Blog Posts Alight and the Timeliness Before

Dragon Quest VII finally is getting a Western release on the 3DS! This is great news and means if you have $40 you should jump on that as fast as you can. After smashing my head on Dragon Warrior VII a couple of times on the Playstation release and falling off every time because I have no attention span (see blog update frequency) I have decided to do something related to it to acknowledge DQVII’s release. We will mash Square over and over and call it fighting.

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below is one long winded and dumb title. I like it. Actually a bunch of the DQ releases have weird subtitles like “Hand of the Heavenly Bride”, “Sentinel of the Starry Skies”, and VII is “Fragments of the Forgotten Past.” Seeing as I have done some write ups on my experiences with Dragon Warrior, Dragon Warrior II, and Rocket Slime it makes sense to talk about the last DQ title I have played. It just happens to be a genre cross over with Koei-Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors.

First off, I love Akira Toriyama’s monster designs. The character designs are colorful, full of personality, and instantly recognizable as Toriyama’s; it just isn’t my favorite style for human characters. Seeing the monsters roaming around in HD in their cartoony glory is truly one of the best aspects of the game. Kudos to them for not trying to update them into either a more realistic, gritty, or extreme style. I like that the monsters will all pummel you while smiling. Maybe they enjoy your pain. The flipside is that you collect medals throughout your battles that represent different enemies that you can summon to your aid. Some of them hang around and fight in the immediate area you summoned them in or may use a skill and disappear. The visuals are on par with other anime styled games on the PS4, I haven’t experienced any crazy glitches or crashes. As a software application it runs.

There is a story here as well as original characters that take the center stage. Just like any other mash up game, different dimensions are colliding and your favorite DQ player characters are fighting together! The power of friendship….blah….blah….

The localization of the DQ games have been a love it or hate it affair. We have accents. All of the accents. They give the characters more defining characteristics. Some of them are expected like the British accents, the Irish accents, and some are less expected in the form of Alena and Kiryl sounding Russian and Valesco does his impression of Antonio Banderas (okay, with that pencil mustache there could be no other accent).

Walk up to monster, press Square a bunch of times, move on to next monster. If you haven’t played Dynasty Warriors it is a straight up button masher. Maybe you’ll press Triangle to change up your combos at some point, use your super when your gauge is full, and each character has unique skills they can use by holding R1 and pressing a face button. The way your characters are developed is probably the main reason the title was changed from “warriors” to “heroes”. There is a traditional JRPG shop set up for purchasing and equipping items in your hub as well as an alchemy pot to create different items and accessories. When you kill enemies you gain money and experience points and level in the traditional RPG sense. What I find really strange is that there isn’t a huge KO counter on the screen keeping track of the havoc you have caused or multiplayer, even Hyrule Warriors had them.

When you first lay your eyes on Dragon Quest Heroes you know whether you will like it or not. It really depends on how long it has been since you played a horde based beat-em up, if it has been a while pick it up. It would really help if you have preexisting Dragon Quest knowledge as a lot of its really hinges on characters and monsters you may be nostalgic for.

There is a sequel already? Oh boy.