I’ve written about this game before, but my wife requested that I write
about it again. I’m sure I’ll probably
wind up saying a lot of the same things I said on the first go-‘round, but who
knows?
Well, here’s something I didn’t say last time: When I first introduced
my wife to Breath of Fire: Dragon
Quarter, she got really into it. Really into it. Given her relative inexperience with Japanese
role-playing games, this was surprising to me.
But as she pointed out, the things that made it seem out of the ordinary
to me meant little to her. She didn’t
have much “ordinary” to compare it against.
Unfortunately, watching her play it made me want to play it also. Part of this is the natural (and deeply
unfortunate) backseat-driving instinct I have whenever I’m watching someone do
something that I’m familiar with, but feel they could be doing better, and in
fact, if they’d just let me have the controller for a few minutes, I could show
them exactly how… But part of it was also
just that seeing the game played really made me want to be playing it
myself. This presented a problem, what with
us having only the one copy. It led to
arguments. Not real arguments, but not exactly cute arguments, either. We did, at the time, have both a working
PlayStation2 and a backward-compatible PlaySation3, so it was only owning just
the one copy of the game that was really a problem. So the solution was pretty simple.
That’s how good it is. Dragon
Quarter: The game so nice, we bought it twice.
* * *
Technically, we only bought
the game once. I bought it when it first came out, back in early 2003. I played it for a while, and while it was
pretty to look at, and it had good music, and the setting was interesting, it
just didn’t come together for me. Despite
this, I had no desire to trade it in. I
had the feeling I was onto something good, though I couldn’t quite grasp it at
the time.
I hadn’t had much experience with the Breath of Fire series then. I owned a copy of Breath of Fire IV, which was really the first game in the series
that I even tried to tackle seriously.
Having unwillingly skipped over the 16-bit generation (owning a
TurboGrafx-16 and five games hardly counts), my impression of the series at
that time could basically be described as “like Final Fantasy, only not quite
as inventive”. It perhaps wasn’t a fair
assessment, but I was basing this on the opinions of friends and acquaintances;
I was unable to draw my own conclusions.
Still, I liked Breath of Fire IV
well enough, even outside of some positive personal associations, so I hung on
to Dragon Quarter, feeling
relatively certain that one day, I would get the itch to try it again.
As it happened, I did, a couple of years later. The story and the characters were calling to
me, and this time, everything finally clicked.
It probably helped that, around that time, I was beginning to feel that
JRPGs as a genre were becoming deeply conservative in terms of design, as well
as character and story archetypes. Realistically,
this has probably been the case since the days of the original Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy
Star. But I got into these types of
games in late 1998 with Final Fantasy
VII; I was new to the genre in those days.
And in fairness, I’ve enjoyed a number of these types of games. But by this time, I found myself wanting
games in the genre to branch out and do something new. So many of the mechanical mainstays of the
genre, the “traditions” of JRPG design, began life as frankly clunky
workarounds for technology that wasn’t really up to giving us a less abstract
simulation of the expected features of a fantasy adventure: travel,
exploration, fighting monsters, finding treasure, getting new and more powerful
gear, and saving the world and any number of princesses. There was only so much you could do with
eight bits, and if you wanted to simulate all of these things, you had to have
a certain amount of abstraction. So you
have your turn-based battles, your random encounters, and so on, and so forth.
By the PS2 era, the technology was rapidly growing beyond the need to
adhere to the old way of doing things for any reason other than nostalgia’s
sake. It had been doing this for some
time – Chrono Trigger shook up the
formula way back in the mid-90s, but despite the universal acclaim that game
received, no one involved seemed terribly interested in implementing any of its
innovations. Developers were, by and
large, unwilling to grow out of those old ways.
In part this might be down to the reluctance of their audience (or at
least a very vocal portion of it) to part ways with those same traditions. Either way, the result was the same:
stagnation. Or so it felt to me.
I wanted something that was different from the JRPGs I’d played
before. Something that still offered the
thought and planning that went into playing an RPG of any kind, something with
a good story and interesting characters, but which went off the beaten path and
did something different.
And so, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005, two years after I originally
bought it, tried it, and hung it up for the foreseeable future, I started
playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter again.
* * *
It’s an odd beast, this game, even when you look at it in the context
of its own series. All the more so,
really. The earliest Breath of Fire games got compared to
the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games,
at least by most of the people I knew back then. Really, a more apt comparison would be to Dragon Quest, but I hadn’t played that
game, and I was part of a group of friends who oddly lacked much experience
with Dragon Quest, so maybe nobody
was in a position to make that particular comparison. With most of my friends, Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon
Warrior; I feel so old sometimes)
was always “That game where you grind for hours and hours and then you finally
say ‘fuck this!’ and go do something else, maybe play Final Fantasy or go outside or something, I dunno”.
Anyway, the whole series up to this point had been pretty standard
high-fantasy fare, with the unique selling point being the main character’s
eventual ability to transform into a dragon.
Most of the game mechanics beyond this were pretty straightforward. My experience with the series at large was
pretty much limited to some time spent on the fourth game, and some time spent
goofing off with ROMs of the first two out of idle and quickly satisfied
curiosity.
One other consistent feature of the series is that your main character,
the aforementioned dragon-transforming person, is always a young man with blue
hair and a sword named Ryu, and there is always a blonde, winged young lady
named Nina who typically focuses on magic.
Additional characters tend to be of all shapes, sizes, and species.
Dragon Quarter, by contrast,
occurs in a future dystopia where humankind, having pretty much destroyed the
environment through the use of biologically engineered weapons called dragons,
has retreated to a single subterranean dwelling. There, they survive as best they can.
In this society, everyone is given a rank, called a D-ratio. On the surface of things, this ratio is a
measure of one’s social standing, limiting the kinds of jobs they can hold,
places they can live, and overall determining just exactly how high they can
rise in the world, figuratively and
literally.
“Low-Ds”, that is, people with low D-ratios, live further down in this
habitat. The air is worse, people’s
lifespans are shorter, and there are occasionally monsters called genics that
roam around down there. The people with
high D-ratios live closer to the surface where the air is better and things are
generally less dangerous. A nice touch
is that, especially in cut scenes, the game is literally more hazy and grimy, visually, the further down you
are. As you go up, the environments
gradually become clearer and brighter.
It happens bit by bit, so you may not notice it the first time through,
but if you finish the game and start over again, the difference stands out.
One of the few story beats to be preserved is our hero: Ryu. Here, he’s a low-D ranger, whose job mainly
seems to involve security and hunting down genics. His D-ratio is abysmally low: 1/8,192. His current job is the very highest he can
hope to achieve. He’s partnered with
another young man named Bosch, D-ration 1/64.
While Ryu is effectively at the very limit of how far he can rise in the
world, Bosch is only at the beginning. A
D-ratio as high as his means he can potentially qualify to become a Regent, one
of the four rulers of this underground world.
Bosch is basically just paying his dues, here. He’s friendly enough to Ryu, in a
condescending sort of way, which Ryu mostly just shrugs off. What else is he going to do?
While reporting for an assignment together, Ryu succumbs to a brief
fugue, in which he has a vision. He sees
the decaying remains of a giant dragon spiked to a wall. Despite clearly being dead, the dragon seems
to talk to Ryu, mind-to-mind, though what it says to him makes virtually no
sense at the time. Moments later, he
comes across the real thing, though it is very visibly dead and inanimate.
A terrorist attack splits up Ryu and Bosch, and shortly thereafter, Ryu
runs into this game’s version of Nina, as well as a member of the resistance movement
Trinity, named Lin. She seeks Nina for
her own – or rather Trinity’s – purposes.
The three form an unlikely but highly effective team. But allying himself with these two has its consequences,
and by the time Ryu and Bosch reunite, circumstances have made them into
enemies. Bosch is a good fighter, and he
has plenty of allies with him, but Ryu refuses to betray his new comrades. Thankfully, his encounter with the dragon was
no mere dream or hallucination.
Unbeknownst to him, it has bestowed him with awesome power… and a
deadline.
With every passing moment, the monstrous dragon power lurking within
Ryu grows more prominent, threatening to overcome him. While Ryu is in control, he can transform
into a bestial form capable of slaughtering even bosses within just a couple of
rounds of combat. But drawing on that power
accelerates its progress in overtaking him.
And so, with all hands turned against him, Ryu, Lin, and Nina have
ultimately just a single option: Escape.
* * *
One of the things that I like about Dragon Quarter – one of many things – is the way that the game’s more
prominent mechanics and its story are so closely intertwined.
The dragon power bestowed upon Ryu early into the game isn’t just a
narrative device or story element, coming out only when dramatically
convenient. It’s also a game mechanic,
in the form of what the game calls a D-counter.
This is a number, a percentage, that appears in the corner of the
screen. As you play, it slowly ticks up toward 100 in
intervals of a hundredth of a percent.
Everything you do in the game causes it to increase. Everything. Every 24 or 25 steps will cause it to
increase by one interval. Later in the
game, this happens every dozen steps or so.
Ryu’s special D-dash ability, which allows him to avoid enemy combat,
causes it to tick up faster.
Transforming, all by itself, raises the counter, and any actions taken
while transformed increase it by whole-number percentages. It is literally overpowered. What I mentioned about crushing bosses in
just a couple of turns was not hyperbole.
I’ve done it. It’s basically my
end-game strategy.
There is no way to drop the counter.
Ever. There are no items, no
spells, no techniques which will allow you to reset it or undo any of its
progress. It just sits up there in the
corner, slowly increasing and glowing ever more furiously as the number
grows. The tension between the
temptation to use it whenever you’re in a bind and the punishing consequences
of said use can be exquisite.
When I first heard Dragon
Quarter described as a survival-horror RPG, it didn’t make sense to
me. But that’s mainly because I
associated the mechanical elements of most of the survival-horror games I’d
played with the more thematic elements of horror.
The key here, I think, is the word “survival”. You might more accurately call Dragon Quarter a survival-RPG, except
it’s basically the only one of its kind that I know of. It’s kind of hard to wrangle a whole genre
out of that.
At their heart, survival-horror games generally “work” based on two
principles.
The first is the fragility of the player character relative to other
types of games. You are not the hero of a
more action-oriented games, who can take maybe a dozen sword strokes straight
to the face and just keep going, or who can withstand a hail of gunfire and
duck behind cover for a few seconds while your shields recharge. Every bit of damage taken is a significant
setback that needs to be planned around, and every attack must be
calculated. This is because of the
second principle, which resource management.
The in-game resources available to you, both those which you use to
preserve yourself and those you use to eliminate your enemies, are finite. So they must be spent wisely, frugally. Because of this, you are constantly required
to take a measured, careful approach to any situation. You can never just blithely wander around; to
do so invites disaster twice over. In
the short term, you risk serious harm, leaving yourself vulnerable to future
threats. In the long term, if you come
out of the situation relatively unscathed, it’s generally at some expense of
resources, leaving you ill-prepared for future encounters. Carelessness becomes indistinguishable from suicide.
This puts pressure on the player to play extremely well at all times by
punishing mistakes immediately and brutally.
As a result, some of the typical elements of JRPGs are missing.
There are no healing spells or techniques. All healing – whether restoring health or
curing negative status effects – is accomplished by way of expendable (and
frequently pricey) items. And you have
to consider how often (if at all) you’ll be using some of these items, because
inventory space is limited, and multiple items of a single type don’t “stack”
very much before requiring another inventory slot. And, naturally, the usual economics of JRPGs
are in full effect. Whatever you get for
selling an item is a pitiful fraction of what it costs you to buy.
The game offers you the ability to use bait and traps to lure enemies
into a position of compromise and get the drop on them, but even these need to
be used sparingly. There’s hardly enough
for every encounter.
Interestingly, the game knows exactly how difficult it is, and gives
you something of a way around the problem.
As with most RPGs of any kind, Japanese or otherwise, you earn
experience points, new equipment, and new abilities as you go through the game. In addition, Dragon Quarter also gives you what’s called Party XP. Basically, this is experience you can dole
out to party members as you like to boost their levels.
Should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t progress
without either having your party wiped or running the D-counter up to 100%
(which, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is an instant Game Over), you have
the option to do what’s called a SOL Restart.
This restarts the game from the beginning, but lets you keep all the
equipment and skills you’ve learned, as well as any Party XP you still
have. This gives you get a fresh start
while retaining your improved gear, and the Party XP lets you give yourself a
boost in the early going.
There’s also an option to restore a previous hard save along these same
lines. Dragon Quarter allows “soft” saves anywhere, but these are
temporary by design. Once loaded, these
saves disappear. There are only a few “hard”
save points, from which you can restore at will, and to which you will be
returned with a SOL Restore.
If this sounds ridiculous for what is typically a long-form type of
game, it may help to understand that Breath
of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only about eight to ten hours long from start to
finish on a single play through, once you know what you’re doing. Even with a couple of full-blown restarts,
you’ll be spending no more time on Dragon
Quarter than any other game from the same time period. Less, probably.
Writing this now, I just about want to say that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is Dark Souls before Dark Souls
really existed. There’s a certain
similarity in that both games are more difficult than usual while still being
relatively fair, and in the expectation that you will die, probably more than once, and that rather than being a
tragedy, it’s simply an instructive part of the experience. Or in the case of Dragon Quarter, you’ll experience (probably more than once) a
situation in which death is basically a given should you continue, and the
smart thing would be to cut your losses and restart.
* * *
Dragon Quarter’s infliction
of pressure extends even to the representation of the game’s characters and
world.
Most characters have a skinny, almost emaciated appearance. Part of this is simple stylization, of
course, but it still contributes to the overall effect. These people live a thin and narrow
existence, it says, devoid of the expansive pleasures humankind was meant to
enjoy. There is a grimness and a quiet
desperation underlying it all.
The world itself is a fucking hole.
Corridors in the lower areas are littered with random junk and debris;
it’s best not to think what it might all actually be. The air is hazy and grimy, and things have a
sort of cobbled-together look that just makes the whole place look cramped and dingy
and uncomfortable. Especially in the
lower areas, everything looks like it’s about one stern look away from falling right
apart. The upper areas are cleaner, more
solid, but can seem so sterile and strictly designed as to be hostile. Dragon
Quarter does a wonderful job of creating a world you want to get the hell out of as soon as you can.
It’s ironic, really. Most games,
I play to escape from the troubles and stresses in my life. And most games oblige this desire. Even the ones that take place in barren
wastelands tend to take place in gorgeously
rendered barren wastelands that encourage you to examine every carefully
tailored nook and cranny. They’re an invitation
to exploration and adventure, and are “barren” or “waste” only as a matter of
aesthetics.
* * *
Ultimately, a large part of what
interests me about the story of Dragon
Quarter, what keeps me coming
back, is that rather than a big, trampling save-the-world epic, it’s about a group of characters who just want
out.
This is a smaller story, a “tiny tale of time”, as the game itself tells
us. It’s huge in its implications for
its world and its characters. It’s great
in the scope of the ideas it asks its characters to contemplate. It that sense, at least, it does involve the
end of the world, in one way or another.
But the scale is smaller, and the characters strike me as being more real
because of it.
Ryu, Lin, and Nina don’t want to fight anybody. There’s at least one memorable occasion where
Ryu, surrounded by enemies, asks why they can’t just let him and his friends go. The character animations in Dragon Quarter aren’t spectacular, but
they get the job done here. There’s something
about the way that Ryu asks his question that seems to have layers. On one layer, he seems genuinely fatigued
from fighting all the time. On another layer,
he seems mentally, psychologically tired from the toll of all the deaths he’s
inflicted. On yet a deeper layer, he
seems likely to be tired of fighting the thing
inside him that threatens to take over.
They aren’t trying to harm anybody.
And it seems reasonable just to let them go, on the one hand. But on the other, there is the major problem
that letting Ryu and company out of this subterranean pit will completely upend
the social order – will end this idea of the world – purely as a side-effect of his escape. Because the underlying problem with Ryu’s
world is a variant on the same problem that keeps people in dead-end jobs and
abusive relationships long beyond the point when, logically, they should be getting
out.
Fear.
The world of Dragon Quarter,
objectively speaking, is an absolute, utter shithole. Even the people in charge don’t seem to be
enjoying themselves much. And it’s
because everyone seems to be in agreement, unspoken, that even if the current
circumstances are awful, at least they’re familiar
awful circumstances. It’s possible that things are better on the
surface, but it’s just as possible that they aren’t. It’s just as possible that they’re far
worse. This, at least, is the devil we
know.
Even one of the main villains, the ruler of this subterranean
nightmare, is ruled by fear. A thousand
years before the story proper, he was given the opportunity to open this world
to the surface. But he backed down. In his fear that the world above might still
be the barren wasteland people left ages ago, he turned back at the final
moment, sentencing himself and everyone in the underground to remain in it
indefinitely.
There’s an anime I like quite a bit – it’s probably my favorite, really
– called Revolutionary Girl Utena,
and in it there is a bit of dialogue that is recited so often it’s practically a
ritual. It goes like this:
“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever
being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will
die without ever truly being born. Smash
the shell, for the world revolution.”
This is actually a paraphrase from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (usually
just known as Demian), in which it’s
put this way:
“The bird struggles out of the egg.
The egg is a world. Who would be
born must first destroy a world. The
bird then flies to God. That god’s name
is Abraxas.”
To go up, to go out, to rise, to escape: This is an act of tremendous faith.
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