The last two games I played on my Switch were the original Dragon Quest and Breath of Fire, two early examples of the Japanese role-playing game. Today, they might seem overly simplistic: grind for levels, brute-force through a boss, repeat. These two games are, if anything, even more simplistic than their peers. And right now, thatâs just what I want.
I need to admit now that, until this year, I had never actually played the first Dragon Quest. Sorry! I only got into RPGs after the 8-bit era had pretty much come to a close. Even when Nintendo was doing that âsubscribe to Nintendo Power and get Dragon Warrior for freeâ thing, I didnât take them up on it because I didnât actually want Dragon Warrior. I figured the release of an upgraded version with lots of quality-of-life improvements was a good time to get into it. I wouldnât be getting the true 1986 experience, but at least Iâd understand the underlying structure of it.
In hindsight, Dragon Quest is fascinating. As the game that kicked off the console JRPG boom, it laid the groundwork for an entire genreâs worth of conventions, tropes, and mechanics. Itâs also, even by the standards of the time, a very compact and short game. There are only a few places to visit, a few puzzly bits that can slow you down, and a few boss fights. Most of your time is spent grinding for levels. The quality-of-life upgrades made to the Switch version speed things up to the extent that you can, without even really trying, finish it in a single day.
Breath of Fire, released in 1993, is clearly patterned after the Dragon Quest series, from the prominence of dragons in its plot to the surely non-coincidental fact that one of the first enemies you meet is a little blue slime. And like the first Dragon Quest, thereâs little strategy to any of it. In any given battle, the strategy is to just unload with your most powerful weapons and hope you can heal up faster than the enemyâs attacks dish out damage.
By comparison, Final Fantasy V, which was released a year before Breath of Fire, makes you do a lot more than grind and fight. FFV let players arbitrarily assign one of 22 different character classes to each of its four players, then let those characters mix and match their hundred or so different abilities. I still wouldnât call Final Fantasy V a âcomplicatedâ RPG, since you can make your way through it with any combination of classes and ignore all of the more esoteric occupations if you want. But what it represented was a marker along the evolution of the genre in a specific direction, the overcomplicating of RPGs to suit a more and more demanding fan base.
This is what tends to happen within any game genre. The core audience gets better and better at the games, and demands that they get more complex and more difficult to satisfy their increasingly sophisticated tastes and skill at the gameplay. This tends to happen once casual players move on to the next thing and only the genre diehards are left. The evolution of the shoot-em-up from Space Invaders to âbullet hellâ is the best example of this.
When I think about the similar trend line in role-playing games, I think about much of Square Enixâs output on the Nintendo DS. I was excited to play the 3D remake of Final Fantasy IV, but found out halfway in that theyâd totally revised the gameplay, making it extremely difficult to proceed unless you dove in deeply into new, overly complicated systems. That led directly to the Four Heroes of Light and Bravely Default games, which are similarly aimed at the sort of player who doesnât feel like theyâre earning their progress unless theyâre forced to puzzle out the pathways of these deep interconnected systems.
Whatever happened to Fight, Magic, and Item, maybe with a little Defend in there to mix things up? What Iâve found while playing through Dragon Quest and Breath of Fire is that being able to rely on the simple promise made by those limited options makes for a relaxing experience. When I need to chill out after a stressful day, or more likely, need to sneak in a few minutes of game time here and there while dealing with the kids, itâs nice to retreat into a game that feels as comforting as a warm bath.
There was a great Twitter thread a few years ago from game designer Laralyn McWilliams about âgrindingâ versus âwhittling.â We donât like grinding; having to slog through unfun hours with a game in pursuit of some power or item. But whiling away the hours fighting Slimes in Dragon Quest is definitely what McWilliams calls whittling, something âmindless but relaxing, inducing a flow state. You may end up with a carving, but the main focus is in the now.â
The best simple JRPGs deliver this state whenever youâre looking for it, and they do it while giving you something else to enjoy while youâre doing it, like pretty graphics, funny dialogue, beautiful music. As long as I have the constant promise of getting to explore a new town with its own cool theme song, itâs quite fun to push on, and the gameâs other promise to me is that itâs not going to throw a wrench in the process and make me experiment with a million different spells, abilities, systems, or pieces of equipment until I build the only one that works.
