Random Roar: Dragon Quest Innovation

 

“The Dragon Quest series as of late is gamer comfort food, considering how little things change from one game to the next.” –Final Fantasy XVI Future-spective

 

The upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, according to the early trailers at least, seems to be taking the series to new places once more.  Battles between the summons, here called Eikons like in Final Fantasy XIV, are featured in the trailer, something which we’ve not seen quite to this scale before, outside of the scene in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward when Ravana and Shiva squared off against one another, and I guess all the summoner battles in Final Fantasy X.  The battle system in the new game might be another evolution of the real time systems they’ve been trying to perfect ever since Advent Children came out.  And the antagonistic, almost resentful way the trailer refers to the crystal makes it seem like Yoshi-P is attempting to distance the series from its roots once more, perhaps worried that Final Fantasy XIV, and indeed the series in general, is relying too much on nostalgia of late and not enough on new ideas.

Last week, I insinuated that the Dragon Quest series doesn’t innovate and in fact is the same from one game to the next and while that is true in some aspects, working on the Retrospectives has shown that when it comes to innovation, both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were industry leaders on the NES.

It was Dragon Quest, for example, that was Japan’s Final Fantasy VII.  Basically, although RPGs existed before then, when Dragon Quest was released, it popularized the genre in Japan and its success prompted Enix to make several more in quick succession before branching out to other games.  Dragon Quest II took the framework from the first game and improved it, introducing a party system.  Dragon Quest III brought jobs into the mix and allowed players to switch them at a special temple.  And finally, Dragon Quest IV put greater focus on both its story and giving its main villain an actual motivation behind his actions and the agency with which to do them, rather than just be another bad guy sitting on his throne doing nothing and waiting for the hero to show up.

Final Fantasy, even back then, challenged the norms of the genre.  After the first game in the series did well, Final Fantasy II threw out everything and came up with a system where you level up individual stats depending upon actions in battle, and spells also grow as you use them.  Experience points were gone, anyone could have any spell, anyone could wield any weapon, and this game has since been called the worst in the series by many.  It’s also the only game of the first five that did not feature elemental crystals.

When other companies like Capcom and Taito wanted to introduce their own RPGs to the market on the SNES, it was Dragon Quest they looked to for inspiration.  The results were Breath of Fire from Capcom and Lufia & the Fortress of Doom from Taito.  Neither game really pushed the envelope too far, but were still successful enough to spawn sequels.

Dragon Quest helped define a genre and continues to refine itself with innovations, with Dragon Quest VIII introducing crafting and a tension system, Dragon Quest IX introducing a quest system as well as enemies visible on screen for the first time in the main series, and Dragon Quest XI coming up with a skill tree to replace the blind skill point allocation system the series had been using prior.  Arguably, some of these had been done before in other games: crafting is big in Atelier and skill trees were done well in so many games before Dragon Quest XI finally improved things for the series.

And yet despite everything the series has done to slowly evolve, its core gameplay loop remains mostly unchanged.  To be fair, the core gameplay loop of most RPGs is pretty much the same no matter what game you play.  Kill enemies, get money, buy new equipment and find out where you’re supposed to go next, it’s at the core of at least 80% of the most popular games in the genre.  What I mean is that battles in Dragon Quest III feel the same as battles in Dragon Quest IV, Dragon Quest VII, Dragon Quest VIII, Dragon Quest XI and so on.  A lot of one’s time in a game is spent in battle, and if you’ve played one Dragon Quest game, you’ll certainly feel like you’ve played them all.

Final Fantasy, on the other hand, will innovate often because they can and not because they should.  In recent years, combat has been high on the list of elements that need overhauling, and the series’ developers are not afraid of coming up with something so unlike anything that’s been seen in the series up to that point.  Final Fantasy III doesn’t play the same as Final Fantasy VI, certainly doesn’t play the same as Final Fantasy XII or Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy XV, and so on.

Declaring open hostility towards one of the hallmarks of the series might not be the best idea, either.  There’s a reason Final Fantasy IX, whose back cover proudly stated “The Crystal Comes Back” is one of the most critically acclaimed games in the series.  It probably represents the closest the series has come to Dragon Quest style innovation on the PlayStation rather than the previous two games and their reinvention of the wheel.  That’s not to say Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII don’t feel like Final Fantasy because they do, but the setting of the former and the character progression system of the latter are so far removed from the roots of the series that they very easily could’ve been called something other than Final Fantasy and no one would’ve disagreed.

Being innovative just for the sake of doing so isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and certainly there were good ideas present in all the most recent games in the Final Fantasy series, but in a game like Final Fantasy XV, I find myself having to teach myself how to control the game every time I pick it back up.  Meanwhile, I already know how to play a Dragon Quest game, so when Dragon Quest XII is developed and released, I’ll already know what to expect and won’t need a tutorial to learn the game’s systems.

There can be value in evolving a series and encouraging it to grow, but sometimes you just want to be able to look back at how a series got to be the way it is and perhaps play something new that still honours and evokes those classics.  I feel like that’s the overall function of the Dragon Quest series, to innovate in small steps with each new game, while overall providing a nostalgic experience for fans who grew up with the RPG genre.  Square-Enix would do well to look towards Dragon Quest to figure out what they should be doing with Final Fantasy.