For those of you who just want to hear my thoughts on DQ10 itself, feel free to skip the first couple of paragraphs.
When Dragon Quest 10 was announced, I was fairly shaken. Indeed, I reacted so poorly that upon reflection a couple of days later, I realized that my entire outlook on gaming had changed. People have often said that Dragon Quest fans are more resistant to change than any other gamers, and many used that position to disregard my and others' feelings about the game being an MMORPG. Of course, this irritated me quite a bit since I felt that turning a rock solid single-player RPG series onto the MMORPG path is a very dramatic change. We've all gone through this before, though. First, it was Phantasy Star: a series that had only just really hit its stride with the fourth entry, then seemingly forgotten for a whole generation and revived as an online game with a decidedly different format. Next came Final Fantasy 11: the idea that Final Fantasy would have an MMORPG was hard to swallow at the time, but Square made it easier by announcing it with other games, assuring the audience that although FF11 is an MMORPG, there are still single-player games on the way.
So, then, if I've seen this before and the world did not end, why was it such a big deal this time? It turns out that there's a little bit of truth to the idea that Dragon Quest fans are resistant to change. Dragon Quest has been like comfort food to me for a great deal of my life. I would go through lots of changes in my life, ups and downs, but I could always rely on a new Dragon Quest game to give me a familiar special feeling that nothing else could. Some of this feeling comes from being so comfortable with what to expect in a game. So many things were established in the series that the player could take for granted. Playing a new Dragon Quest game felt like coming home after being away for so long, troubles melting away.
I said that DQ10's announcement changed my outlook on gaming, but it wasn't really DQ10, it was me. Its announcement is what finally made me realize that I had simply become too invested in gaming, and the Dragon Quest series in particular. A hobby of mine should not hold so much power over me, and so I no longer let it. Over time, my disgust for what DQ10 was dissipated, and I allowed myself to begin looking at the game's own merits. I still wasn't sure I wanted to play a DQ MMO - after all, I was not a very big fan of what was done in 9 - but I would give it a try. I probably would have always tried the game, because it is very important to me to experience things first-hand and form my own opinion. But it became much easier as time went on.
So hopefully that answers the frequent question I'm asked about why I'm even playing DQ10.
Now, about the game itself!
Dragon Quest 10 feels familiar. I think that is its most important trait, and it's one that I feel even FF11 did not accomplish nearly as well as it could have. You walk out of town, and the first enemies you see, regardless of where in the world you are, will be slimes and other low-level monsters from the DQ series. In town, you already know exactly what each facility does. Even the church, which although it isn't used to save the game anymore, it's used to set your binding point for when you die. The icons on the maps are the same familiar ones used in the series for decades. The music is composed by the same person who's written the music for every game in the series, and some music from earlier games is used in certain contexts to further drive familiarity. Even combat manages to feel familiar, despite being formatted entirely differently, just because of a couple familiar cues such as enemies being shown in first-person right when the battle begins, and when it's your time to act, you get that tried-and-true DQ menu window. And the interface - the really big one - is just how you'd expect. Everything is where it should be, and everything works how it should. This is one aspect that has been established over the course of the series that remains steady even in this game, and the things that are different are still similar to how they were presented in DQ9.
Speaking of DQ9, the more I play DQ10, the more convinced I become that when they were tasked to redo DQ9 after the genre change, they must have actually looked at what they were doing in DQ10 and scaled it down. The systems in DQ10 don't feel like evolutions of systems in DQ9, rather the systems in DQ9 feel like pared down versions of systems in DQ10. Some of the things present in DQ9 that didn't really feel "fit" in the game thrive wonderfully in 10, particularly the expanded stat setup and things like the ability for mages to regain MP by physically attacking - which felt so weird in 9 - feel right at home in 10. Whether this is actually true or not, it gives me a better understanding of why 9 turned out the way it did.
I do have to say, though, that the claims that it "feels just like a DQ game" are very misleading. DQ10 is very much an MMORPG. Although you can level "solo" by hiring AI party members to help you out, the balance of the game and the design of the areas and quests are very much "MMORPG." Things take much longer to do, and the degree of difficulty is much higher. You cannot just log on and ignore the other players and pretend you're playing a game like DQ8, because it won't let you. Although there is a story to the game, it's fairly disjointed in the way that MMORPG stories tend to be, and you have to seek it out specifically. The world is not designed to funnel you toward the next story objective, as DQ games typically have been in the past. In fact, I would say that if you've played FF11, you know exactly what to expect from DQ10, because it's formatted incredibly similarly.
The game is very fun, and I've been enjoying my time with it. It has a lot of neat ideas that make it easier to play socially than standard MMORPGs, such as being able to change servers whenever you want. It also has some really great systems that make playing alone or even not playing work out better, such as the energy ball system (which lets you spend your hours spent offline to get items that double your exp/gold for 30 minutes) and the ability to register your character to be hired while you’re offline and receive exp/gold when you come back online. It also has a really fantastic player site that gives you the ability to view a screencap of your character, its equipment, the people who have hired your character, your friend list, your screenshots taken, among many other things. I also think that the way battles work is incredibly cool and interesting. Monsters roam around the field like they would in any other MMORPG, but when you touch them, a battle transition appears and you enter into a battle. At that point, you could be fighting just the enemy you touched, or it could have come with other enemies - there’s no way of knowing. Once you’re in the battle, a ring is formed around the area and other players and monsters become translucent. This means that there is no danger of other monsters wandering into your battlefield and joining in, or accidentally getting hit by someone’s AoE, or anything like that. It also means that other players cannot intervene directly with your monsters. They can, however, cheer from the sidelines which will boost your tension and occasionally give you a small heal. It’s a very interesting system that encourages people to be nicer to each other and also makes battles go more smoothly. And running away from a fight is as easy as walking outside of the ring, which is a very welcome change for me personally.
DQ10 is not without its issues, though, and I think some of its biggest issues would prevent good reception in the west at all. In fact, I'm fairly certain that it would be absolutely panned by western audiences who have played MMORPGs. The thing is that although DQ10 is an MMORPG, it’s a bad idea to approach it as something comparable to World of Warcraft, because it just does not stack up. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that it is trying so hard to be a console RPG that just happens to be an MMORPG. It doesn’t have macros or really any quick way to trigger abilities - they must be activated through the menu. The game is built to be played with a controller, from your comfy couch. It supports USB keyboards, not only for chatting but also for character control, but it’s just very odd to use the keyboard bindings they’ve set up. It doesn’t have a chat window that’s up on the screen at all times - chat bubbles pop up by a person’s portrait on your screen when they say something, but it’s only brief, and only one message; you have to open up the social window to view your a log of public chat, friend messages, combat log, party chat, etc. Also, there is no general chat or trade chat or things of that nature, so doing large-scale coordination seems like it would be fairly difficult unless it were inter-guild or something like that. In fact, the game is designed such that you could very easily play it without a keyboard, and it even welcomes that fact by giving servers for players who don’t have one, and allowing you to mark yourself as not having one. You can register pre-set lines of text and gestures that can easily be recalled exactly as they are in DQ9, and that seems to be plenty to get by in the game, at least to begin with. The amount of text you can send in one line is also very restrictive. Beyond that, though, the game is not quest-driven like modern MMOs, nor does it have instancing or any of that fancy stuff. I think that if approached the wrong way, it could very easily be viewed as an archaic game, and considering that western audiences often already think that about Dragon Quest, I really do fear that it just will not be accepted in the west at all. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.
But for me, I am enjoying the game very much for what it actually is, not what I wanted it to be or what it could have been. I expect to play this game for quite a while, and hopefully Square Enix is able to keep it thriving. They’ve just started with weekly quests, which is a nice start, but I hope that they do more. Fortunately, I think there is quite a lot of room for expansion, so I’m not worried.
EDIT: Nevermind, got it!
