* Here's something that I find very interesting. Again, we're dealing with a simpler system here. By the end of the game, you're probably not more than level 20, and dealing a hundred damage at once is unthinkable (as opposed to Final Fantasy's 9999 damage cap at level 99). Your growth is gradual and starts from a reasonable point. You're evenly matched at first, until you begin to level up and then eventually the slimes are dust you brush off your shoulder. The first enemies are slimes that do 1 or 2 damage, and only have a few HP. In Dragon Quest, you start with single digit stats.
The default stats on RPG Maker VX Ace are totally out of whack, and have level 1 actors dealing hundreds of damage right from out of the gate. I think this really makes a lot of sense. But it's not like Final Fantasy where you have a ton of spells that do the same thing (Fire, Ice, Lit - although I do like the concept of elements), and a million different status ailments or enhancements, many of which work so rarely that you never bother using them. Well, except Hurtmore, since by the time I learned it, I didn't really need it for anything except the final boss, and every time I tried to use it on the final boss, it failed, so I just gave up trying. They're very basic, but functional, and there's a good mix of spells designed for combat (Heal, Hurt, Sleep, Stopspell), and spells that are useful outside of combat (Radiant, Outside, Return, Repel). I like that, from a simplistic development perspective. This means that all the physical and magic skills are combined into one character. Party includes only a single hero (as opposed to the first Final Fantasy's four-hero party), and you only fight a single monster at a time. This is interesting, because this is the default battle system in RPG Maker VX Ace, and it's not the one I'm used to - which is the side-facing battle screen of Final Fantasy. * Combat utilizes a front-facing battle screen, where the monsters are drawn to face the player as he sits in front of the screen, and the hero is not drawn on the screen at all.
* I knew the gameplay was going to be basic for a game this old, but wow - you have to select commands from a menu to do simple things like talk to people and use stairs! But I've just finished playing through it for the second time ever, and I jotted down some of my (more or less scattered) thoughts while I was playing it:
Rpg maker vx ace free roaming actors series#
I never actually played any of the Dragon Quest games until my friend gave me his NES cartridge not that many years ago, despite growing up on the Final Fantasy series (which seems to have attracted more popularity in America). Except, I'm not sure how confident I feel about diverting that time and effort from the game I really want to be working on (Dragonfaith).īut about Dragon Quest. I find the simplicity very appealing as a novice (and solo) developer, and I'm tempted to try building a bare bones proto-RPG as a practice exercise - to sort of teach myself the basics before I try putting together something more complicated, with multiple playable characters and such. It actually preceded the first Final Fantasy by about a year or so, and is at least an order of magnitude simpler. And in light of my recent decision to scale back the complexity of my game (at least from the start), the first Dragon Quest (known in North America as Dragon Warrior) seemed like the perfect place to start. I thought it might be helpful to go back and play some classic RPGs for inspiration.
(For my fellow players, here is a link to the most helpful guide I found on this game).
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