First up, glad tidings: our copy of Pokemon Black is here! That Guy will be working on that Epic Flail as soon as he finishes with Jump Superstars- possibly sooner, I dunno.
But for now, Pokemon Weekends. I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest IX once again, and while I do enjoy it, there are bits here and there that are still clunky and old-fashioned. And a lot of them are things Pokemon has a better handle on. That- and the fact that Pokemon Black and White actually outsold Dragon Quest IX's opening weekend -inspired this weekend's list, a followup to the Five Ideas Pokemon Got From Dragon Quest.
5. Cashing Out
This actually started out as another idea Pokemon got from Dragon Quest- probably a stronger link than the footstep thing but I'd never done a YouTube video before and wanted to try it out. When you suffer Total Party Kill in Dragon Quest, you lose half of your money. If you're saving for something specific this is the most obnoxious thing in the world. The earlier Pokemon games did this as well, but the latest games have introduced a much better system: instead, you just lose whatever amount of money you would have won as your prize for this trainer battle.
There's a good reason for the disparity of these systems, though: getting money is a lot easier in Dragon Quest since everything you fight drops gold. Pokemon's introduced a lot more ways to get money since it was first introduced, but I still pad-reset every time I get wiped out. And I'd still like to be able to get a few bucks for every Pidgey I have to grind. (Of course that's probably why you can't: since Pokemon, as I said before, is Level Grinding: The Game, you'd never run short of money if you got it from every Pokemon you beat. It also just makes more sense that random Pokemon wouldn't have cash on them, so it's win-win.)
4. Bring a Friend
Dragon Quest IX is the first game in the series to have serious multiplayer options, but there's a catch: it only uses local wifi, so you and your fellow adventurers have to be in the same physical location. This was a great solution for downtown Tokyo. Guess where I don't live? I'm the only person I know in my area with the game, and so this is a total drag. Bring on the Friend Codes!
3. The Seamless World
From the beginning, this was one of the things about Pokemon that I really enjoyed. In Dragon Quest, like in most JRPGs, there's a World Map- all your wandering from point to point is done on the World Map, and then when you reach a landmark of some sort the perspective shifts- suddenly that town that was two sprites wide is huge. Once CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs got involved, this meant load times any time you went anywhere significant as well.
Pokemon does not do this. You can look at it as there being no World Map, or that everything takes place on the World Map. Either way, the fact that the transition is no less jarring than town music fading out and route music fading in is a stroke of genius. (Though I do miss Pokemon on Super Game Boy where the color pallette would suddenly shift once you hit a town. That was neat.)
2. Party Management: The Impersonal Touch.
Because Dragon Quest is set in a fantasy world with only touches of technology, it tends to present its menu options in fantasy terms. To save your game, you go confess to a priest or inform a king of your heroic deeds. To switch party members, you go to a tavern and change your roster. All the menus are very conversational, and more time-consuming than they need to be. Every time I use the bank in Dragon Quest IX I have to click through three screens of text to deposit or withdraw gold- so I don't lose half of it to a TPK -and it is getting OLD.
Pokemon is set in a version of the present day, or maybe the future. Or someplace else entirely with a bunch of neat technology. So there are computers, one of which your trainer is carrying around at all times. Save? Bring up a menu and save anywhere. Change party members? You still have to go to specific locations, but there's one in every town and the newer generations have interfaces that make it quick and simple to change out a bunch of party members at once. Comparatively, Dragon Quest is still in the Dark Ages. Not just in terms of setting, but even the most modern installments still creak in places under the weight of a menu system whose roots lie in 1986.
1. Once Again, Capturing Monsters.
Like several other things I've talked about, Dragon Quest did it first. But Pokemon does it so much better. You're probably pretty familiar with how a monster is caught in Pokemon- weaken monster, Poke Ball, ???, profit. In Dragon Quest it goes like this:
First, there's a limited number of the game's monsters you can catch, assuming you're playing DQ V or VI which are the only mainline games so far that even let you catch monsters. (VIII sort of does, but you can't use them as regular party members, which means it's pretty useless in terms of Pokemon comparisons.) So when you find a catchable monster you want, you have to make sure it's the very last monster in a group defeated and then, after the battle, there's a certain percentage chance the monster will join you. The better the monster, the lower the chance.
The pinnacle of this is the Liquid Metal Slime, known in earlier translations as the Metal Babble or Metabble. You have a 1 in 255 chance of recruiting one of these. This is complicated by the nature of the LMS' existence as an XP booster: it's very hard to kill and it likes to run away. So if you can kill it before it bolts, there is a tiny fraction of a percent of a chance it might join you.
Personally, I'd prefer to just throw a ball at the damn thing and be done.
HONORABLE MENTION: Resurrections
This one just occurred to me as I was sitting here, but it's a pretty important one as well. In Dragon Quest, death carries a horrible price- half your money as I mentioned above. But even the death of one or two party members can be a horrible setback, as you have to take them back to a priest and pay to get them returned to life. Later in the game you get some resurrection spells that don't cost you anything but MP, and then things get easier- if the party member with the spell isn't the dead one. DQIX at least fixed one of the other problems with Total Party Kill- prior to that game (and possibly VIII, I really need to play that again) you lost half your money and had to pay to get everyone except the hero brought back to life. Absurd.
Meanwhile, Pokemon not only has free revival, but the Revive item is only moderately expensive for reasonably easy ressurection on the go. The Yggdrasil Leaf is the only thing other than a spell or a priest that revives characters in Dragon Quest, and they are hideously rare, can usually only be carried in limited numbers, and cannot be bought.
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