Walk Like a Zenithian

Dragon Quest Walk came out for mobile devices in Japan this week, and I am having the slime of my life.  If you love Dragon Quest games, then this is just awesome.  If you’re bored of Pokemon Go but have the unshakable compulsion to keep playing it for three years straight so that walking around earns you intangible wealth and worthless prestige, then… well, let’s just say this game came at a wonderful time.  I want to keep the commentary to a minimum today because I’d rather make this a useful document: 10 tips for playing Dragon Quest Walk.

#1 Build your house in an accessible place

At a certain level, you will be able to build your very own home.  You can place it just about anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world.  You’ll want it to be close enough that you can physically reach it from time to time because being there is the only way you can arrange the interior and use it to rest your party for free. 

#2 Build your house in a busy place

Your house will appear on the maps of other players if they’re nearby, so try to put it somewhere with a lot of foot traffic or places like schools and fast food shops where other players might be lurking.  Visiting and being visited are both ways to add players to your friends list, so get out there and make some friends!  You can change the location of your house once every 24 hours, so pack it up if you feel the need to move to a new neighborhood.

#3 Guaranteed drop enemies have other rewards

An enemy that shows a 100% mark will definitely drop an item such as a soul or seemingly meaningless Gold.  By all means, collect all the GP and souls that you can, but don’t be surprised if you get a C or D rank from these guys.  The real value of these monsters is that they also appear on the maps of other players, so hanging around the places is one way to meet other players IRL if that’s your thing. 

#4 Don’t throw away garbage souls (yet)

Equipping souls is turning out to be a major factor when it comes to powering up your party members, and you’ll probably only have eyes for A and elusive S ranked ones (yes, S ranks do drop from normal enemies!).  You can only hold 200 souls at a time though, so at some point you’ll need to make space and get rid of all the worthless crap.  Instead of throwing them away, upgrade them!  Two D ranked souls can combine to make a C, three Cs make a B, and so on. 

#5 Visit the landmarks in your area to collect souvenirs

Special landmarks all around Japan will offer quests that reward special regional souvenirs that you can collect and probably send to your friends.  I visited Osaka’s Tsutenkaku tower today and all I had to do was choose another location to visit in order to get a Takoyaki Slime.  They may even offer you an extra souvenir to share for the low price of 100 pink gems.  There seems to be a slight bug at the moment though, because in spite of having over 7000 gems at the time, the game told me I had 0, and offered to redirect me to the gem store where one can spend actual money on them.  Hopefully this will be remedied soon because there are 100 different souvenirs to get, and I can’t be the only one who refuses to pay real money on a free to play game.  It’s the only way to win!

One of at least four major Osaka souvenir dispensers

#6 Use WALK mode!

Walk Mode is a kind of autoplay feature that will have your characters fight every monster that appears and smash every item pot that comes into your range.  It is very useful when you are on the move because each pot heals 40% of your HP and MP which will keep your team healthy enough to fight the monsters.  It also reduces the risk of being hit by cars and running into shit when you’re out and about.  The auto-fight AI is generally pretty smart and will handily slay just about anything the game throws at you, at least between quests (more on this later).  Walk mode is also nice when you’re idle at home, work, or in transit, although you may have to click on the enemies manually if you are not actually walking around.  You’ll want to fight A LOT because leveling up is the only way you will survive the Boss encounters later on.

#7 You can beckon enemies that are out of reach

When in Walk mode, you may see some monsters outside the periphery of your party’s radar.  Touching them on the map will get their attention and make them start walking toward you so you can fight them for the sweet ambrosia of XP of which there will never ever be enough.

#8 Starting a new quest can make the enemies tougher

You’ll probably be on a mad tear to unlock new quests as soon as you get them.  Unlocking them is fine – you’ll want to spend those blue crystals before you max out, but once you unlock a new quest, you’ll be asked if you want to begin the new quest.  Around the middle of Chapter 2 you may have to consider this more carefully because once you begin one, the map enemies will be at the recommended toughness level which can be considerably higher than when you’re not in an active quest.  If there are wyverns appearing, do NOT use blindly use Walk mode because they will fuck you up with fire breath and the battle AI is not smart enough to get rid of them first.  Tougher enemies mean more XP, but you’ll have to be attentive in battles until you complete (or abandon) the quest – then you can go back to passively earning XP in Walk mode.

#9 Wait until level 20 before changing jobs

Unless you REALLY have an attachment to a certain class and want your main character to become one as soon as possible, wait until you hit level 20 before you begin multiclassing.  The reason is that at level 20 (and 50!) your character will get a stat boost that carries over to other classes.  Otherwise, you’re just starting over from level 1.  Don’t worry – any levels and experience you earned in any class will remain, and you can switch back any time – but to really power up, you’ll want to grab all those carry-over perks – perhaps especially the +15 defense that comes to level 20 fighters – good stuff for the whole family.  Also, the most recommended cycle of jobs I’ve come across from other players is Mage to Cleric, Cleric to Fighter, Fighter to Martial Artist, Martial Artist to Thief, and Thief to Mage.

#10 Grab some headphones!

One of the best features that Square Enix got just right on the first try is the ability to customize the sound settings and play audio from other apps in the background.  Not meaning to disrespect the great works of Koichi Sugiyama, but it is quite possible that you will tire of hearing the same Dragon Quest tunes over and over.  Turn the music down to 0, the sound effects to a 1 or 2, and then listen to whatever the hell makes you happiest when you’re taking long walks around town.  Podcasts, Music and Spotify all work and make all the difference in the world between going on an endless mindless level grind or actually enjoying your time out in the great wide world.  

  

Voodoo Dragonomics

I have now officially played Dragon Quest X more than any other MMORPG. Usually I steer clear of games of this genre because they make me isolated, moody, and obsessive. But there’s something about this one that has drawn me in without making me a complete infected penis hole. For one, I can share it with my son who has a character of his own. As a father who can’t help but spoil his child, I hook him up with weapons and gold through the game’s postal system and in exchange, he learns how to read and recognize more Japanese characters when we play together. Second, it’s on the Wii U, so I am not tethered to a stationary screen like I was with World of Warcraft and Vendetta Online. Thanks to the miraculous and downright inexplicable technology of the Wii’s wireless gamepad, I can level grind in bed if I wish, and it doesn’t take a genie or a candle on a cake to make that wish come true, although that latter did play a catalystic role in reacquiring the game (happy birthday to my old ass).

If you go back to July of 2012, you’ll find an entry up here about buying this game for the first time, right when it came out, for the Wii. Incredibly enough, the characters that we created way back then survived, even after months and years of inactivity. And imagine my delight and surprise when upon rejoining the online world I was notified that I had 40,000 gold to collect – KATUNK (that’s the sound of a sack of gold hitting the counter). I wasn’t sure what for at first – dismissing the idea of interest accruing on the meager sum I had stored in the bank, and doubting highly that Square Enix simply rewards their players with in-game monetary gifts for simply not deleting a character from their servers. But a fortune is a fortune, and like a bumpkin winning the lottery, it took me all of one week to squander my newfound wealth, and here’s how I did it.

Crafting, crafting, crafting. After buying myself the most luxurious armor that my level 24 thief could equip, I re-dedicated myself to that noble pursuit of blacksmithing weapons for other players in the game to use. However, in order to make this job a source of income, one must needs spend thousands and possibly millions of gold investing in the recipe books and components needed for the items to be crafted and then sold in the online marketplace. For a game that only has a user base in Japan, the amount of commerce that takes place in this game is fucking staggering, and kind of requires an explanation of its own. It is probably not that dissimilar to other games’ user-run marketplaces, but is a goddamn marvel of ingenuity that hints at strange impossible plutarchian economies that would make any real life economist shit with anger, envy, madness, and above all, respect at its near perfect sustainability.

On my day-to-day delvings, I’ll go into that marketplace looking for some kind of, oh let’s say Silver Ore, which is an actual ingredient needed to make mid-level weapons. It’s a common enough item in the right areas, and many (technically most) of the game’s players have no use for it but to sell it. Sure, blacksmithing is a common profession for characters in DQX, but there are other jobs out there, and it is the other players who make clothes, food, and enchantments who see metallic components found lying around in the field the same way I see cotton plants: stray gold. People collect this shit while they’re out fighting monsters, then bring it back to town to sell. Inventory space is severely limited, so you have to get rid of it, and computer-run item shops won’t give you jack shit. This is why it’s standard to sell the things you find in the online marketplace, because you can undercut any shop run by NPCs, and usually have no problem finding a buyer as long as you price your stuff smartly. This is key to both generating gold and clearing out that precious holding space.

Now, my silver ore is being sold in various quantities by literally hundreds of other players, and you can even sort the listings by cheapest per-unit price. This list updates every time you access it, but you can be assured that the cheapest per-unit priced items will be snatched up almost immediately after being posted, even if it’s just a couple of gold less than the standard price. Say silver ore costs on average 240 gold per unit. Some smart guy puts two on the market for 460, or 230 per unit. That’s not a bad price, I think, considering, and so I select it and make my purchase when suddenly, the little creep behind the counter is like, ”Uh oh – looks like someone has already purchased that! Tough luck. Don’t hate me, bro.” This happened again and again and again one night when I was on a crafting spree. It’s almost a minigame in itself, browsing through the item lists, trying to find the aberrant cheap stuff and button smashing that A, praying to some weird petty god that you get the message, “Here you are – thank you for your purchase.” You start to think that if only you could apply this to buying and selling shit in real life, you could be… I don’t know. Some kind of tycoon motherfucker or something. But probably not. Remember, I went broke doing just this.

Now it’s hardly a given that you’ll make back your money just by collecting the pieces. When the components are purchased and the recipe is known, the actual mini-game of hammering out the product begins. One must remember that love and care, or at least care is needed for the process of crafting, or else you will fuck it up and churn out a sub-standard product that sells for poop, or perhaps a completely irredeemable glob of slag that is worth less than poop. This mini-game is rigged so that cheaper items are easier to make, which is kind of fucking brilliant when you think about it (think higher DCs on accurate hammer strikes in my blacksmith’s case). One could easily crank out 20 shitty swords with a small investment, but these are the questions that the crafter must consider: Are people really going to buy them? At MY prices? Is it worth it? And what is life, anyway? It soon becomes obvious that the returns on low-level items are shitty in terms of gold and experience, meaning that only by moving up, up and up can one expect to make an actual profession out of this hobby. And by hobby, I mean timesink. Christ, I haven’t even killed a slime anywhere in this article yet.

My problem is that I need crafting experience that will allow me to craft the higher level weapons, and I haven’t found my perfect price-margin that will let me continue making weapons AND turn out a profit on them. The demand for weapons is always there, but the components needed to make them sometimes end up costing much more than the standard selling price for the weapon itself. I took goddamn nearly 8,000 gold out of my bank account to buy two “wind cutter wings” for this new set of Falcon Claws, only to discover that such claws were selling for a mere 6,000 in the marketplace – and mine even had a two-star rating, which means they were some kick-ass artisan masterpieces. Luckily, my character uses claws, so I ended up using them myself to farm gold in the more traditional way while stocking up on components to nickel and dime my way back to wealth.

I can be a right stupid fuck when it comes to figuring this kind of thing out on my own, and learning to correct this flaw can be an expensive endeavor indeed.  Want to hear how I set fire to 17,000 gold with one careless, caustic fart?

Every crafting profession requires a tool of some sort. The tailor needs a needle, the cook needs a frying pan, etcetera blah blah, and each of these trade tools has a limited number of uses before it breaks and your have to buy another one. It’s like income tax, I suppose. Now I’m a blacksmith, so one day I was thinking, hey, I’ll just forge my own crafting hammers! The fucking things are ridiculously expensive, after all, and like the pothead who decides to grow his own weed, I went out in search of the necessary components for this project without doing any intelligent or discerning research at all. I ended up buying a recipe book for a Platinum Hammer that cost over 17,000 gold, and I was like hot dog, now I’m set. That’ll save me tons in the long run. It was only after my crazy purchase that I discovered I have to be at a crafting level of 28 to make this fucking thing. This was nearly 10 levels in the future, meaning probably half a million gold for parts, and at least 10 days if I work at it every day. The silliest, most premature purchase ever, right? Well, it gets worse. I discovered soon after this that tool crafting is a completely separate profession from weapon crafting, and that I would have to change jobs and start over from level 1 if I ever really wanted to make this fucking thing which I don’t. Are you serious? Fuck that, I’m just getting into my own right as a weapon maker, so let the tool makers make hammers for me, and I’ll just keep the bragging rights that my character knows how to make a platinum hammer even though I will never actually bring the filthy thing into reality. Anyway, that was 17,000 gold down the goddamn fucking toilet – there is no refund on recipe books that your character has read. They pretty much evaporate into light as soon as you read them.

You may kill the slime

It’s turning out to be a bad weekend for RPGs. Which sucks, because this is ostensibly the best time to play them – 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday with my family sound asleep. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t scream and wake everyone up when those Mandoragoras killed me in Final Fantasy IX just now.

I picked up FInal Fantasy IX again because I thought that my save file was at the very beginning of Disc 2. While it is very near the beginning, it has none of that Disc 2 intro stuff that I was counting on for orientation. Where are we in the story? What are my current goals and party members? And what the fuck did I name everybody this time around?

Doesn’t matter. I bit it in less than ten minutes and have no desire to pick it up again until, perhaps I’m on the plane taking me back home this summer for a month’s worth virtual reality in the good old US of America. Plenty of time to get refamiliarized with everything on Iifa’s green Gaia then.

I was supposed to be playing Dragon Quest V, but in my haste to get the hell out of work for the weekend, left the 3DS charging in my desk where it sits now.

Nice game, that. It’s healthy to play Dragon Quest games. I wanted to get VIII for the phone, but $30 is kind of a fucked up ridiculous well not really because it’s great but I can’t justify it because I already have the game for PS2 price. You should buy it, though. Especially if you played the non-Japanese version, because when you did that, you got a shitty version of the game.

The Western localization of Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2 featured voice actors, which for Dragon Quest games is fucking blasphemy. You’re not supposed to hear the voices. When you talk to someone or even read text in ANY OTHER Dragon Quest game, you hear a range of tones going bloop and bleeb and THAT’s the voice. It’s like a compass for your imagination to work with and hear the words in your head. It’s part of the Role-Playing Experience(™) to imagine things for yourself. In a big, big world, your character on the map is obviously a grossly enlarged representative version of your tiny self. Each step you take is like half a mile in reality, and each battle, though executed with menu commands is actually a rollicking fracas with jumping and swearing and the clang of steel. Dragon Quest has a tradition of sound effects for these things, and they’ve remained unchanged since 1986, motherfuckers. So cut the shit and don’t assume we want to hear the profanity of human speech when stabbing slimes in the ass.

Right, so I didn’t buy it. But DQV for the DS can be reliably found at a reasonable price, and I bought such for such one rainy Saturday night last month and got caught back up in the Zenithian saga again. This game is unique in that at a certain point you are forced to marry one of three women who will bear your child who will take up the sword in a kind of Dragonballsy epic fashion. Interesting story mechanic, but could the choice possibly be any more aggravating?

Here are the maidens from which you have to choose:

Bianca: You go adventuring with her early in the game when you’re still a child. And she’s blonde. Balanced melee fighter / spellcaster.

Flora: Hair of blue. It is revealed that she is kind. Strong spellcaster, weak defense.

Debra: Debra is Flora’s black-haired bitch-ass bitch of a bitch sister. Strong melee fighter. Not featured in the original Dragon Quest V, so you think I’d rally against her very programming code for that fact alone.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Debra Cuziplayit.

Truth be told, I didn’t want to marry at all. I didn’t think it was a particularly good time to be wedded, what, in the middle of my epic quest and all. I slay and bleed every day and stay at shady taverns every night, and it’s no way to start a family. But I suppose if you look at it from the standpoint that you didn’t have a choice whether or not to fight monsters in the game – you either do it or you don’t proceed – getting married is really not so different from killing a slime.

So here I sit, not playing any RPGs, thinking how best to make the time go by. Hey wait, that’s right! I have a family! I’m going to cook some bacon and wake their ass up.

Scenes from a Hylian restaurant

Sometimes I feel like a fuck. For as badly as I spoke about Gabriel Knight II earlier, I still feel a real attachment to that game in spite of all of its design and production flaws. It’s hard to believe that that’s coming from the same person who will barely ever play a video game that comes out unless he’s been sufficiently hyped for it with the guarantee that it will be well made. I’m talking about the FFs and DQs with roman numerals after them. Series that continue after 25 years of celebrated adventure. Games that I have played before and remember like sentimental songs.

The new Zelda is home, home in the Wii, and the next ‘new’ game anywhere on the horizon also happens to be Zelda.

The Ocarina of Time port for the 3DS included a special offer for customers who bought the game within the first couple months of release. Register the game, get a free soundtrack to the game on CD. Game soundtracks are awesome, and they’re even better when they’re free. And it’s really nice when the publisher is Nintendo itself, and you just know it could be sold for like $20. Skyward Sword also came with a disc of Zelda music, performed by a symphony orchestra. That is so rad, Nintendo. I fucking love you.

Funny thing about the Ocarina of Time – I used to play it on a Nintendo 64 Emulator back in 1998. It was the first working 64 emulator out there and everyone in my dorm was installing it and playing Mario Kart and Zelda on their computers and I couldn’t believe my eyes. When I ran the emulator on my own system, it was lacking the 3D rendering power of Glide, and just didn’t have the horsepower to emulate it. I ended up buying a $150 Voodoo Banshee graphics card for my system – just to play a Nintendo 64 game. It should be noted that at this time, an N64 retailed for nearly the same price.

I was able to play a great portion of OoT on my souped up fakir machine, but came to a point in the Water Palace (about ten or twelve hours in) where you are required to hit a certain target on the wall with the hookshot to access a new area of the dungeon. The controls of this emulator were not precise, however, and could not be tweaked for sensitivity. It turned out to be impossible to line up the aiming bead of the hookshot with the target on the wall. You’d be aiming just a couple of pixels to the right of it and tap the stick one little teensy tappity tap to the left and suddenly you’d then be mere pixels to the left of it – not close enough for the payload of the hookshot to connect. I could not proceed. It was a sad, sad way to stop playing a game, but perhaps more legitimate than stopping in order to play something else.

I am now in the dilemma of being far, far into Dragon Quest VIII with my son, but for the last week, we’ve been playing almost nothing but Zelda: Skyward Sword. Bless him, he loves to watch his father play Zelda. The controls are too sophisticated for him to play at the moment, so whenever he wants to be in control, that’s when I should be throwing in DQVIII – the menu-based fighting and its default cursor position being “attack” allow him to legitimately play the game. But more importantly, I feel that it’s my duty as a father to teach him to play games responsibly and finish what he begins, so it’s essential that we finish DQVIII together, even if I’m the one who fells the last boss. After all, when he gets older and realizes that there are hundreds and hundreds of epic games lying around the house it will be all too easy for him to try out something like FFVII and be like, “Hey, this is kinda blocky and crappy. I’ma try this ICO game that dad gets so teary about. Hmm, weird. I don’t get it. Next!” The thought makes me shudder.

In a way, it’s a relief that I am not looking forward to any new games. It could even be a blessing. A Christmas goddamn miracle. I wouldn’t say no to a PS3, though. I still miss playing Final Fantasy XIII so much that it burns my bowels.

I was banging 7-pound slimes cause that’s how I role

Play, that is.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Dragon Quest franchise, known better in the States as Dragon Warrior, but fuck that shit, we’re calling it “Quest” today (be thankful I don’t call it Dorakue). To mark this quarter century of uninterrupted awesomeness, the good people at Square-Enix decided to release a collection of the first three games in the series on a single disc, playable on the Nintendo Wii. The games would be presented as they were in both their Famicom and Super Famicom forms. And yes, we’re going the Famicom route for one important reason – the NES versions are markedly different from their original Japanese counterparts. Enough, I think, to warrant the system distinction. It’s not like I love saying “Famicom” or anything.

This was actually my first time playing Dragon Quest I in Japanese, and my first time playing II and III at all. I might have tried out II back in the days, but I wasn’t a fan of managing more than one character or fighting more than one enemy at a time, and I wouldn’t play another Dragon Quest game until VIII, nearly 20 years later. Loved that first one, though. I wasted no time in getting down with that one again, in original Famicom format, of course.

Check out the difference in how the sprites of DQI look – weird, right? Everyone in the Famicom version faces forward all the time, even YOU, heir of Roto. Yeah, that’s right – I said “Roto” because the heir of Erdrick was able to look to the left, the right, and show his ass to the camera instead of moonwalking all over the damn place. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t remember if your character could face different directions in the NES version, but after checking out some of the differences, I learned that this was just the tip of the iceberg. There are rounded, sandy coast lines in the NES version, whereas in the Famicom’s rendering of Alefgard, the ocean begins at the forest. It is truly an enchanted land.

One thing that struck me immediately about the Famicom version was that there is no save file system. The Famicom carts didn’t have batteries in them, and the only way to save your progress was to get a big, long password from the king, write it down, and then punch it back in without fucking it up the next time you play. And believe me, they are easy to fuck up. Thankfully, in this Wii release, you can pause at ANY time to make a single save state that can be loaded up even if you turn the power off or die. It may not be the traditional way to play, but I’m a busy dude with two jobs and a family. Screw that password system – it makes the idea of playing for just 20 minutes seem absolutely pointless because you’ll be spending half of that time inputting your last password and copying down the new one. It totally changes the way I imagine Japanese kids playing this game back in the day. I can picture notebooks full of hiragana nonsense with notes like “Lvl. 14, no keys, Roto armor” and parents wondering what the fuck kind of devil language this game was teaching their youngsters. But then again, it’s Japan and the more likely scenario is that the adults were playing the game alongside their kids, the way I am today.

My son is a funny, incredible creature. He’s very quick at picking up on the names of monsters and every time an encounter would start, he would gasp with alarm, and then scream the name of whatever enemy suddenly appeared. Whether it was “*gasp!* a slime!” or “*gasp!* a red dragon!” it didn’t even matter if we were level 20 – he’d call each of them out, and then laugh hysterically (if not derisively) when they ran away. I was even able to let him play a good portion of this game just by keeping him in an area where the monsters were not so tough, so he could roam around and bang on the A button to win encounters with hardly a scratch. One time I even dozed off while he was playing, and I woke up to the familiar chime of a level up that he was able to achieve on his own. There are some moments that as a father, I cannot begin to describe the joy or pride that I feel, but it is fucking awesome. We defeated the Dragonlord together and restored that ball of light to Alefgard on our sixth day into it, and he still tells the tale whenever we watch the sick animated intro, which is basically every time we fire up the game. Here is that intro now in YouTubular goodness: