Castles, swords, knights, princess, dragons, kings, and epic quests are all elements that define RPGs in the medieval setting and are what best describes Dragon Quest.
When someone talks about RPG the first thing that comes to most people’s mind is Final Fantasy but little is known today that the venerable Dragon Quest (also known as Dragon Warrior in North America) is the root of all console based RPGs. This post will give you a general overview of the serie and in subsequent post I’ll review each game independantly as I complete them (give or take 2-3 weeks between each).
Dragon Quest might be the most influencial role playing game ever released for the console, everything after this (even Final Fantasy) takes its roots in it. The top down perspective, turn based fight, random encounter are only a few of the game mechanic that were introduced.
Every game in the serie were always extremely well done, to this day no Dragon Quest game have been tagged as the lesser one (sales figure aside). This might be attributed to the fact that since the first installement the three main designer have always been the same. Such control over a serie is almost unheard in the video game industry.
Yuuji Horii, the scenario and game designer, got the inspiration from Wizardry and Ultima that he discovered after winning a contest sponsored by Enix in 1982. The rest of the team, music designer Koichi Sugiyama and character and monster designer Akira Toriyama (also known for the Dragon Ball serie) met the following year to start the design of Dragon Quest. Yuuji Horii was one of the supervisor of the game Chrono Trigger in which he appeared in one of the ending with the game development staff, he is also owner of the production company, Armor Project, which has an exclusive production contract with Square Enix, a contract established with Enix before the company merged with Square. Given that fact I think it pretty much establish which company (square or enix) is truly responsible of whoring the Final Fantasy serie.
In North America the serie never achieved the status it deserved and was always shadowed by Final Fantasy. However things are different in Japan where it is such a cultural phenomenon that there are live-action ballets, musical concerts, and audio CDs based on the Dragon Quest universe. The London Philharmonic Orchestra has performed for several Dragon Quest music albums. It was the first video game series to have its music performed live by an orchestra. Since 1987, music from Dragon Quest has been performed annually in Japan in concert halls.
With eight main installements in the serie is no real chronology unifying all the Dragon Quest games. The first six installements were divided into two trilogy Dragon quest 3, 1, 2 then Dragon Quest IV, V, VI. Dragon Quest VII and VIII are independant of each others.
Many mangas and anime based on the serie were released in Japan, with only one in North America. 13 out of 43 episode of Dragon warrior (Based on Dragon Quest III) were aired here in 1990.
I'm so tempted to just fangirl out all over your post. We'll have late night talks about DQ and become BFF's
Instead I'll try to have some composure and ask a question:
What's your favorite "Puff-Puff" moment?
Although if you're just starting to play these games you may not know the answer.
{fangirl} Did you see the ESRB gave a rating for DQIV remake on the DS? I'm hoping this means DQV and VI for the DS will come out here too. It would justify playing them on my NOT computer all those years ago. I'm soooo excited for it! {/fangirl}
(sorry, there's a little fangirl moment. I just love Dragon Quest so much)
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Instead I'll try to have some composure and ask a question:
What's your favorite "Puff-Puff" moment?
Although if you're just starting to play these games you may not know the answer.
{fangirl} Did you see the ESRB gave a rating for DQIV remake on the DS? I'm hoping this means DQV and VI for the DS will come out here too. It would justify playing them on my NOT computer all those years ago. I'm soooo excited for it! {/fangirl}
(sorry, there's a little fangirl moment. I just love Dragon Quest so much)