Dragon Quest II Reminded Me It's Okay to Look Towards Tomorrow

I played the Dragon Quest I+II HD-2D Remake collection recently and rather enjoyed it. There is indeed something charmingly timeless about the chosen hero claiming the sacred blade of their ancestor and wielding it against the darkness. You broadly know what to expect from "Hero VS Dark Lord", and the game knows that you know what to expect.

In Tim Rogers' review of Dragon Quest XI for Kotaku (aka Action Button Reviews No.0), he says:

"Dragon Quest games are bedtime stories.
[...]
As a Dragon Quest's release impends, you know that it is going to be suitable for playing in a bathrobe before bed. You know it will be the perfect game to play when you are tired, or when you have a cold."

I may not have a cold, but I am very tired. Why am I tired? Well, I'm going to open social media right now whilst typing this and list the first dozen posts I see:

1. major politician supporting Israel
2. shitpost about massive game industry layoffs
3. lamenting massive game industry layoffs
4. other, newer game industry layoffs
5. lamenting the ending of chainsaw man
6. iron chef screenshot bot
7. clip from a podcast about said major politician and their public image
8. post lamenting how generative AI is ruining art as a livelihood
9. share of a Go Fund Me for laid off staff
10. link to a post about CEOs building chatbots to do their jobs for them
11. quote sharing a major politician supporting Israel and saying that if you support him you're a bigot
12. video game sale link

...Me posting something glib about the video games I'm playing perhaps seems tone-deaf or ignorant while real human beings are losing their lives or livelihoods. Maybe some would say I ought take the real world more seriously. An editor would probably tell me I need an Angle.

Perhaps I'm unduly obsessed with the idea of needing to be a "good person", but social media and the way it spreads information feels sort of uniquely geared towards taking advantage of that impulse. The Voice in the Head says, "If you don't RT a post describing human atrocity, then that means you don't agree that it's an atrocity! Therefore, you are a bad person!! You'll be socially ostracized forever!!!" I imagine people clicking on my page and looking at my feed and judging me for Not Doing Enough to highlight whichever issue they're thinking about.

Which is to say, I'm tired at least partially because I've been building a straw man in my head who's scolding me for Not Being A Better Person (At Least Partly By Making Sure Everyone I Know Knows How Bad Things Are Out There, And Also Everything Else You're Fucking Up).

One recalls Shel's post about social media addiction:

"When I say 'What if God punishes me?' it feels so obviously absurd. It's easier to get over; but for the decade when social media ruled my life, how many times did I say or think 'but what if I get cancelled? What if someone writes a call-out post? What if I'm labeled as problematic to the point of tainting anyone who associates with me?' The fear did not just extend to online behavior, for anything I do offline could be shared to social media by someone else. It did not feel irrational."

I'm getting sidetracked. I'm here to talk about a specific scene in a video game I played recently in a way that's certainly less intelligent than anyone I'm quoting in this post or anyone on my RSS Feed.

In contrast to Dragon Quest 1's silent, sole Hero or Dragon Quest 3's cadre of silent generic adventurers, Dragon Quest 2 has a silent Hero and his rather talkative cousins. The party is thus:

• Gawain, the silent, stoically heroic Prince of Midenhall (You)
• Caradoc, the easygoing, oblivious, comic-relief Prince of Cannock
• Peronel, the dutiful and traumatized Princess of Moonbrooke
• Matilda, the hotheaded, rambunctious Princess of Cannock (Later)

The game opens with the forces of evil priest Hargon laying waste to Moonbrooke; barring a handful of nameless NPCs, Princess Peronel is the sole survivor of her kingdom's genocide. She is understandably upset about this and spends much of the plot driven by a furious vengeance against Hargon. To track down her quarry, the party needs a ship to facilitate traveling the world, and acquiring one is the main thrust of the plot for a few hours.

So about, let's say, 15% into Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake, the teen squad acquires a sailing ship, opening up the game world for exploration and adventure. I've timestamped the relevant cutscene below, which lasts for two or three minutes. (1:28:06ish to 1:31:00ish if Youtube shits the bed as it is wont to do)

And I admit, it got me.

That's Dragon Quest right there. That's fairy stories, the human condition as filtered through fantastical fiction.

Aside: when I say "fairy stories" I am specifically referring to a lecture/essay by Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien where he discussed the importance of said "fairy stories". Pertinent quote:

"Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."

(Other Aside: I was discussing this with my friend whom hasn't played any Dragon Quest games and he said something to the effect of, "If this dialogue verbatim was in a game that looked exactly like Expedition 33 instead of Dragon Quest, game journos would be falling over themselves saying it was the best written RPG they've ever seen." One recalls Harper Jay's post on such things.)

Those little Akira Toriyama lookin' cartoon kids told me that the moment matters more than the whole, for the whole is just moments strung together until the end. You need not spend every waking moment crusading for what you believe in, because solidarity gains more from fellowship than from transitive penance. Sometimes it's okay to just live life.

To be fair, what I did with said life was play another 25 hours of Dragon Quest I+II, reaching the extended extra epilogue that as far as I've read only happens if you have completed save data from Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake on your platform. It's a neat gesture, closing the emotional loop on "The Erdrick Trilogy", as the HD-2D remakes have been billed. I'll leave further discussion on the finer points of what did or didn't warrant being Remade to those with greater expertise.

I could go on about the combat and exploration or whatnot, but there's hardly a need. As friend of the site Josh Tolentino put it, Dragon Quest is "more straightforward than other games but it's also pure and elemental in a way that you only really understand when you give it a go". Sure, I guess it wouldn't be too far off to say Square-Enix has made basically the same game for 40 years. Maybe that means people are tasteless sheep; I distinctly recall not-so-thinly-veiled racist sentiment during the early 00s surmising as such. Or maybe it means there's actually something to these games.

It's easy to dismiss as antiquated or childish, but there's got to be a reason we keep the "fairy stories" around in the first place. Perhaps we do need to relearn the lesson from time to time that Good must always stand against Evil. And, in an increasingly chaotic and complex world, there's a resonance to be found in presenting such lessons without pretension. If you're willing to accept that framework and calibrate your expectations, not much does it better than Dragon Quest.