Clearing up Confusion with Dragon Quest

by Richard Dore 

I am concerned that many people do not understand something important about RPGs. Many people, including many at RPGamer have expressed that Final Fantasy is the most successful RPG series, and the most revered in Japan. This is flat out wrong. The most successful RPG series is Dragon Quest, by a very large margin. Dragon Quest series has outsold the final fantasy series on a worldwide scale, because of incredible sales in Japan. Besides a few games like Pocket Monsters, All the top selling games in Japan are the Dragon Quest games. Final Fantasy is and always has been number two.

Dragon Quest is a part of Japanese culture and has a large cult following. Even people who do not play video games know about Dragon Quest in Japan. The word RPG is almost synonymous with Dragon Quest there. Dragon Quest is so popular that when Dragon Quest 3 was release in Japan, many people skipped school to buy it and fights broke out over the carts. Because of this, law now requires them to release Dragon Quest games on weekends. Hoimi is word that was added to the Japanese language because of Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest invented this word for the healing spell and it is now a part of Japanese.

Many people probably wonder why Dragon Quest was so successful in Japan. The only other RPG on the market when Dragon Quest released was Ultima, which the Japanese found too confusing. This allowed Dragon Quest to corner the entire market from the start. Another reason is that the three people who started Dragon Quest were all famous for other things in Japan. Akira Toriyama, who does the artwork for Dragon Quest, was already a famous anime artist, including Dragon Ball. Koichi Sugiyama was famous for his famous music before working on Dragon Quest and Yuuji Horii had written several hugely successful dramas.

For many of the same reasons, Dragon Warrior, the American counterpart to Dragon Quest, was unsuccessful. Nearly two years were spent translating the original Dragon Quest, and so when it appeared in the US, more recent games like Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star had already been released. The translation also lost much of the humor originally found in Dragon Quest, such as the behavior of the Goof-off that was poorly translated and censored. Those who worked on Dragon Quest in Japan were virtual unknowns in the US, and did not help it to succeed. Finally, in more recent years, many players have rejected Dragon Quest because it provides solid but somewhat stagnant game play and graphics rather than innovative but uneven aspects of other Role Playing Games like the Final Fantasies.

Dragon Quest 7 will be a hugely successful game, at least in Japan. I fear it may not come to the US, because publishers will feel US gamers would prefer RPGs that are more fast paced and less nostalgic.