So DQ8 is the FF6 of the DQ series? I'm sold. Hope I don't hate the first person battle system (if that's still in DQ8).
Nope, you can see your characters in battles in DQ8 (and DQ9 and the remake of DQ7), so you should be okay. Not sure I'd call DQ8 the FF6 of the series, though. It's more like the FF7. DQ5 is probably the FF6 of the series, but it's not available in English yet on iOS. My personal ranking of what's on there right now would be: DQ4>DQ3>DQ8>DQ1>DQ2. For the whole series, my ranking is DQ5>DQ4>DQ7>DQ9>DQ6>DQ3>DQ8>DQ1>DQ2. I should add that I feel that DQ is like pie: There's no bad one.
If I understand your comparisons correctly, DQ8 is the first step towards modernizing the series and DQ5 is the best of the old school?
DQ8 is the big-budget, big production values entry that reintroduced the series outside of Japan. Its systems are simplified greatly over the previous installment in a lot of good ways and a few bad ways. It's an unusual game for the series in quite a few ways, such that if you like it, there's no guarantee you'll like any of the other games in the series. The overworld is really something to behold, though. Really does a good job of taking a classic JRPG experience and pushing it as far as technology at the time could go. DQ5 is, I guess, the heart of the series. You can tell the creator, Yuji Horii, really put everything he had into its story, because all the DQ games after it don't come anywhere near its narrative power. If games weren't products, it probably would have been the end of the Dragon Quest series, I think. It's also mechanically a more complicated game than DQ8, but most of the DQ games are.
If youve never played final fantasy before, start with final fantasy 3 and final fantasy dimensions. All the others are just a waste of money
Not sure if serious or confused the American 3 with the original 6. But everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Can't imagine anyone liking the original 3 over 4 and 6 though unless that was their first ever final fantasy.
@Shaun - since it seems like you can read / speak / understand Japanese with all the inherent cultural knowledge - how well are any of these FF, DQ translated into English? Japanese culture and cultural norms / understanding are so different than American norms (this is my belief) that it would seem that any of the translations would at best be OK since most, if not all of the nuance would not be realized in a translation. True? My best frame of reference for this is film - Seven Samurai - I watch it in Japanese with the English subtitles and have watched it with English dubbed translations, and I see the emotions, the looks, the body language and it just does not match up. Same with Akira, or even many of the Studio Ghibli gems - I always am wondering how much I am missing due to translation, and I suspect a reasonable amount.
That's a good question, but man, we are going really off-topic. So I'll answer it here but if you have any follow-ups please make a new topic in General Gaming or pop into the RPG Reload thread to ask. At this point, I've played FF1-6 in both English and Japanese, including all of the different English versions. I've played every DQ game except 7 in Japanese and all of them in English, and I actually prefer to play them in Japanese. The original translations on the FF games were... as best as you could expect, I think, given the tech limitations, the state of localization at the time, and Nintendo of America's draconian policies on anything that might offend anyone. As for their current scripts (the ones that have current scripts, anyway), I feel like they're pretty faithful for the most part. There are a few weird English pop culture references jammed in there, but the spirit of the important lines is preserved. There's certainly a cultural gap that comes into play, some of which can't really be fixed in a localization, but it's less of a problem in the earlier FF games. The Dragon Quest games... the English scripts are a bit too jokey at times, and it does sometimes spoil the intended mood. Not every situation calls for a pun, you know? The Japanese versions love to use puns for enemy names, but that's about it. I also think the accents are a bit overdone. DQ does use different dialects of Japanese in the original scripts, but it's a lot less distracting. DQ5 has a couple of scenes where the jokeyness changes the mood, and DQ6 has a lot of issues with it, in my opinion. That all said, I think the English localizations we get these days are really nice to read and do a very good job of trying to bridge a surprisingly wide language and cultural gap. If you're really into the topic, I highly recommend this site, Legends of Localization. He even goes step by step through Final Fantasy IV to compare different versions. Very interesting stuff and explains things a lot more thoroughly than I can. Anyway, this is allllll off-topic, so let's take FF/DQ general talk to the general forum if we want to keep going on about this all.
@Shaun - thanks. Will do with other questions. With the discussion on FF and DQ, i figured the question might be of general interest. Apologies to folks if too far off topic for them. Thanks for the website!
Looks like several of the FF titles are on sale again. III, IV and IV:TAY are definitely on sale for $6.99. Not sure about the others but those are the ones I have saved in App Wish. I may skip III and just grab the IV titles. What do you think?
