Tag Archives: JRPG

Delving Into..., Dragon Quest, Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Hand of the Heavenly Bride – #4

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I think I’m nearing the end of Hand of the Heavenly Bride. It’s just a feeling I have.

As we’ve previously discussed, Dragon Quest is not generally a series for making a huge deal out of significant narrative moments, preferring to allow you to draw your own meaning from them rather than attempting to force you to feel a particular way through lengthy cutscenes.

This doesn’t make those significant moments any less meaningful or effective, however — it’s just a markedly different treatment of these events than you’d find in many other games.

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Delving Into..., Dragon Quest, Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Hand of the Heavenly Bride – #3

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Exciting things have been happening in the world of Dragon Quest V, and I am thoroughly enraptured with this game.

I can’t remember the last RPG that managed to make one’s adventure feel so simultaneously personal and meaningful to the broader context in which the narrative unfolds. But Hand of the Heavenly Bride does a wonderful job at this — and now I’m into the game’s third (and, I believe, final) act, things are escalating considerably while still remaining tightly focused on the protagonist and his family.

Let’s take a closer look, then! Doubtless you’ve already figured out that spoilers likely abound in this series, but I’ll warn you once more just in case.

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Delving Into..., Dragon Quest, Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Hand of the Heavenly Bride – #1

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For one reason or another, fatherhood has always been a popular subject to explore through video games.

Interestingly, when fatherhood is presented in a positive light (as opposed to stories of, for example, abusive or absent fathers) it tends to be with the player in the role of said father, rather than the child. But there are plenty of interesting stories to be told about fatherhood from the child’s perspective, too.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride’s early hours explore this idea in some detail, making for an incredibly memorable prologue chapter that concludes with plenty of incentive to set off on an adventure.

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Chapters of the Chosen, Delving Into..., Dragon Quest

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen – #3

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I’ve been making good progress through Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen so far. I think I might be nearing the end of the game. Or at least the end of the main story.

So far I’ve been playing for about twenty hours or so, and the game has provided a pleasant amount of variety during that time. It hasn’t really got what I’d call especially complex at any point, but sometimes that can be refreshing; it allows you the freedom to enjoy what mechanics there are, and more importantly, the other aspects of the game such as its world design and characterisation.

Today I wanted to talk a little about Chapters of the Chosen’s more “traditional” aspects, and how they make it quite a refreshing experience when played from a modern perspective.

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One-Shots

Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God – A Mysterious and Fragrant Dungeon

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Japan’s most commonly seen take on the popular roguelike RPG subgenre — typically referred to as “Mystery Dungeon” games after the Chunsoft series that cemented the formula — is a little different from how we tackle our dungeon-delving here in the West.

Mystery Dungeon-style games have been developed by a wide variety of companies over the years, and the formula is straightforward and versatile enough that it’s been applied to all manner of franchises ranging from Pokemon to Etrian Odyssey as well as a number of original creations.

Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God from Compile Heart and Idea Factory takes Compile’s venerable Madou Monogatari series — that which ultimately begat the much more well known Puyo Puyo puzzle empire — and reimagines it for the Mystery Dungeon age. The result is an accessible and enjoyable game that is a great introduction to this style of RPG.

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Chapters of the Chosen, Delving Into..., Dragon Quest

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen – #2

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Dragon Quest is a great example of what I like to think of as a “comfy game”. That is, the kind of game you can pick up and play, and immediately feel like you’re welcome in its world.

There are certain series that do this very well. Gust’s Atelier games — particularly from the PS3 era onwards — are especially well-known for it, and my journey through Chapters of the Chosen on Nintendo DS is making me feel like Dragon Quest as a whole is very likely to be the same way.

As controversial as it might be to say these days, I feel a big part of the pleasant atmosphere the later English versions succeed in creating is down to the efforts of the localisation team and how they made some significant changes to how the original scripts were presented. So let’s take a look at that aspect today.

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Chapters of the Chosen, Delving Into..., Dragon Quest

Delving Into Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen

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Welcome to the first installment of what will hopefully become a regular (though not necessarily scheduled) feature here on MoeGamer: Delving Into…

The aim of this column is to give me the opportunity to catch up on and write about games and series which perhaps aren’t entirely practical to fit in to the monthly Cover Game format — usually due to them being much too long or consisting of too many individual titles to squeeze into a single month… or, most likely, a combination of both.

I have a number of different series that fit into this category, including Dragon Quest, Yakuza, Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel, so as time goes on, I’ll be exploring each of these gradually — and offering some immediate, ongoing, personal thoughts about my experiences as I proceed through them rather than a single, “final thoughts” article. We begin today with the Nintendo DS version of Dragon Quest IV, aka Chapters of the Chosen.

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Essentials, Game Boy

Game Boy Essentials: Mario Tennis

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With the latest installment in the Mario Tennis series coming soon to Nintendo Switch at the time of writing, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit one of my favourite versions.

It’s not often that a handheld version of a game can honestly claim to be superior to its counterpart on TV-based consoles — and this was something that occurred even less frequently back in the days where the 8-bit Game Boy Color and the 64-bit Nintendo 64 coexisted happily alongside one another. But 2000’s Mario Tennis pulled it off with a spectacularly ambitious, interesting and ballsy handheld version that, for solo play at least, ran rings around its big brother.

It achieved this primarily by not even attempting to be a “port” of the rather multiplayer-centric N64 version — not that this would have been possible given the disparity in technological capabilities between the two platforms — but instead providing a unique, solo-focused experience. One that is still worth playing today — and which Mario Tennis Aces’ single-player Adventure Mode has undoubtedly taken some inspiration from.

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Announcements

Pete Plays Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God

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Hi folks, just a quickie to announce that from this point onwards, you can expect (hopefully) regular Let’s Play videos on Saturdays and Sundays.

This is in addition to MoeGamer’s midweek content, which I’m aiming to support with video versions of articles as you may have seen me experimenting with throughout the latter half of this week.

Head on over to my YouTube page to subscribe now, and hit the jump to check out the first two episodes of Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God, a game I’ve been meaning to check out for ages — and which has recently had an excellent PC port!

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One-Shots

I Finally Beat Persona 5

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Most of the time, gaming is a fairly solitary activity for me, but on occasion, there are games that my wife enjoys watching me play enough to drag her away from Final Fantasy XIV for an hour or two at a time.

Last year’s Persona 5 was one of those games, and thus rather than focusing on it as I do with the Cover Games for each month, “we’ve” been playing it rather casually over the course of the last year or so. The other night, we finally reached the end.

What better reason to reflect on a game that, according to some, represented a great renaissance for a Japanese games industry that had supposedly been “kind of bad” for years?

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