Notes on Dragon Quarter
·
The
game establishes its dystopian future aesthetic immediately by contextualizing
the typical JRPG “Pick Your Name” screen in a fashion similar to the Nodes in Metal Gear Solid 2: You aren’t
interfacing with abstract game interface, you are entering your name on a
government computer.
·
The
first camera angle in Dragon Quarter
is from behind a ceiling fan in a locker room and holy shit videogames need
more of that. (I can confirm that, in
areas without combat, similarly dramatic camera angles were common. Presumably
they were less common in areas with combat because moving around enemies is so
important in Dragon Quarter.)
·
The
soundtrack is awesome, and yet
totally un-JRPG like so far. It reminds me a lot of Soul Reaver actually.
·
Aaaaand
the battle theme is lame, filled to the brim with abrupt shifts and lacking in
core melody. I’m gonna take a guess that it’s . . .
·
.
. . yup, the curse of Yasunori Mitsuda strikes once again. (Holy SHIT dude,
just listen to some fucking Motoi Sakaruba and get with the program.)
·
[According
to some sources some of the music was also done by Hitoshi Sakimoto, but based
on his work with Tactics Ogre: Let Us
Cling Together and Final Fantasy
Tactics I stand by what I said. He has a lot of the same problems.]
·
[The
battle music does get better later, and the boss music is fantastic.]
·
I
like how you start off too poor to buy even a basic weapon upgrade. The game
has already established through many visual and dialogue cues that getting to
the top is what we’re trying to do, and communicating that upper echelon above
you through your own comparative poverty is clever.
·
My
absolute high point for JRPG opening acts is, of course, Final Fantasy VII because it gives you a setting and an aesthetic,
within just a few seconds, and then hits the ground running telling a story and building its world and teaching the game mechanics. Dragon Quarter does this in a more subtle
way, but it definitely does it. 2:46 and this game has been rolling since the
moment I popped in the disc. The gameplay has communicated an aesthetic better
than almost any game I’ve yet played and the story has already enthralled me.
·
In
my first night of playing Dragon Quarter,
I’ve played for about 5 straight hours. This used to be what I called “The
first half of Saturday” after which would follow dinner, and then another 5
hours of a game, but really, I don’t do this much anymore.
·
“Indeed, the truest trumpet blast
proclaiming Dragon Quarter‘s
greatness is said atmosphere. Insects cling to flickering lights in
psycho-depressing underground metal stairwells, words are scarce (what’s to
talk about?), elevators are a ‘mode of transportation’, people in ‘cities’
slump against rock walls, everyone hates everyone else, everyone hates their
self, everyone hates everyone else for hating themselves. That the game’s
characters and players share the same desire re: getting the hell out of
this depressing place is more than just a coincidence: it’s good game design.”
– Tim Rogers
·
I’d
like to point out that Action Button’s
review of Dragon Quarter has an aside
wherein Tim Rogers uses a triple
parenthetical to criticize the lack of continuity in the Final Fantasy series, and then rolls back said criticism. I really
can’t make up the shit he writes sometimes.
·
It’s
a damn shame that faces in this game are made with 2D textures because it’s the
only part of the game that looks bad.
·
It
was probably the result of a small budget, but this game has no voice acting. I
cannot overstate how well the game
uses this. A fair amount of the cutscenes thus far have had no music at all,
and that communicates the aesthetic perfectly.
·
Most
of the money you make in Dragon Quarter is
by finding items and selling them. I’ve always loved this version of
money-making mechanics in RPGs because frankly they just make so much more
sense. It adds an extra layer of busywork, but that busywork feels real and
immersive, and suggests an in-game economy, even if it doesn’t do the hard work
of building a fully functioning economy outside of the player characters
presence.
·
Having
put down the game and not played for pretty much the entirety of December, I
was quickly reminded that Dragon Quarter
is fucking brutal. In this particular case: the kind of brutal where a
status ailment you’re commonly inflicted with does not have its remedy readily
available for sale, but you can buy the item that cures all status ailments for
twice the price. (Thankfully I had the money.)
·
RYU:
“Am I going to die?”
LIN: “Well, we all die in the end.”
LIN: “Well, we all die in the end.”
·
I
find myself revisiting Dragon Quarter
less often not because it is unentertaining, but because it is fairly draining.
Saving is a limited resource in Dragon
Quarter and for what I shit you not was the last three hours of the game I
wasn’t allowed to do it, because I actually ran out of Save Tokens. Those
stretches got bigger and bigger as the game went on.
·
A
great thrill in Dragon Quarter is
that the game is designed around you sometimes not being prepared for boss
fights, which encourages you to really overprepare in towns. It feels like
genuine survival against a genuine struggle. This creates a tension where there’s
the tension that the next time you open a door it’ll be a boss fight and you
might not be ready for it. The way the game takes little notes from horror
games here and there is pretty genius.
·
There’s
a cutscene where a major character dies, and as one character is shocked, the
dungeon music fades back in and they walk on. Not a sad “character just died”
theme but the regular music that goes with what is technically speaking the
mundane part of your adventure.
“So it goes.”
“So it goes.”
·
Briefly
after that, I realized that my previous hard save had me at 12:20, and my new
one at 15:36. Again, I restate that the level of dedication Dragon Quarter will ask from you is
pretty insane.
·
A
common mistake I made and you’ll likely make: saving before you’ve bought your
items and such. Save yourself some pain: don’t do that. Don’t take permanent
progress for granted.
·
I
love the tension that having a limited inventory is brining. Now granted, you
start with only three pages of inventory, and as of the point in the game I’m
at now, I have seven [I ended with seven], but it brings a serious amount of
resource management into the question. Make no mistake, you will run out of space in your inventory.
·
Common
example: Your inventory is full. (Trust me, it is.) And you have an opportunity
to pick up a new unidentified weapon dropped by an enemy. (This happens a lot.)
You could pick it up, but to do so you might have to drop a slot of 10 healing
items to do so, or gamble on this unidentified weapon being better than some
other unidentified weapon. And really, either of those could be huge. It could
be the weapon that allows you to thread skills exactly the way you want so you
can really start doing damage, or those healing items that might make it possible
to beat the next boss. What Dragon
Quarter excels at is making that decision feel tense and real whilst not
too often putting you in a situation where you ended up making the wrong one.
·
Another
thing in this game that I can’t say I’ve seen in many other RPGs: Jump scares.
Really cheap ones too. Dragon Quarter still
looks great today, but that’s in part because it has a cartoony aesthetic that
doesn’t make you expect too horribly much in the way of character animations,
for example. Point is, it doesn’t necessarily do horror well, but it can still
get you every once in a while by sneaking an enemy behind you and making you go
“Fuck! Where did he come from?!” And again, the game isn’t unfair: the extra
turn that gives the enemy isn’t going to result in your immediate death, but it
does mean you’re gonna have to burn some healing items because you didn’t get
to kill the enemy before they even had the chance to attack. It’s just a little
whisper in your ear every once in a while that keeps you on your toes.
·
For
the past few months I’ve been stuck in a particular part in Xenogears because basically, if you
don’t upgrade your gears you’ll not be able to beat the upcoming bosses that
you fight with your gears. Except this time there’s no place to go buy shit for
my gears. I’ve been playing for about 25 hours after already having restarted
the game twice or so, and I’m going to have to start again. From the beginning.
(Game Design!!!) Now lemme tell ya, if you wanna feel defeated, starting a game
over and over again and not actually beating it is a good way to do it. Dragon Quarter is about that.
It’s about feeling overwhelmed, defeated, and yet still struggling onward, and
wondering whether it’s worth it, and wondering even as you steadily progress
whether the choices you’re making with strategy are actually effective enough
to see you the whole way through, (because in a game like this eventually
someone’s gonna have your number . . . right?) and it expresses that with the
hints of an aesthetic, but primarily through ludic frustration. Said ludic frustration is achieved through, for the most of the game, trapping the player in the area of character strength that feels like the first 10-15 hours of a typical JRPG rather than letting them grow into the immensely broken parts of the later 30 hours. Best of all is that this is used to metaphorically express the characters place in society and their struggle to escape, all of which is totally brilliant. I'm going to write more about this game, but I'm just going to say now that you absolutely must play Dragon Quarter.
Dragon Quarter is my favorite horror game. I especially loved that endlessly ticking up D-Meter as a source of tension...
ReplyDeleteI might end up writing a short piece about how the game casually borrows a lot of horror type stuff. But yeah, The D-counter is obviously genius, it's that ever present reminder that no matter what you do, death is coming. Love it.
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