now that were back and better than ever: DRAGON QUEST POLL

i have never played any out of i thro vii for more than, like, ten minutes. i think there might be some europe-america release disparity, though. that or i was too busy owning only sega things.

dq8. gorgeous and incredibly pleasant game environment. wish the battles went by a little quicker but this is a game about exploration and taking in all there is to see. take your time.

my top ps2 game and one of my alltime faves.

runner-up: dq3. gameboy color ver is addictive and plays FAST. for an rpg, anyway. class system spices the game mechanics up nicely and its non-linearity really adds a nice sense of scale.

haven't played 2, 6, 7, or 9 yet. p curious about 7.

seven is probably the worst game in the main series. it does very little but over complicate the class system and drag on for four ps1 discs. theres just sorta too much: it tries too hard to acknowledge all the dq mythology, it requires way too many pointless battles, the enemies are poorly balanced (a v dq flaw tbrr), the story is boring and hard to skip.

my vote is for eight as well, i think its the clearest and most successful game simply by paring back all the sidequests and the class system and the gimmicks of five, six and seven. its also the nicest looking by a p far margin.

voted v: I'm a sucker for games where you raise a family & save the cosmos through slaughter

didn't love iv, too disconnected, have vi & ix waiting on ds when some year I get a spare minute

I was hoping dq7 was this misunderstood gem since it came out at the height of the ps1 fmv cut scene rpg era. but that sounds like what people were saying at the time. oh well.

xpost

there are some good parts to seven its just overstuffed and so drags on.

dqv is a lot of fun, i think its the best of the three that i played as ds remakes.

yeah, I loved building up a party of weird monsters in that one

I can't say I've ever played any past the first one, but I gotta say it's incredible in retrospect how tough that game really was. I picked up the Game Boy version some years later and was surprised how much they neutered the difficulty, which is probably a good thing (obviously us NESheads can wax poetic about being 8 and fighting blue slimes over and over to level up, but in retrospect that part of the game really sucked)

V, for the excellent monster recruitment system, followed by VIII which is just beautiful.

(I have only played the DS ones and VIII.)

the first two are not at all worth playing except as curiosities and for a challenge, i guess. theyre not even particularly hard just time consuming.

i am kind of embarrassed that i have played through all of them but vi, which i bought after xmas in a sale :/

maybe it's nostalgia but I played through most of the gameboy color remake of dq1 a few years back. would have finished it but I lost my gbc and the cartridge somewhere in philly. >:(

played through most of dq1 and really got into it that is

any of the spinoffs worth playing?

this one is p fun but I lost interest a couple hours in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Slime

haha alan yr display name is killing me...

idk i played through dq1 on a rom this year and it was just like the worst parts of zelda II and wizardy mixed together? everything was so featureless and plain and the scale seemed wrong? like there was no sense of narrative to the way monsters scaled or the difficulty of the dungeons or even the build of the towns.

ive liked some of the games in the 'monsters' series but theyre p slight. 'joker' is probably the best and by probably i just mean 'the one i remember'

zelda II was amazing!! unless you're talking about the graphics, which are very weird for a nintendo game

haha yeah, dq1 is obv totally primitive and not even a particularly well-designed game for its time but the dungeon exploring part of it still just works for me. if you don't grind too much, there's a real sense of danger to it. and that danger may be p artificial in that you are simply punished severely if you happen to die (i.e. you just wasted an hour). but that also makes the crawl through a dungeon more exciting and getting out alive feel more rewarding.

typical nes era rpg stuff, but what can I say, the formula works for me.

remake also automates some of the mechanics to open doors and stuff like that but it is still plenty tedious bc it is still dq1.

xpost to lamp, duh

Only played 1 and 8

I kind of like the sense of scale in it too. stuff like being able to see the last castle in the game from the area you start in. but you can't reach it yet (of course).

haha but that last castle didnt feel materially different from the first! i actually think they really fucked up the overworld in that game tbh. i know final fantasy came out later but they nailed the big and treacherous overworld much better, and did a better job giving the areas a sense of place w/in a limited framework

zelda II was amazing!!

better hope big bang canx isnt reading this thread

well, I've still never played any of the nes final fantasy games since they weren't given away w/nintendo power subscriptions but I'm sure you're otm anyway. the game prob doesn't esp work if didn't play it at the time, but like I said, nostalgia + competent execution of a formula that happens to click w/me.

also liked zelda 2. \(o_O)/ can't say I remember much tho.

as far as other red-headed stepchild sequels go, I have much love for mario 2 but castlevania 2 really is mostly a total shitshow.

oh i like zelda II quite a bit as well...

i think dq reminds of zelda II cuz the overworld was similarly directionless/shapeless and theyre also visually sorta similar

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i've played none of them to any distance other than 5 ds remake which was pretty awesome, i don't know how it was the one that hooked me, but... there it is?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

:-o

thought this would be a landslide for 8

p stoked on Google Maps quest view

haha yah: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=san+francisco+ca&hl=en&ll=37.64849,-121.726627&spn=0.086987,0.126343&sll=55.753419,37.620363&sspn=0.016109,0.031586&t=8&hnear=San+Francisco,+California&z=13

dear lamp and/or alan, should i buy dragon quest ix or one of the ds remakes of the middle trilogy

I liked the DS VI the best

signed,
not lamp or alan

lol thanks abbs. no exclusion meant, just that lamp and alan were the er dominant voices of this thread to date

i liked ix better than vi but theyre both similarly pleasurable

id go w/whichever you can find cheapest

I actually haven't played 6 or 9 yet but 5 was my favorite of the ds remakes.

9 is incredibly, incredibly long. Like hundreds of hours.

IX is probably the easiest to find cheap at this point

in fact, it's $15 on amazon right now

ix isnt that long abbs!! i mean theres lots to do potentially but the main story is ~30 hours or so i think

IX would be my recommendation. V is also very good.

Ok maybe it just FELT hundreds of hours long

well it took a year to get around to it but i have lost my whole weekend to dragon quest ix. sigh.

i think today this ticked over from 'compulsive and fun' to 'unpleasantly compulsive'

"i'm just going to find a couple more metal slimes and then i'll get dressed"

you might say this is starting to dragon a bit

...

and i just lost several hours of play when my DS crashed. my life is over

ok, the chances of this are minuscule, but

a) has anyone here played Dragon Quest II (NES)?
b) remember that town where you talk to the king and then he releases some sort of catbeast that you have to fight, gladiator style?

i think he is supposed to give the moon sigil as a reward. but i went to this town waaaaaaaaay too early on accident (as soon as i got the boat i just started exploring the entire map) and wasn't given the moon sigil as a reward. now it's later in the game and the moon sigil is a required item to advance, and everyone's telling me to go to that town and talk to the king to get it. and in the FAQs for the game, it also says to go there, fight the beast, and you get rewarded with the moon sigil.

i can't exactly remember, but i think after i beat the catbeast i just went about my business and left the town without checking in with the king again to claim my reward (i didn't know there WAS a reward at the time!). and now when i talk to him he's just like "HELLO FAIRE TRAVELER, YE NEED A MERE 158 EXPERIENCE POINTS TO REACH THE NEXT LEVEL, NOBLE FRIEND OF FRIENDS!"

anyway. i'm kinda fucked, i think.

this is the year you learn how to hack nes save states

i'm playing the new iPhone port, which sucks only because they decided to change the names of many of the towns and items for no apparent reason. as a result it's 100x more difficult to use the old FAQs because everything has a different name.

but the good news is i realized that i DO have the moon sigil - it just wasn't in my inventory. instead it's listed as an icon on the status screen. ALL IS WELL IN DRAGON QUEST WORLD