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Once upon a time, Dragon Quest VIII had fucking good graphics.
The graphics are enough to send screams down your spine. The graphics are heavenly. Long live the graphics.
For the first time since Super Mario 64, I'm entering the first-person-view mode and staring every object up and down. I spend entire game-day-lengths atop hills, watching the ocean way out in the distance. I let battle screens sit untouched for several minutes every time I encounter an enemy I've yet to encounter. There is a kingdom in need of uncursing, a princess who needs to be turned back into a beautiful girl, and a king with a sense of duty to restore his people nagging me along in my quest; however, these foxes in musketeer outfits just look too cool to not stare at for a few minutes. They dance in place.
Everything in Dragon Quest VIII looks like a cartoon. This is a good thing, as well as an original thing. Forget Jet Set Radio, which looked like a cartoon because it was going for an original visual style. Forget Zelda: The Wind-Waker, which looked like a cartoon because it could. Dragon Quest VIII must look this way. It is essential to the future of videogames that it look the way it looks.
It goes like this: Westerners don't understand Dragon Quest. They don't understand it because the games have been, historically, renamed Dragon Warrior, which implies that the game is about a brawny tough guy who eats dragons for breakfast rather than the journey undertaken by a man seeking a dragon for reasons of loyalty to his king. The game was renamed, originally, because of an old copyright issue with TSR, makers of the "Dungeons and Dragons" games and books. There was a module called "Dragon Quest." Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest series producer, knows this, because that's where he got the name for his series. However, much like manga artist Monkey Punch's hero Arsene Lupin III, who is much more well-known in Japan than the character of French suspense novels who inspired him, Horii's Dragon Quest is infinitely more than some mere fantasy book full of airbrushed art depicting women in metal brassieres.
We can blame the first man who painted a metal brassiere for creating these notions Westerners expect when a man goes on a Quest involving a Dragon. The original game, published by fledgling Enix for the Nintendo Famicom in 1986, sold extraordinarily well because, mostly, young comic artist Akira Toriyama, whose "Dragon Ball" was all the rage, had drawn the box art. He'd also designed the many dozen monsters the hero has to fight -- always one-on-one style -- in his quest to kill the dragon -- though that matters little. The fact stands that the average player could not see Akira Toriyama's influence past the title screen, with its obviously Toriyama-designed lettering. The monsters, excepting the larger Golem and Dragon, looked mostly like globs of pixels. So when the game came to America, it faced a name change. And the box art, which once depicted a rather "Dragon Ball"-like young man in a suit of armor cowering before a fire-breathing dragon, soon became airbrushed, stylized fantasy art of a dragon breathing fire onto the shield of a shiny-armored warrior whose back is turned to the viewer. The Japanese package was cool -- purple, blue, with the green dragon being the most threatening object -- and the American one was hot -- orange and red, with a bright yellow spine. The very font in which "Dragon Warrior" was written depicts this image of dark, gothic fantasy.
This is all well and good; the game itself didn't really jump out and say much about the state of videogames, and what it meant to do to stir things up. It just kind of walked into the room and sat there looking pretty. Once its prettier friends started showing up, the Japanese paid their respect -- Dragon Quest III is that game that prompted the law that no Dragon Quest games be released on weekdays because of school-skipping; it was not a Final Fantasy game, like you might have heard -- and they continue paying their respect until today.
On the other sides of the ocean, things went differently. Captains of little-league baseball teams were duped into buying Dragon Warrior, and disappointed that the in-game action did not depict large men in armor shiny with the wetness of testosterone and fire-breathing dragons that stomped through bitchingly blood-red corridors. It was a failed experiment to get Westerners into Japanese role-playing games, and it was too little, too late. Final Fantasy was able to walk right in and hook a certain type of obsessive gamer, and this was mostly because it allowed control of four party members. Dragon Warrior II and III arrived on US shores and fell flat. IV was played by very few, and at a time when the first Western fans of "Japanese RPGs" were saving up to buy a Super Nintendo and Final Fantasy II, which was easily more "grown-up" than a Dragon Warrior game because it had flying wooden boats with propellors, and even scenes involving robots of a giant variety.
Dragon Warrior V does not exist; neither does Dragon Warrior VI, which almost did, because of how much it looked like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger was a collaboration between Final Fantasy producer Hironobu Sakaguchi and Dragon Quest frontman Yuji Horii; it was a gorgeous experiment, a wonderful fusion of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's play styles, and sold well overseas despite its box art, which depicted Akira Toriyama's "kiddy" cartoon style in all its glory. Oddly, while Chrono Trigger, released in 1995, didn't really advance the field or do anything "original," it's credited with many trends that had been shared by Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for many years. Even more oddly still, the game did nothing to legitimize the act of loving videogames; if nothing else, it sent its fans scattering and scrambling for cover -- in an age where John Madden was a household name because of a videogame based on a sport, Chrono Trigger arrived alongside other gems like Final Fantasy VI; while pretty and artistic, it became, instantly, crowned little more than the rather undeserving king of a genre of games to be played only by the most loserly of losers. From here, the role-playing genre cowered in the shadows. In Japan, our heroes continued to prosper, and grow.
Soon, Final Fantasy VII was announced for PlayStation. It was announced thusly because Enix had already stated they would release Dragon Quest VII on the system. Final Fantasy got a leg-up on Dragon Quest, here -- Final Fantasy VII, released well before Dragon Quest VII, had the distinct privelege of tempting the public for months upon months in advance of its release. It did this through the power of graphics. One could call it sex appeal -- it did, after all, star a girl with impossibly large breasts, and a guy with cool blond hair and a sword that's long enough to look like he's complementing something rather than compensating for it. It was an adult-like story of revenge, mixed with a lot of bad language and gritty science-fiction elements. It was personal, it was man-to-man, and it was perhaps the most important Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game ever.
Dragon Quest VII was by no means a bad game. It simply arrived three years too late to the party. Its graphics were outdated and simplistic, and sometimes called "ugly" (though hey, I find them endearing (. . . okay, so I only find them endearing with the right texture-smoothing settings)). The game's system was relatively unchanged from Dragon Quest VI -- you raise levels, you buy items, you equip weapons, you change job classes, you earn new abilities. It was only in the story where it advanced its series. The story goes like this: in the world, there is only one island. One island in the middle of an ocean. It's called Estard Island. Billy, a fisherman's son, hangs out with Kiefer, the neighboring castle's prince, who wonders if there isn't anything across the sea. For the meantime, there isn't anything across the sea. You can look at your world map and know this. Nothing -- just an island and miles of ocean. Together with their friend Maribel, a rich man's daughter, Billy and Kiefer explore the ruins close to their home. The ruins of course hold a terrible secret. For the first five hours or so of the game, players fight not a single battle. We wander from town to town, talking to people, solving little mysteries, and eventually coming into the possession of fragments of a stone map. Soon, we find out how to enter the sealed ruins. Deep inside, after solving many puzzles without using a single weapon, we find a pedestal. We place the stone map fragment correctly, and are whisked to an island we've never seen. It is the past. The village on this island is in turmoil. Soon after arriving, we're attacked by Slimes. We beat them. Maribel is frightened. We help the townspeople out, and then return to our own time, where, much to the buzz of all the castle-townspeople, an island has appeared off the northern coast of Estard. We board a little boat and go to investigate. Right about now, we're going to check our world map, and notice how that one island we just worked six hours to save is actually kind of tiny. On that island, what do we find? Another stone map fragment. The player who has not cut his corneas on the jagged polygons and quit by now tingles with excitement. This player will most likely see the game through to its conclusion.
However, the game's problem is that it doesn't involve us in the game enough. It pulls. What it needs to do is push. The characters are rather dull; Billy wears the same green hood and tunic he wore on his first fishing voyage even when he's slaying demon lords at the end of the world. The game opens with a computer-rendered image of a lizard crawling around rocks in a ruin. The box art depicts the lizard perched on Billy's head. The lizard never figures anywhere else into the game. The story's hero is not mystical, or interesting.
What the game has, however, is a lot of heart. Yuji Horii told me about that heart. The player plays because he likes unlocking the new islands, and seeing the world map gradually become complete. Because we unlock the islands one by one, we start to feel like the world is ours. When we return to our time after saving a kingdom, we look at the map, and we know exactly what has changed. We rememeber the names of the towns because of the way the game has shown them to us. It's a lot like the way my teacher taught us geography in second grade -- you look at the blank map of Africa, and you point at the countries, naming them one at a time. If you mess up, look up the name of the country on your numbered list. Then start back at the beginning. Eventually, you get it all.
What makes the game work, on the whole, is that each island teems with life. The life is not something you can advertise on the back of the box alongside a "DAY-NIGHT CYCLE OH MY GOD!!" or the fact that you can "SELECT ONE OF A HUNDRED JOB CLASSES." It's much simpler than that. At a bar in the town of Hamelia, a woman in a red dress ("woman in a red dress" is just one of the man kinds of townspeople) is drinking at the end of the bar, alone. You talk to her. She says, "What? You have a problem with a woman drinking alone?" You talk to a guy at the other end of the bar. He says, "Look at that woman over there in the red dress, drinking alone. Real mysterious. I wonder what's up with her?" The answer is that there's nothing up with her. She's just a woman in a red dress drinking in a bar in a basement of a town on a boring little island. Yet she makes the whole island, right down to the name of the town, memorable to me, even now.
Shigesato Itoi, acclaimed Japanese writer and producer of the Mother series of videogames, says that games are a lot like prostitutes. I like this quote so much I use it everywhere I can. Yuji Horii agrees with this, though he wouldn't be bold enough to say it in an interview. He's a little more refined than that. In his late fifties, he looks like he should be hanging out at a pachinko parlor. He wears tinted little glasses and a turtleneck sweater under a sportcoat. He's a hell of a guy to talk to. Not five minutes into a conversation with him, you'll understand why he chooses to leave four treasure chests behind a locked door in the basement of Dragon Quest VII's first castle, unlockable until the game's ending, a hundred and twenty hours later. The most compelling element of Yuji Horii's approach to game design, as far as I'm concerned, has to do with gambling.
In every casino in every Dragon Quest game, the first time you ever play the slot machine, you win. There are big prizes (like the legendary Metal King Sword) if you're able to win enough times to earn dozens of thousands of coins. You won't be able to earn enough on your first play to buy any legendary items; however, that first win is crucial. Says Yuji Horii, a gambling man himself, of this phenomenon: "It's not a real casino. It's a casino in a videogame. Real casinos could really draw in patrons if they did this. However, they'd also go bankrupt with people coming in, playing once, and leaving. Since it's just a videogame, it's all right." It's just a videogame -- it's all right. Yuji Horii knows that he does not lose when you win. This is crucial.
However, crucial as its code of honor toward the player, the Dragon Quest series has never loved Western players enough for them to love it back. Dragon Quest VII arrived rather stillborn, though twitching, on US shores, a year after the launch of the PlayStation2. It was ugly, and nobody wants to love somebody who's ugly. Some people end up loving them, yes; however, let's stay realistic here.
The most optimism I can direct at Dragon Warrior VII's behavior in America is its box art. While not amazing in its own right, it was unchanged from the Japanese edition. Dragon Warrior III on Gameboy Color, just a year earlier, had sported amazing new Toriyama-drawn art that trumped its Japanese counterpart. Dragon Warrior I+II, a year before that, had looked utterly hideous. Its art looks like Pokemon fan art by a nine-year-old with a PowerMac.
Somewhere between Dragon Warrior I+II and Dragon Warrior III on the Gameboy Color, Japanese animation became acceptable. This was mostly thanks to Pokemon, a cartoon based on a manga based on a game that played much like Dragon Quest V in Dragon Quest I's world dynamic. Thanks to the "Pokemon" anime's popularity, Akira Toriyama's "Dragon Ball Z" was given another shot at life, and millions of American teenagers, God bless them, fell into the trap of its plot-riddles.
"Dragon Ball Z" has been criticized on two accounts, by player-haters. Let us address them here, because it will be important to the rest of this review.
"The fights are too long. A whole episode can pass with nothing happening -- just two guys charging a super-move." Okay, then -- well, what about the long, long stretches of episodes where no one fights anyone? The battles are supposed to be epic and rare. Also, you should admire the fact that Akira Toriyama had such a firm, deadly grasp on each and every rule that governed the fights. And while the two guys are "charging super moves," other characters might be racing around the world looking for cures for diseases, or else love. Or they might be watching the battle on television. Later animes would take the "television" example and exploit the ever-loving hell out of it. Matches in "Yu-Gi-Oh!" are televised in the world of the story because the card game is fun. People gather to watch pokemon duels in "Pokemon" because pokemon are "cute." When a lesson is learned in "Pokemon," it's something like, "Wow, all this violence sure taught me a lot! Like -- if I really want to beat rock-based pokemon, I need to more firmly grasp my PikachuuuuuuU!" In "Dragon Ball," battles are aired on television for other characters to watch because the future of the world depends on San Gokuu defeating those damned aliens at martial arts duels.
"The characters all look the same." What are you, a racist? Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that all human beings look the same, and that "anyone can draw like Akira Toriyama if they try hard enough." Let me tell you about that, about "trying hard enough" -- people only try hard enough because Akira Toriyama's style is something they want to imitate. Ever thought of it that way?
I remember my childish readings of Dragon Ball. The most exciting thing, for me, had always been the sweeping landscapes. Toriyama's excellent handling of hard-edged lines, layered repeatedly and bubbling endlessly toward the horizon always struck me as more real than my real world. I'd never seen horizons like that, with as many mountains with bare-rock sides. I was only confident that they existed somewhere.
Now, they do exist somewhere. They exist in Dragon Quest VIII. This, to me, is the selling point of the game. This will push any and all children with fifty dollars, a PlayStation2, and three hours of "Dragon Ball Z"-watching into the world of the game, and once they learn that that horse is a princess, they're already tumbling down the well. It goes deep, it takes us places, and it loves us right up to and beyond the moment we enter our first casino and win our first slot machine pull.
It is a great game because of and in spite of its amazing graphics. I can elaborate, if you'd care to hear it.
[next: . . . there was a hero . . .]
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