…because you can read a super-great Dragon Quest 25th anniversary retrospective series over at 1UP now! It’s kind of like a GameSpite production (given that it’s all written by authors who publish here), except it’s technically more professional. Be sure to check out all five parts! Collect them all!
In planning this series, I wanted to cover all the bases without forcing readers to slog through the same bog-standard historical material they’ve read through a thousand times. The closest thing to a straight retrospective is Philip Armstrong’s Oat Turner comic, which is, you know, a comic. But the rest of the material is about Dragon Quest’s influence, or a treatise on its inner workings and overall design philosophy, or a totally anecdotal piece about the addictive nature of an overlooked spinoff. And, for my own piece, I tried to tie all these different approaches together by combining anecdote, retrospective, design breakdown, and developer interview into a single piece. I feel like it’s fairly successful, if not completely perfect.
We also did a livestream call-in podcast today, but that broke down midway through due to phone issues… so I guess we’ll be doing another live Dragon Quest episode sooner or later.
My apologies if you hate Dragon Quest’s guts. You monster.
Oh, speaking of call-in shows, what happened with the Chrono Trigger call-in show? I can’t find it anywhere, and I’d love to give it a listen.
http://www.1up.com/do/minisite?cId=3156908
I….I only just now realized that ‘Oat Turner’ is an anagram for Retronaut.
Is this the “secret project” you’ve been teasing, or is that still yet to come?
Nah, this was a sideline. Check the site Tuesday for the main event!
I forgive you. Grr. Argh.
Great reads, as usual.
I enjoy Philip’s simple “Adventure Time” style faces. Very cute.
More than anything, I think the Dragon Quest series was a victim of not just bad timing (late to the party here on the US) and circumstance (Enix USA closing up shop before 5/6 could be localized), but also Final Fantasy VII pretty much codifying the RPG experience for the Western masses in such a way that stood in direct contrast to the Dragon Quest series as a whole.
Hope I wasn’t captain obvious there. Just my two cents.
Never apologize to people who hate Dragon Quest.
I will not demonize people for having different tastes than me!
Oh come on, they could hardly be considered “people.”
Speaking of old-school RPGs, FF V just got ESRB-ed so I guess the FF V Retronauts is hopefully coming soon.
That’s cool, I’m not already feeling like I’m getting old or anything ;)
I’m i just completely blind or are none of these articles given writer headlines? I’m really curisous as to who the writer for each article was, as it is right now it just looks like written by 1up.com
Yep, I’m blind, just noticed the main hub page, It doesn’t help that the what’s hot bar links to separate articles…
You mentioned Joker, but not the original DQ: Monsters for GBC? :(