|
The Dragon Quest series, Japan's little darling, has never enjoyed the same popularity in the United States. Much of this can be attributed to stylistic choices in its game design, but some of it is due to misinformation about the series, or expecting something from it which it is not, and therefore being disappointed.
Dragon Quest is in the prestigious position of being the first console RPG as we've come to know them. As such, it didn't come with some of the built-in niceties we've come to expect out of our games. Some of these, admittedly, should have been in there, sure, but the series' interface has gotten an undeservedly poor reputation. It is true that in the Famicom/NES installments, it was necessary to use the menu to talk to NPCs, open treasure chests and search, open doors, and go up the stairs. The bad points of this are obvious, but there are overlooked advantages, too. As soon as the series moved off the Famicom—or, perhaps more accurately, when it moved to a different game engine—the series added an, "action," button, automatically performing such actions, but left the options in the menu, leading to continued complaints from those who couldn't find the action button in its top-right corner (what did these people do when Final Fantasy switched default confirm/cancel buttons?) or from people looking for an excuse to call something bad instead of just attributing it to personal taste.
I'm sure that at one point in almost everyone's gaming career they've triggered an extra conversation with a NPC from an attempted search of the area, or from errant button-pushing while trying to end a long conversation. We've needed to go down and then up a flight of stairs to get to the other side of a narrow hall. Giving the option to do this in a menu adds a layer of precision which can prevent some frustration. Having a door command when keys are generic but aren't reusable is a perfectly sensible option; however, Dragon Quest has used specific reusable keys for some time. To keep these options in the menu does offer utility.
Finally, the menus draw complaints from those who prefer an entirely separate menu screen, rather than menus on the map screen which cascade. However, as established, it is partially a matter of usefulness. In addition, in the PlayStation generation, this was one of the reasons why load time was able to be kept so short compared to other major games; lightweight menus drawn over the map lessened the menu loading time and removed the need for additional time to reload the map afterwards.
While much of preferring any game or series is indeed solely personal taste, there is still room for objective quality and analysis. The Dragon Quest interface provides several good and relatively unique ways to interact with the game, and these should be acknowledged, even if not universally liked.
|
RSS feed
iTunes
