Hi! I was going to send out a big mopey pseudo-cultural-critical explanation of why I took a break, but that’s boring and who cares! This is a quick thing in response to scurrilous commentary I heard the other day from sources I shan’t name impugning the quality of Dragon Warrior VII for PS1. I might’ve talked about this a bit before, but never at quite such length. Okay cya!!
In the wake of the release of Dragon’s Dogma 2 (a game I’m working on a longer thing about; the tl;dr there is that it’s really cool and I like it a lot), there’s been a lot of discussion about “quality of life” features in games. I’ve always found this a slightly funny term—like, I’m sitting here playing video games or whatever; the quality of my life right now is pretty solid—but I take the point. It’s unquestionably annoying, in most circumstances, to lose progress, wade through slow turn-based combat animations, not be able to travel quickly, etc.
In any case, the term seems, on its face, to brook no objection. Who doesn’t want a higher-quality life? The data are in: apparently, a lot of people do indeed want worse lives, given that many of the Biggest Games of the last few years intentionally strip back quality of life (QoL (lol)) features. While FromSoftware’s Elden Ring had a ton of nice QoL stuff that their earlier “Soulsbourne” games had lacked, it was still a tricky, difficult game, and earlier Soulsbourne games—including, of course, Dark Souls, arguably the most influential game of the 2010s—were notorious for the QoL stuff they lacked (fast travel, the ability to pause gameplay, quicksaves, difficulty modes, etc.).
Or, to take maybe an even higher-profile example: in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo doubled down on their controversial decision to have items fall apart as you use them; though I haven’t played much of TotK yet, I’ve been led to understand that the things which fall apart are even bigger and higher-effort, such as trebuchets (?) and helicopters (?!).
I am bringing this all up because I recently heard repeated the received wisdom that the PlayStation 1 version of Dragon Quest VII, localized as Dragon Warrior VII, is a uniquely poor entry in the legendary series. This reputation stems largely from not only its length, which is admittedly enormous (using emulator speed-up liberally, it took me about sixty hours, easily the longest game I’d played in that version of RetroArch; howlongtobeat.com puts a main quest playthrough at 109 hours on average), but also from its opening hours, about which I have either written about or thought about writing about before.
Dragon Warrior VII does not, as has been reported, “look like an SNES game,” though the squished character sprites took me some getting used to. It looks, if anything, like the precursor to the well-received DS remakes of IV, V, and VI—lushly chunky polygonal environments populated by expressive two-dimensional sprites depicting characters from multiple angles. (See also: the recent Star Ocean: The Second Story R—itself, to my eyes at least, the most disappointing iteration of the “HD-2D” style perfected in the wonderful Octopath Traveler II. Despite the similarities, Dragon Quest VII looks way, way better than Second Story R, which weirdly makes me kind of want to vomit. Sorry!!! I really wanted to like it!!!!)
Infamously “slow,” you don’t fight an enemy in Dragon Warrior VII until at least four hours into the game. You’re mostly just chilling out on your little island—apparently the only island in the entire world1—hanging out with your pals, chipping away at a big weird puzzle in the basement of some mysterious ruins, trying to get various important items from your drunk uncle.
The game’s 3DS remake (created after Square merged with Dragon Quest creators Enix; localized this time around, in the style the games would continue to adopt, as Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past) abbreviates the introductory hours, reducing its big slow puzzle to a zippy, perfunctory fetch quest. This was—and here we reach the relevant point—widely lauded as a QoL improvement. (Dragon Quest VIII, released long before the VII remake, chucks a slime at you within seconds of opening the game, as if snarkily appeasing those who complained about the VII introduction. It’s not as good of an opening!)
While I can’t say that Dragon Warrior VII for the PlayStation is the best in the series, or even my favorite (the first two acts of Dragon Quest V invent or perfect like, ~85% of what I love about video games), the official Corridors of Time position is that Dragon Warrior VII for the PlayStation totally owns.
For what it is worth, I have since played the first few hours of the 3DS version; it seems, apart from the changes we are here discussing, really great. The PS1 version also lacks some quality of life features I do miss quite badly—specifically, the game doesn’t let give you any clues to the obnoxiously obscure locations of the (latterly titular) fragments, which are essential to progress the narrative. I also confess that, as most readers of Corridors of Time have probably inferred, I am predisposed to opinions like “the PS1 version of Dragon Quest VII is good” (what if the boring thing were actually interesting? What if the bad thing were actually good???), because I am annoying. (I have a fucking Substack2, for God’s sake.)
In any case, on the heels of the runaway financial and critical success of Dragon’s Dogma 2, we here at Corridors HQ have elected to more deeply indulge our petty contrarianism. The introduction to Dragon Warrior VII is, we argue, not only Actually Good—but prescient.
Reviewers and commentators seemed to quickly settle on a vocabulary for speaking about why and how Dragon’s Dogma 2 is good. The consensus goes like this: by stripping away quality-of-life features, reviewers say, DD2 forces you to immerse yourself in its meticulous, remarkable world. “There’s no fast travel! The quests are just ‘go over here and talk to a guy!’” Well, yes, but that’s because they’re red herrings: they are designed to get you into out and about, stumbling onto surreal emergent experiences; by the time you loop back around to the cities, quests, etc., they’ve begun to feel momentous, the digital landscape shimmering with reality.
(At this point, each review, it seems, is contractually obliged to include one (1) anecdote of such an experience. For my part, I was riding an oxcart to the mysterious “Checkpoint Rest Town” when an ogre and a bunch of hobgoblins started fighting in the middle of the road; the ogre drop-kicked a hobgoblin through the oxcart, shattering it, and proceeded to fly straight off of a cliff, rewarding me with experience for both itself and the dead hobgoblin, and forcing me to walk the rest of the way to a campsite. I laughed at this for like, five minutes.)
There’s more to say about Dragon’s Dogma 2 (hopefully, or else my next letter is pointless), but the implicit economy outlined here is worth pausing on. “Immersion,” perhaps the most elusive of game-critical terms, and “quality of life” are, according to this unspoken conceptual framework, inversely proportional. To some extent, then, the lower the quality of your life, the higher the quality of your experience. (In video games, that is. For what it is worth, we here at Corridors of Time HQ have tried this “IRL,” and can confirm this formula does not apply.)
As I’m sure all the reviewers would acknowledge, the actual calculus is more complicated than this. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is replete with quality-of-life features earlier video games lacked—you can save the game pretty easily before quitting, to take one example. Moreover, a lot of the big-ticket deprivations are a bit overblown (intentionally, I think). Some quests aren’t marked on the map, but a lot of them are. The oxcarts work pretty well for fast-travel purposes! Sometimes you get attacked or whatever, but the higher your level, the easier these assaults get to take care of. The terrifying “dragonsplague,” rumored to soft-lock your save file, doesn’t perma-kill vital NPCs; they apparently respawn after about a week of in-game time.
It is worth noting that this is a register of experience particularly susceptible to differences in circumstance and tastes. While it may increase my “immersion” in a game at this point to have to redo half an hour of gameplay (I almost wrote “work”—a slippage which itself could constitute a topic for another letter), it might not’ve made me feel particularly good when I was still driving delivery at night and teaching during the day—a half an hour of leisure time was harder to come by. (I’m not sure what would’ve made me feel “particularly good” during that time in my life, but that story is, again, for another letter.)
In its introductory hours, Dragon Warrior VII completely cashes out on the idea that subtracting crucial gameplay elements can lead to immersion. Combat, of course, isn’t a QoL feature—as Dragon Warrior VII progresses, I am sad to report it starts to feel like the opposite—but it’s far more essential to the series’s formula than, say, fast travel is to the ordinary open-world RPG. Putting your first battle off that long was a highly intentional design decision. (It is akin to what Ueda Fumito, the director of Ico—a game FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki said “awakened [him] to the possibilities of the medium”—called “design by subtraction.”)
And that gameplay decision perfectly concords with the game’s narrative design. Everyone thinks, at the beginning of the game, that your island is the only island in the entire world. By the end of the introduction, you have so settled into the terrain that (spoilers, though not really) when you finally do get to leave, it’s momentous. The island itself is an elegantly microcosmic world—a small town, a big town, a castle; some overworld stuff, some underground stuff, some big old ruins—and its mysteries are as profound as those of much larger game worlds. Strange tunnels trail downwards to locked doors; those doors open onto massive caverns, revealing intricate, rewarding puzzles. (I’d argue the sense of place established in the opening hours of Dragon Warrior VII approaches that of something like… that’s right…Final Fantasy VII.)
All art relies on the rhythm of tension and release. Perhaps most obvious in music (and thrillers), art establishes expectations in the beholder, then satisfies or subverts them. Plots build, then resolve; even visual art is predicated on the idea that you can capture both moments in the same image. Dragon Warrior VII does this with a mechanical convention—the combat encounter. It’s not perfect or anything, but it’s kind of thrilling, and in a way that parallels what reviewers are finding so revelatory about Dragon’s Dogma 2.
The history of video games suffers, perhaps more than the histories of other art forms, from being seen as straightforwardly progressive. This narrative indeed might have a bit more explanatory power than it does with other art forms, given how entirely games are bound up with rapidly developing technologies. But as is always the case, these advances come at something of a cost. Independent designers have long specialized in spelunking forgotten historical depths. At its least interesting, this tendency leads to what I think of as “love letter syndrome”—nostalgia can dampen the capacity for genuine engagement with artistic history. On the other hand, so much of this stuff is incredible. It’s neat, then, to see games like Dragon’s Dogma 2 take a similar approach from the big-budget side of things, especially as the development cycle for “cutting-edge” games approaches wide-scale untenability. (For its part, Dragons’s Dogma 2 has some pretty bad performance issues; while they don’t bug me, I’m not quite ready to argue they’re aesthetically integral.)
In any case, my advice to all the AAA developers reading this? If you want your game to sell three million copies or whatever, cut a bunch of shit that people think they want out of it. The end!
A conceit which, I feel obliged to note, never fails to remind me, perhaps a bit non sequiturishly, of the concluding lines of one of my favorite poems, George Oppen’s “Ballad.” Turns out a lot of people are out there thinking about “the idea of going to an island”!
I also feel obliged to note this: it has recently come to my renewed attention that the Substack internet corporation is even more unchill than I remember them being. I’m going to stick with it for now because, opinions aside, I am presently in a psychospiritual position where I am unable to think logistical matters like this through, let alone act on them. On the off chance I ever intentionally make this thing paid again—which is to say, if our letter-mailing overlords begin snatching away a percentage of my hard-earned posting dollars—I will be actively considering my options. I’d love a pay-what-you-want option for Premium Content anyway; I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do with their lives.