Dragon Quest Future-Spective: Dragon Quest XII

 

If there’s one series that has stayed true to its roots throughout the years, it’s Dragon Quest.  For as innovative as each title has been, you can be assured of several things: the artwork of Akira Toriyama, the music of Koichi Sugiyama, the Overture beginning each game, a turn-based battle system, a generally similar bestiary including various slimes, a sharp experience curve coupled with relatively low HP and MP when compared to other games and super low stats to start with.

The general art style of the series has also remained consistent throughout, making use of the entire palette to help players feel welcome during the start of the game, gradually shifting to darker and more ominous colours whenever players needed to treat things a bit more seriously.

In stark opposition to Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy typically opts for more realistic depictions of its games’ settings.  The ones that fans remember as being darker and grimmer games are ones that start out with starker colour palettes, like Final Fantasy VII, and games that start out with brighter palettes are remembered as being a bit more cheerful and carefree, like Final Fantasy IX.  If you know anything at all about these games, then you know that Final Fantasy VII can be very light-hearted throughout the story, and you also know that there are many moments in Final Fantasy IX that are very dark for the series, yet the former is often considered a mature Final Fantasy for mature teens and the latter is considered a kid-friendly game for babies.

Yeah, because a game full of deliberate genocide, one where the bad guys summon an extra-dimentional mouth that sucks in and eats half of Lindblum before disappearing back to the void, is for children.

The logo for Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate has recently been revealed and despite the friendly and upbeat atmosphere that the series is typically known for, the reveal trailer is full of dark colours and fire and is absent of not only the Overture but any actual details about the game.  It’s also claimed to be a more mature game in the franchise, with changes that are apparently going to include a somewhat different battle system than the one the series is typically known for.

At this point, that one paragraph is everything that is known about the game thus far.  Will we find out more during E3?  Possibly, but Square-Enix also has their upcoming Final Fantasy games to hype as well as games like the Legend of Mana HD re-release.  I’m expecting to find out a lot more about Final Fantasy XVI than I am about Dragon Quest XII this weekend.

So what does a darker, more mature Dragon Quest even mean?  Well, for one thing, I’m imagining the colour palette of the starting areas will lean a bit heavier on darker, deeper colours, more like fern and evergreens than lime and neon greens.  Brown is probably going to be more pronounced, too.  If they’re committing to a more mature feel for the game, I’m fully expecting them to represent this in the colour choices they make when designing it.  I don’t know when we as a society decided that brighter colours were kid friendly and darker colours were for adults only, but I guess it’s because reality isn’t as colourful as one’s imagination and for some reason, imagination is also considered to be for babies only?

We’ve been assured that the battle system is still going to be turn based but is also going to change.  For a good idea of what alternate turn-based battle systems look like, look no further than games like Final Fantasy X, Grandia or Mana Khemia.  All three are games where the battles progress in a turn-based fashion but through actions taken during battle, opponents can have their turns delayed or even cancelled.  Then there are the games which are turn-based, but character placement can have an effect on battle, like Lunar: The Silver Star, Adventures To Go!, The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermilion (and it’s sequels) and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure.  Certain games also make enemy placement have an effect on battle, like Chrono Trigger, Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled and Final Fantasy XIII.  Some games require characters to get within range of enemies before they can attack, like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter and Emerald Dragon.  Dragon Quest XII could draw inspiration from any of these games or none of them, but the one thing we can count on, as long as the developers don’t change their mind like they did with Dragon Quest IX, is that the battle system is going to fundamentally change in some manner.

The notion that the game is going to be “more mature” is one that has inspired much speculation in my mind since the reveal trailer, and other than the colour palette, there are other ways in which I imagine the game might grow up a little.

Dragon Quest is a very notable franchise in that the core group of people responsible for it has largely not changed since the first game in the series.  Akira Toriyama has had pretty steady work thanks to Dragon Quest as well as his own projects.  He turned 66 this year.  Yuji Horii has been the scenario writer and designer of every main series Dragon Quest game thus far and has directed many of the spin-off titles.  He turned 67 this year.  Koichi Sugiyama has had pretty steady work writing the music for the series, including all of the main series games and most of the major spin-off titles, and he turned 90 this year.  The staff is aging, especially Sugiyama, who was already in his mid-50s when he began composing the music for the series.  As much as it would be great for the reason Sugiyama retires from the series to be Enix putting him into forced retirement as acknowledgement of his unfortunate political beliefs, it’s much more likely that they’ll use his old age as an excuse.  Either that or he’s literally going to keep working on the series’ music until he dies.  Hopefully that’s not the case, since some fans have begun to notice Sugiyama’s running out of steam.

The style of Sugiyama can be easily compared to that of classical composers like Beethoven.  One only needs to compare “To a Vast World” from Dragon Quest VIII to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony to see what I’m talking about.  However, a more mature Dragon Quest XII might suggest a more modern style of soundtrack, and that means that Sugiyama might not be back to compose for this twelfth main game in the series.  Is this where younger talent might begin to step in?  Possibly, but then as much as Sugiyama is beginning to be known for his regressive beliefs, many still ignore that and unconditionally call him a musical genius, and Enix knows this.

Still, it might be about time for someone much younger to be given a chance to make a name for themselves.  Nobuo Uematsu composed the first Final Fantasy soundtrack before he was 30, and Yasunori Mitsuda was even younger than that when he worked on Chrono Trigger.  In fact, many of the most popular video game composers currently working in the field got their start in their twenties and composed at least one iconic soundtrack before the age of 30.  Most of them are now between 50 and 60 years old.  Masayoshi Soken, main composer of Final Fantasy XIV, is relatively young at 46, but even he is not immune to the passage of time, because during 2020 when the rest of us were dodging COVID-19, he was being treated for cancer.  At this point, it’s only a matter of time before one of our favourite iconic composers passes away, and a torch is going to have to be passed along sometime.  It might as well be now and in what better game than Dragon Quest XII?

This is, of course, not to say that any of these composers should immediately retire and make room for someone younger.  Many of them are still doing good work.  I’m just saying that there’s room for new talent to begin making a name for themselves.

At this point, everything is speculation.  It could just be that a more mature Dragon Quest means murder is handled more casually and matter-of-fact (somehow, Dragon Quest V and Dragon Quest VIII weren’t mature enough, I guess?) and swear words are tolerated, but it could also mean a more complex battle system and a different style than what the series is currently known for.  The logo is certainly much more “mature” looking than we’re used to, and hopefully we find out soon whether it’s a hint of things to come.