PlayStation Monger

I’m playing DragonQuest VIII, and it’s a thrill.

by Nadia on February 26th, 2008

If there’s one variable I can blame for turning me into a hack writer, it would be the Dragon Warrior / DragonQuest series. Granted, if you come from a journalist family like mine, the writing gene is always inside you, albeit sometimes inactive…like herpes. But just as that STD flares up and says “Hi” every so often, writers experience triggers that make them say, “Oh man, my muse done gone humped my leg.”

I was about 12 when I played Dragon Warrior III, and it inspired me to take on a stupidly huge writing project. To my credit, it wasn’t fanfiction (I wrote one of those for a school project the year before): It was about two prepubescent kids who are pulled into a medieval world through a book thanks to magic, or dungeons and dragons or who the hell knows. There, they discovered they’re destined to beat the Dragon King because they’re descended from some wanker named the Black Duke, etc etc. I had a wizard character named Garth. I shit thee not.

There were some cool moments: One of the kids (Jay) acquired a pet baby dragon, which subsequently poisoned him and he had to find his way out of the spirit world with the help of (boooong) The Black Duke. I think the school year ended by that point. I did have an outline for the rest of the novel, though, which is more than I can say for some of the crap I write today.

So what the monkey does all this have to do with Dragon Warrior? Even if I didn’t blatantly steal plot ideas (except for the word ‘descendent’, which I learned from being a descendent of the noble warrior Erdrick), I stole monsters without knowing exactly what they were. So the guardian of my childish underworld was a multiheaded dragon named Orochi; I had no idea it was a creature from Japanese myth. Dragon Warrior III also featured the Hydra, which I had no idea was from Greek myth.

Oh video games. Where will you take us next?

Expect a lot of DragonQuest VIII talk over the next few weeks, because I’ve forgotten precisely how unforgiving this series tends to be:

GREEN FELLOW: “Great Hero, you must steel yourself and charge into battle! Leave no enemy unslain!”

ME: “WAR CRYYYYYYYYY!” *dies*

No seriously, I died on my second battle with a bunch of bunnicorns. Yeah, I got totalled by rabbits. And that’s when I remembered.

DragonQuest is not a sissy-boy RPG series that coddles you. You don’t start with massive swords, gun blades or armour beyond the clothes on your back. You don’t start your adventure with some token female who can heal your boo-boos from the outset. You have to earn your healing spells, and they don’t spread out with the “R” button, bucko. And when you die, a stay at the Inn won’t call back your wayward spirit. No sir, you’re going to Church and ponying up some cash because God don’t let His souls go for cheap.

Then there’s the small issue of item distribution. Oh, you’re down to zero HP, backed up against a wall by a fire-drooling dragon and you forgot to take some herbs out of your bag before the battle? Sucks to be you.

Good times, though. Good times.

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POSTED IN: Playstation 2, Self-Indulgence, Square-Enix