final Fantasy. They love Dragon Quest. Over there, they're into role-playing-games--into quiet, understated games that involve fiddling with a lot of numbers and much micromanagement. These games are fun because they are cerebral.
Now, to be sure, there is some cross-over. I mean, I think there are people in Japan who actually play Halo, and Final Fantasy does well over here. But Halo is not typical of most first-person-shooters in America. It is definitely a console game. It is slower and less frentic. It focuses on exploring a bunch of large (and really badly designed, but that's something else) levels, rather than running at high speed through a Strogg base that consists entirely of long corridors. Halo doesn't depend on quick-saving and quick-loading--rather, it is sort of what you could call the thinking man's first-person-shooter. The Japanese probably dig that.
The Final Fantasy games, on the other hand, as much as I love them, are pretty brain-dead. VI, my favorite game in the series by a long shot, consists of little more than a long, rollicking, story interspersed with "walking around" sequences and hundreds of "battles," all of which can be quickly finished by pressing the "A" button repeatedly. It would not be far off the mark at all to say that you can complete all of Final Fantasy X by placing a rubber band over your PS2 controller's analog stick so that it always points upwards, and putting something large and heavy over your controller's X button. The "game" in Final Fantasy is nothing more than an arbitrarily artificial artifice that exists so Hironobu Sakaguchi can beat you over the head with a sappy message. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se.
The thing is, though, that Dragon Quest is really not Final Fantasy. It is a different beast. Dragon Quest is less about "themes of life and death and memory, and also the tragedy of the Planet and Meteor, and Holy, and Huge Materia, as well as Sephiroth, who is evil, and other things that make no sense" and more about "causing numbers to increase." In Dragon Quest games, you are a random, anonymous teenager who has to spend hours walking around alone and killing tiny, cute slimes to get their gold. Once the quantity of gold you have amassed reaches a certain level, then you go spend it on equipment that lets you go a little further away from town, so you can kill more, slightly larger and less cute slimes with higher HP attributes, so that you can buy even better equipment and continue the virtuous cycle. If you are an autistic savant, some kind of freak, or Japanese, then you will derive much enjoyment from DQ. I kind of am the first two of these things, so I loved the hell out of the first six games in the series. They please me, even though they aren't ambitious fluff. They are games with few pretensions. They aren't out to rock your world and change the way you think of long-haired men with aliens for mothers and anger management problems. They're just out to make you feel good by bashing the hell out of slimes.
That's what I thought, anyway.
Enter Dragon Quest VII, the first Dragon Quest game to be sold in America for, you know, a lot of years. I bought the game. I put Disc One into my PlayStation Computer Entertainment System. I hit power, and waited, and started to play.
Three hours later, I turned that Computer Entertainment System off, put the game in my closet, and didn't touch it again. It wasn't so much that I hated the game as it was that it...failed, completely and utterly, to grab me. I figured I'd keep going later--I had saved my progress, after all, but I never did. For years afterwards, people talked about the greatness that was DQ7, how it was over one hundred hours long and really, really good and I pretended I knew what they were talking about. I wanted to get back to the game someday, but never bothered, and now three years have passed and I have played Dragon Quest VII for only three hours and I don't like this. I wanted to rectify this situation, so I figured, last night, to go ahead and do it.
And yet I still just can't get past those first few hours. I am simply incapable of it. I mean, I tried, I really, really did, but I just got angry and frustrated.
The beginning of the game is so inane that I simply can't handle it.
You wake up. Your mother gives you a sandwich. You take this sandwich to your dad. A guy tells you to go to Estard. You go there. You talk to the king. He tells you to find Kiefer. You wander around the castle and the town and don't find the fucking kid. You go back to Fishbel and there's a random guy standing near the dock who has nothing to do with anything, and he tells you to go to the ruins and meet Kiefer. You go to the ruins. You meet Kiefer. He gives you a scroll. He leaves. You leave. You go back to Fishbel. You show the scroll to Maribel. She says, why don't you show that to the guy in the item shop? You show the scroll to the guy in the item shop. He says, why don't you show that to the guy who lives underneath Estard? You go all the fucking way back to Estard. You give the scroll to that guy. MORE STUFF LIKE THIS HAPPENS FOR ANOTHER HOUR.
This is all before you enter a long, entirely pointless dungeon where there aren't even random battles to keep you sane. Somewhere in here, my mind turns to mush. It's not normal Dragon Quest. There are no slimes to be found. It's all very dead, and empty. I was told, once, that this was intentional: that Yuji Horii was purposefully messing with the player by not throwing battles at him, frustrating him, bothering him, and showing him that this Dragon Quest game is different from all the others because you don't fight a single battle for the first three hours; haha, I bet that threw you way off balance, didn't it?
Well. It did throw me off balance. It did this altogether too well. The first six Dragon Quests managed to keep me interested because, even though they were old and archaic with clunky menus and battle systems and stories, they came together. There was a certain je ne sais quois about them that made them bearable, enjoyable even.
But when I play Dragon Quest VII, the inherent flaws of the console RPG are laid bare before me.
Console RPGs suck.
This is a truism. They suck by definition. They are brainless, stupid, limiting, arbitrary games. Thus, the best console RPGs try to make you forget this.
Final Fantasy puts up a ruse. Final Fantasy X, as much as I may abhor and loathe it, was a game I actually finished despite its flaws, because even though it was a completely mindless game about bashing the X button and angling the analog stick upwards, it had voice-acting and good music and not unattractive polygonal chixxors. I can't, therefore, say that it's necessarily a bad game. It's one I don't like, but it's one I didn't put down after three hours. I put it down after sixty-five hours, instead. That's a lot of hours.
Dragon Quest put up a ruse, too, but its ruse was more holistic. There is something mesmerizing about wandering around the fields of a Dragon Quest and killing stuff. You learn to love the high-pitched "player character attacking" sound and the low-pitched "monster attacking" sound. You learn to love the sweet, sweet sound of a level-up, the "a spell is being cast" jingle, the battle music that you hate but that you burned onto a CD to listen to all the time because you're crazy like that. And the slimes.
There are no slimes in the beginning of Dragon Quest VII.
This might be why I don't like it, I don't know. I think it has more to do with the feeling of futility that hits me when I play it. The feeling--nay, the knowledge that what I'm doing really doesn't matter. Fishbel is a tiny, dead little town, with nothing in it but people who say the same things to you over and over again as you speak to them. Nothing distracts from this fact--there's no story, no excitement of slimes on the horizon. Instead, there's the quiet loop of happy, empty Sugiyama music and the "person is talking" sound effect that existed in some form or another in every Dragon Quest since the first one. The graphics are ugly and murky--they are, actually, a lot less attractive than those in Dragon Quest VI. It feels dead, to me. It feels totally awesome to millions of people in Japan, I know, but hey, people over there like tentacle-rape anime porn, don't they?
The problem is, Dragon Quest VII doesn't gloss over its nature at all. It makes no effort to even try to keep the player pressing those buttons. Instead, it says, "Look, man, I'm a long-ass game, and you're going to be playing me for hours. And hours. And hours. And everything you do is going to be just this stupid and pointless, but you'll love it because SOME NUMBERS WILL INCREASE AS YOU PLAY."
I feel like I'm wasting my time. Why can't my mom just go the twenty or so feet over to where my dad is and give him his damn sandwich? Why must I do it? Why must I show Kiefer's fucking scroll to people? Just because I can? What the hell do the "HotStone" and the "Pearl" have to do with anything? Why are there so many puzzles in this stupid hidden dungeon? Why doesn't the game tell me to do any of this; does it just want me to run around talking to random people until I figure it out for myself? (Answer: it probably does, yeah.)
You ask all of these questions to Dragon Quest VII and it doesn't answer.
It just sits there, the smug bastard. It doesn't like you, but it expects you to like it. It doesn't try to lure you in with a siren's song like Final Fantasy VI does, telling you, hey, look, you've only just started the game and you're in this really big armor and you can blow shit up and terrorize a whole city. Instead, it's just indifferent. I can't stand it. You do the fetch quests because they're fetch quests, not because they serve a higher purpose. It's not something I can stomach. Playing the game for even a little while is a kind of mental torture. My brain doesn't like it. It wants a reason. It wants justification. Instead, it's just numbed by the futility of it all, the complete lack of excitement. It looks forward to another one hundred and forty hours of this, if I actually keep playing. And then it switches off. My hands, on their own, using a kind of muscle memory, guide me to the local church, where I tell the priest I want to save. And I stop.
Maybe Dragon Quest VII isn't a bad game. In fact, probably it isn't a bad game. People seem to love it. I want to love it, but I can't. My brain won't let me. Every time I play the game, I get a headache, and I know that eventually my brain is just going to turn off in protest if I keep it up. It's warning me. It's got an eye on me, and now I'm on probation. I can't play Dragon Quest VII because my life will be endangered if I do. It sucks the life out of me. It makes me tired. It makes me want to kill myself.
I think it's possible that Dragon Quest VII, like The Sims, will be one of those games that I can play, but that I don't really understand, that I don't find myself able to wrap my head around. People like these games, but I really, really don't. I can't. They rub me the wrong way. They lack something that they need to keep me playing. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe, because I don't eat tempura all the time and don't live in a house made out of paper, I can't begin to see the appeal of Dragon Quest VII. But I think it's something more than that. DQ7 is a console RPG. It is too unapologetic about it. It is raw and bare, and it leaves me uneasy and bothered. Maybe I'm shallow, and I prefer the fluff of a Final Fantasy to this. Maybe I'm American and want to blow stuff up. I don't know. I wish I did.
I think I'm going to go play Halo now.
