Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest
Jan 29, 2019 16:02:14 GMT -5
Post by edmonddantes on Jan 29, 2019 16:02:14 GMT -5
Actually, a friend of mine (DQ-fan ;P) jumped right onto that statement when I did show him the article, because DQ3 was releases only 1-2 month' after FF1 (GameFAQs says the same - FF1 came out in Dec. 87 while DQ3 in Feb 88). 1 1/2 month seems to be a bit too short to influence something as big as a class system.
- elves/dwarves presence
- five character stats (STR, AGI, VIT, INT, LUC) plus separate attack/defense calculations
- the strongest sword in game is Japanese
- battle damage depends on character order (i.e. the first one will be attacked most often)
- flying transport (yeah, I know that flying transport existed since Ultima 1, but it wasn't availible in DQ1-2).
To be honest most of those "similarities" all sound like they could easily be either A) coincidences or B) being inspired by similar source material. FF1 is basically a Dungeons & Dragons game after all (they even had to redesign and rename the Beholder for the US version to avoid being sued since that was TSR's original creation and not a public-domain monster), and almost every concept listed above came from D&D initially, and then was done in Wizardry and Ultima (which clearly both teams were familiar with) before Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy were even a thing.
Dragon Warrior 1 was deliberately simplified both to introduce it to non-RPG players (kinda like FF Mystic Quest) and also (I suspect) because the development team had never made an RPG before, so it doesn't surprise me they would experiment with more features in sequels, getting around to finally adding stuff D&D always had by part three. Final Fantasy's developers worked with the knowledge that people already knew what RPGs were so could skip a step (though Square had technically made an RPG before FF, called Sword of Kalin/Karin no Tsurugi).
As for the last three...
Strongest sword being JApanese... well the game was made in Japan.
Battle damage on character order... I could imagine this being an attempt to adapt/simplify the party-order mechanic seen in Wizardry (where characters in the back can't hit or be hit by melee weapons at all).
Flying transport... well, they stole that from me, when I flew there in my TARDIS and buzzed a bunch of unsuspecting locals
....
I was gonna reply to the original post but then I realized this topic started in 2007, and I see no reason to start a nerd-fight over something so old. My love of 8-Bit RPGs is... well known? Well, at least, its something I've discussed before. Right now I'm having trouble finding the topic (can't remember its title) or I would link to it/copy-paste its contents.
Recently played a fan-translation of DQ5. One thing I don't care for is how the stat screens are kinda... well, they're bigger than the original JP, which on my television (yes, television) means they go off-screen almost... fortunately none of the actual text does, but it looks unprofessional. There are also some sprites that move too fast which I thought might be a translation-induced bug, but then I tried out an original Japanese cart (yes, cart--not a ROM) and the same thing happened there.