TheYungLink
Smash Lord
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2018
- Messages
- 1,454
My story is odd. Remember that Kotaku video that talked about how awesome Dragon Quest 11 was for over half an hour? Well, years ago, the man narrating the video, Tim Rogers, was known in underground circles on the internet as a guy with well-thought-out and interesting opinions that deviated from the norm. As such, you got takes from him like "Landstalker on the Sega Genesis is better than any Zelda game in the series", "Super Mario Galaxy is not that good", etc.Stuff changes mid-development, so I am not too surprised about the parameters being different. A Slime hat would most definitely come with Erdrick.
Reading some of the movesets conceived here, if Erdrick's Final Smash ended up being something out of Dragon Ball visual-wise (the Luminary's Gigaburst comes to mind), then that would definitely make a big first impression on people not familiar with Dragon Quest, as well as give some people more reasons to start calling him/her "Sword Goku".
Anyway, not sure if there is any overlap with Dragon Quest and the Dragonball fanbases here (and I am very sure someone has asked this question before), but were some of you first exposed to Dragon Quest just because of Akira Toriyama's involvement?
For me, it wasn't the case. I was first exposed to Dragon Quest when I bought and played DQVIII 3DS after an employee at GameStop gushed about it when I inquired about other 3DS RPG games, having recently beat "Fire Emblem: Awakening". TBH, I really don't care much about Dragonball, despite how popular it is.
Some of these opinions are pretty easy to disagree with (especially his Super Mario Galaxy opinion), and I certainly didn't agree with his view that Smash is a horrible video game series, but the way I saw it, it was more productive to read why someone thought something--even something you disagree with--than to just read reviews by people that are agreeable and validate your preexisting opinion already.
One day, I hit gold with Tim: he wrote a passionate review on why Dragon Quest is a fantastic series and how Dragon Quest 5 in particular is one of the greatest video games of all time. I had already tried some of the games he'd recommended or written positively about and ended up enjoying them, but more than that, I had always heard that Dragon Quest was a boring, lame RPG series, and that Final Fantasy is so good that no one needed to check out DQ anyways. Tim Rogers' DQ5 review was the first thing to truly challenge my preconception, and it piqued my interest. I took the plunge and bought the DS version.
I found it charming right away, but also I stopped playing an hour or so in. It wasn't grabbing me yet, and I started to think "maybe the fact that I inexplicably didn't want to play after 2 hours means the game is bad". Obviously it wasn't, but it took me about a year before I returned to my save file and give it an honest second try.
It finally had its hooks in me when Prince Harry was kidnapped. Turns out, I just needed to be patient, and that it's okay for games like Dragon Quest to have slow-burn beginnings. It just means the hard-hitting moments hit all the harder. And boy, did Dragon Quest 5 have a LOT of those. I fell in love with Dragon Quest 5, and checked out the series starting with the first one soon after.
So yeah, bizarrely it had nothing to do with the characters looking like DBZ characters. I never even watched Dragon Ball Z, I somehow magically avoided doing so and by the time I felt like giving it a shot, I learned about the horrifyingly high amount of episodes I would need to watch and decided to pass. Some people recommend Kai, but other people don't because some of the filler that's cut out in Kai is entertaining. So I've avoided the series for the most part.