I'm all ears-unless I get stuck in a casino. Maybe, if I'm lucky, this tale will spark something that makes you want to play the one I'm talking about.Īnyway, I'm sure I'll have more stories to tell, and I'm sure the game does too. My long-forms on games really are incredible in how little of the games in question they contain. I have not covered all that I've played through-as usual, I probably said about half of what I wanted to.
My only disappointment so far is that I cannot walk around in it. It's also heartbreaking.Ĭurrent events: I've just got my ship. 'I've heard of pinching gold, but pinching beds?' he exclaims, or something to that effect. In the next room you find a man with no bed. In one, the walls divided by wood so poor and broken it is like cardboard, you find a man who's just been sold a rough looking mattress for the floor, at a good price, from 'Dodgy Dave' the reseller. Several of the long buildings may as well be housing projects.
These aren't the irritating beggars of Elder Scrolls, because you actually know where they have to live, and sleep. These are just people, and most of them are living in abject poverty.
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The town of Pickham is a great example: rumoured to be a hard town, one full of pickpockets and worse, one your partners don't wish to visit on account of its reputed danger: it reveals itself to be that indeed, but moreover it is revealed to be a poor town.ĭragon Quest has had poor towns before: pit-stops made of broken stone riddled with graffiti, dangerous in that anyone may be an actual monster in disguise.
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It is this fabulous concoction, happy, sad, bizarre and comic that sets the whole series apart. It is these moments, small and spaced out as they may be, that contribute in large part to Horii's 'living worlds'. Like every DQ, it is high drama, high camp, maximum shenanigans and very, very quiet tragedy. In the very first town of the game, an old man on a bench near a smoking ruin remarks 'this is the second friend I've lost in a fire.'
But it also does what the true fairytales do: it doesn't look away. It's familiar to the point of friendliness. Possibly the boldest thing this game does, actually, is play it (mostly) straight: it really is that fairytale you've heard before, the one on the tip of your tongue, your imagination. This, I think, gives you more a feeling of agency, of direct connection with what's happening, than the lonely time-travellers of 7. They probably looked like that to begin with.Īnd you are a measly palace guard, a subject of the King, who just happened to survive when the Demon King effected all these troubles. maybe King Pilaf from Dragon Ball?), said king's darling Princess, turned into a beautiful but mute horse, an aristocratic lady willing to take up arms in search of revengeance for her lost brother, and a would-be Don Juan in the form of an abbey templar whose actions and vices aren't so priestly.Īll because of a curse. You (yes, you) are personally responsible for escorting a menagerie which may well be faerie story incarnate: a king turned into a 'monster' (some mix of a toad, a kappa, and. 7 was (mostly) a series of small tales, tales which became legend through the passing of time the player character was an avatar to change these pasts, yes, but perhaps more importantly to observe these small stories, usually one at a time, in smallish doses, as one does when handed the 1,001 Nights, a copy of Grimm's, or any compendium of world myth.ĭQ8 goes for the straight-up fairytale. This feeling persists into DQ8, perhaps even more heavily, or perhaps I should say overtly. I've, surely, written about it already.Īnd 'myth' can become such a boring word, if accurate, when you have so much to choose from, in where these stories come from: the fae, dream, the various ladies who are three but one, folktales from the Old Country, which is the same country as myth, the same country the muses hail from, the same country we inhabit right now when we play Dragon Quest, when we talk about Dragon Quest. As I worked my way through those books, the endings of them and Dragon Quest 7 nearly coinciding, the suspicion crept that the stories, and viewpoints, of the two things I was experiencing were not terribly dissimilar: I'd go back to DQ, think 'this is like that bit of the Sandman I just read', knowing that Yuji Horii likely never read it, but knowing that he and Neil Gaiman were working from some of the same exact sources, and more importantly, the same main source in general: myth. I recently burned my way through the Sandman, both the Netflix series (recommended) and in re-reading what I'd read of the books and then finally finishing them.
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