Do you think Dragon Quest (Warrior) could do better in the west if they stuck with Toryiama art?
>>12198247Fun fact: Toriyama actually drew both of these
If they replaced all the characters in the game with ghost busters or something of that nature then it could have been a hit
>>12198247No. They westernized it for a reason.
>>12198247In the US: No. The audiance for RPGs in the west were teens and adults and they'd have thought DQ was only for kids.In Europe countries like France, Spain, Italy, etc, had they bother to release it, all it would have taken was to keep Toriyama's key art and put stickers on the game boxes that say "by the creator of Dragon Ball!" and they would have sold out in a week.
>>12198247It wouldn't have mattered either way. We loved the art of the monster sprites. Cartoons were cool.>the audiance for RPGs in the west were teens and adultslmao, not on the NES.
>>12198247Yes, I believe it would be. Toriyama’s art has been globally popular for multiple generations of kids at this point for good reason. It strikes a great balance between cute, funny, and cool. Kids will certainly see this… But to the adults doing marketing back in the 80s, Toriyama’s art would have looked two cutesy for what was supposed to be a Wizardry inspired game. Not saying they made the right decision or not, but that’s just how they were going to see it back then.
>"Ew, I don't want to play a gay cutesy game!"
>>12198287>Wizardry inspired gameUltima, it's far closer to that.
>>12198287This comes off as an ai response...
>this looks like that dragon ball from tv! lemme buy it mom!!
>>12198291I think the original goal with DQ was to create Wizardry(as that was popular in Japan) but accessible to kids and casuals. >>12198303Just how I write
>>12198309Well stop getting your writing lessons from gpt, or at least stop writing flowery like that.
>>12198316hey, leave that guy alone ok? I love him.
>>12198309>I thinkI don't care what you think based on what you heard, I'm actually familiar with RPGs, it's far closer to Ultima with Wizardry elements.
>>12198247The problem with the NA release of Dragon Quest isn't that they changed the box art. The problem with the NA release of Dragon Quest is that it came out way too late. It was released in NA in mid 1989. That is more than a full year after Dragon Quest III came out in Japan. That's way too late. Dragon Quest III had enormous hype leading up to its Japanese release because it was slated to be by far the biggest and most ambitions game on the console. Dragon Quest I and II became popular retroactively in its wake. Dragon Quest is a series that succeeded on grandeur — on being the biggest adventure you can have on your Famicom. That success was never going to carry over when Enix staggered the international release by half of the console's life cycle. By the time the games came out in North America, they weren't state of the art; they were behind the curve. They should have skipped bringing over Dragon Quest I and II and tried to get Dragon Quest III out by December 1988. The Japanese release was February 10, 1988, so that would have given them almost a full year to do localization and handle international logistics.
It's funny that many Americans liked Toriyama's art, through Dragon Warrior and Chrono Trigger, before they ever saw or heard of Dragon Ball.
>>12198328Yeah, we got DWIV in fucking October of 1992. Crazy. Only reason I played it was that a kid gave it to me, because I wasn't buying NES games anymore by then.
for some context, they kept up the dragon warrior and westernized cover art until 4, and 5 and 6 never released in the west except for the DS remakes
they kept up the dragon warrior name even in the gameboy remakes
>>12198328The only reason Dragon Quest even got known in NA is because they overproduced too many copies of DW1 and Nintendo Power had to give out the extras for free. It was either that or give them the Atari E.T. burial.
>>12198328> Dragon Quest I and II became popular retroactively in its wake.Dragon Quest 2 was a big success, which allowed the DQ3 hypetrain to kickstart. Famitsu would have never ran a year long marketing preview campaign of 3 had 2 not been the success it was. DQ2 was also the turning point that inspired other devs to make JRPGs, like Final Fantasy.
>>12198357DW1 did sell 500k copies in the US, before the give away, which doesn't make it "unknown".
>>12198247What this anon said:>>12198328What they should've done: Pull a Final Fantasy and skip + rename the western releases. Keep Toriyama's art and release DW3 in the west as just Dragon Warrior. Don't translate in old style English either as much as I like it, because it's supposed to be a game for kids and teens and I've heard people who got filtered by not understanding the text despite being native speakers. DQ4 then becomes DW2, DQ5 becomes DW3 etc. Then they can finally bring 1+2 to the west later with the SNES remakes as something like Dragon Warrior Origins.
>>12198337>>12198356Wasn't the Dragon Warrior rebranding necessary due to some legal dispute? I think they just didn't have the rights to the Dragon Quest name because of a board game or something
>>12198370A tabletop RPG, but yes. I think Wizards of the Coast bought them out but the name went up for grabs due to a lapsed trademark, so Square-Enix snatched it up immediately.
>>12198306I had a Dragon Quest poster and I literally showed it to my "your pic related" type friend and he was like huh that's nothing like Dragon Ball
>>12198370Same reason why Final Fantasy is named the way it is, they wanted fighting fantasy but couldn't use it because that name was taken, so they went with the next english F word.The whole shit about it being Final because "This might be our final game" is an old wive's tale.
>>12198316You are a moron. The post was nothing like the way got writes. It was just a well-thought-out post from someone with a triple-digit IQ. We are in idiocracy now where someone like you berates a more intelligent person for "writin' like da computa"
>>12198381*Gpt
>>12198309Just look up gameplay of the first Ultima, then look at the first DQ. But I mean the original Japanese release where characters don't even have turn around animations, not the superior western release. It should be obvious how much of a simplified Ultima clone DQ is, just without the isekai and sci-fi elements. Combat especially in the sequels is more Wizardry-like, and DQ3 has that thing where you go hire adventurers at the local bar among other things, but it's still more Ultima than Wizardry to me
>>12198247Yes because shit like >>12198356 just looks worse
>>12198356it's not until the remake of the third game (i think?) that they finally started to use toriyama's art for the cover
>>12198316Better than writing like a fucking retard. You should try to learn from that.
>>12198356what a downgrade
>>12198407But here the western release is better
>>12198448So I'm the only one who notices that the cover has a few monsters that don't appear in 1 or 2, like the Spiked Hare?
>>12198461wtf I hate toryiama art now, ruined
>>12198479>wtf I hate toryiama art nownice, maybe you'll actually get laid now
>>12198490I don't think that's enough, I'm still stuck in an ancient imageboard discussing niche subjects with fellow retards
>>12198505Really? Can you back that up with something? The Chibi art was cute, bit I always assumed they used it for the handheld releases because of the association of handhelds being weaker with less detailed graphics, so the box art was made simplistic to match that perception.
>>12198247toriyama's art is the reason why it never took off
>>12198526NTA but the art was somewhat chibi in the originals too, pic related, and in the manual art and such.
>>12198526>>12198560or this kind of Toriyama art>>12198553not an issue for Chrono Trigger or Dragon Ball
>>12198247>Do you think Dragon Quest (Warrior) could do better in the west if they stuck with Toryiama art?The early western games came out before Dragon Ball took of in the english speaking world. It wouldn't have changed the sales much. The issue with dragon quest 1 and 2 to lesser extent is that they were already primitive games by the time they got released in the west. Final Fantasy came out only a few months later in the west and that look liked a whole other generation in terms of detail compared to the orignal dragon quest. Their focus should have been on releasing 3 for a late 89 relase, and saving the first two for a snes or gameboy ports down the line. Like what Square did with FF 2&3.
>>12198306Didn't Dragon Ball come out way later in the West?
>>12198258If youre not screwing with me that just blew my mind
>>12198756Yep.
>>12198894Deleted my comment because I did a second search and it's innacurate, but in return what I found on the other box arts:DW1 - artist unknownDW2 - Hiroshi Kajiyama who did art for the Shining series for SegaDW3 & 4 - Chris Hopkins, a painter who later went on to paint the cover art for Age of Empires
>>12198282>We loved the art of the monster sprites.This. All the monsters are fun to look at.
>>12199037Monsters in the first game looked great. In the second game they were even more cartoony and goofy and stupid-looking and it was a little too much (for me, a child at the time). Toriyama monsters are kinda ugly in general, honestly.The infantile depictions of the heroes in the early games would have turned me off badly back then. (They still do now.) Japan just has terrible taste in some things. NA marketers probably didn't fix this because they were any great artists or art appreciators themselves, but they did in fact fix it. And then non-Japanese people had to go and fall in love with Dragon Ball Z so now we're stuck with cutesy infantile garbage and weird scrunched-up Goku faces in Dragon Quest again.
>>12199058nice bait
>>12198303>This is too well-written to be humanBixnood purple drank, nigga.
>>12199081Not black, but...>Toriyama’s art has been globally popular for multiple generations of kids at this pointRelevant to Americans in the 80s, how?>It strikes a great balance between cute, funny, and cool. Kids will certainly see this… What kid thinks like this?It really does feel like he fed it to gpt or grok
>>12198247probably not. lots of game marketing seemed fixated on trying to not be seen as kiddie, and they were more right than wrong at the time.quite immature in of itself, honestly.but as substitutions go, that box art isn't all that bad. Although, looking at it now, it probably went thru a couple drafts on the warrior. He probably had spandex butt, and nintendo said 'cover that shit up.' Hence the kinda weird sword position
>>12198272Then why did it fail in the west despite being one of the most important classics of game?
>>12198376Your exceptionally retarded friend is not a good exampe for a counterargument.
>>12199614fail is harsh, it did good enough to get 2 and 3 released.but all sorts of reasons. probably chiefly weak marketing strategy combined with a player base that was over on PCs only at the time. Same reasons no final fantasy 2 or 3
>>12199117>probably notIt sure worked for Chrono Trigger and Dragon Ball.
>>12199627In Japan the game's popularity was comparable to the first generation of Pokemon, it was a massive trend that never really died out.Bringing the game to the west and not reproducing that kind of success is a failure of incredible proportions that people don't seem to fully understand. Other JRPG and Toriyama works demonstrate that the potential was there.
>>12199627>>12199640No kid was playing rpgs on pc, they fucked up by taking ages in localizing the game and bringing in 1 instead of 3 like the other anon said.
>>12199617Nah. I mean he is retarded but it's easy to see how that logic doesn't apply. Dragon Ball is basically MUSCLES + blonde hair + kamehameha. The moment you add people with swords and armor it's a wrap for that any kind of association
>>12199843Trunks has a sword you mongoloid
>>12199849Yeah and he barely uses it cause he gets wrecked everytime he does
>>12199627>Same reasons no final fantasy 2 or 3.I don't think so. Both DQ and FF in the US actually have a similar story.DW1 was published by Nintendo but they 'only' sold 500k units, that is between 1/4th and 1/6th of what they were hoping. After that they didn't want to have anything to do with the series and Enix had to implement itself in the US to release 2/3/4 and it only took them one year to do so.Similarly, Nintendo was publishing Squaresoft games themselves in the US. Rad Racer and 3D World Runner sold over a million each, and FF1 sold 500k.History remembers DW1 being a 'failure' in the US and FF1 being successfull even though they both sold the same. DW1's 'failure' also didn't dissuade Nintendo from publishing FF1.Squaresoft then also implemented itself in the US to publish themselves, but unlike Enix, diversified and started with Game Boy games which gave them a headstart. Plans to release FF2 and 3 in the US were made and the translation for FF2 was pretty far along. The leaked US proto of FF2 shows that it only lacked a few more weeks of dev time before turning gold. As for why it didn't release, it really doesn't seem to be because of the lack of audiance. GB games did well enough and the few RPGs released on NES were constantly in Nintendo Power top charts of all kinds. The general consensus is to think that Square abandonned the NES to put all its chips on the SNES instead.
>>12199867>The general consensus is to think that Square abandonned the NES to put all its chips on the SNES instead.But personally I don't buy that because of how far along FF2's translation was and how their marketing had already announced it for a soon release and FF3 would be coming afterwards. I have a schizo theory that Nintendo of US prevented the release of FF2, or at the very least did everything they could to slow it down, because they were pissed at Squaresoft going solo and potentially becoming a dangerous competitor, like I said Rad Racer and 3D World Runner sold 1 million so Nintendo made tons of money with that and knew Squaresoft had the potential to go big and they were very protective of their market leader position with the NES. They wouldn't do the same for DW2/3/4 because of the different history regarding their publishing of an Enix game, and when it came to the GB and SNES, they wouldn't put a wrench in the cogs for those because they needed all the help they could get for the new consoles to grow an installbase and replace the NES (as evidenced by how slow the first year of the Super Famicom was even in Japan).It's just a schizo theory with nothing to back it up other than sales numbers of other games and NES FF2 US being so far along in dev. I definitely disagree with the idea that RPGs on NES were failures in the US, they were obviously not as successful as on Famicom but they did well.
Dragon Ball and Toriyama weren't well known enough internationally at the time, to the point that there was even a Dragon Ball Famicom game "Shenron no Nazo" (mystery of Shenron) that was modified and released internationally as "Dragon Power" without the license.Except for France, they actually got Dragon Ball Le Secret du Dragon.
>they should have released DW3 instead of 1The price for Nintendo to acquire the publishing rights for DW3 would have been much much greater than that of DW1. As for DW1 looking dated when it released: as opposed to what other console RPGs? Plus they did put a new coat of paint on the game to modernize it.Releasing DW1 first also made sense from the point of view of RPGs being a completely new genre so it seemed best to start with something with simple mechanics, you should have a look at the Nintendo Power issues marketing DW1 having to explain what RPGs are and how they play. Though if you ask me treating the game like it needs so much explanation like playing it was rocket science probably was a doubled edge sword.But the real fuck up was them thinking DW1 would be the same phenomenom as DQ2 and 3 were in Japan, just with the first game alone. In japan DQ3 was the cultural phenomenom it was in Japan because 1 and 2 paved the way, Nintendo of US was probably so far up its own ass with the sale numbers of Mario/Zelda that they thought they could sell 3 million units of anything as long as they market it.
>>12198247would've sold worse, the NES art is epic fantasy which nerds at the time that liked D&D expected. Toriyama would've looked too cartoony, the fact that the main character sprite looks like shit wouldn't have helped although the enemy sprites would've made more sense.DQ2,3,4 box art could've done better since at least it's more "action" looking anime style and not chibi but it's hard to know, we'd need to ask boomers what they thought of the box art as kids.
Nowadays I associate toriyama's artstyle with spics so I wouldn't want to play it.
>>12200580>Toriyama would've looked too cartoonyClearly not since Chrono Trigger and Dragon Ball became a lot bigger than anything D&D related shortly after. Do you think Pokemon would have been an even bigger success if this was its cover art?
>>12200981Dragon Ball and Pokémon becoming big in the US was an entire decade after Dragon Warrior. I don't know why everyone who makes that argument fail to realize that, it's a completly different generation of kids from a different time period. For just a bit context, Batman around the time of the NES DWs was the 1989 movie. Then in the mid 90s it became the faggy Schumacher shit with the last Batman movie at the time of Pokémon even incorporating girl power stuff.Also the SNES US release of Chrono Trigger wasn't that big and did not sell more than DW1 did on NES.
>>12200997Kids from a decade later weren't into otaku culture and kawaii designs when Pokemon came out, it was Pokemon that redefined the tastes and expectations of western audiences and fully opened the doors to the japanization of pop culture. Dragon Quest had the power to do everything Pokemon did and more, but it failed because it was released in an untimely and dishonest manner. The people who published it in the west didn't understand they had solid gold in their hands so they painted over it with the trendy color of the year and sold it for cheap.This has to be one of the biggest business failures in history.
>>12201002The point I was making is that tastes, trends and behaviour evolve with time. In the late 80's / early 90's kids stuff for boys had to look "tough" and this slowly changed throughout the 90's. If we had to imagine releasing the Pokémon we know in the US in 1989, the context would have been even more hostile than it was for DW.
>>12201018It's true that trends and behaviors evolve over time, but not as slowly and gradually as you imply. There have been massive groundbreaking events that completely subverted the status quo and changed people's perspective in a very quick and sudden way.Pokemon and Dragon Ball were criticized, demonized and censored, but they were too strong and won anyway. Dragon Quest could have been the same but they fumbled it.
>>12201028NTA but no, in the 80s anime look wouldn't have done them any flavors. Now in the 90s it's when it slowly started becoming a niche and otaku culture really began. No, Dragon Quest with an anime style in the Super NES games wouldn't have made it sell like Pokemon, but it would've gotten the interest of that small niche fanbase that was slowly growing. It really wasn't until Toonami had been airing anime for a while and Pokemon before anime became the IT thing.
>>12198247Just changing the art wouldn't have done anything. They would have had to spend a lot of money on marketing like Pokemon and FF7.
>>12198397I actually kinda like the GBC 1+2 american boxart in a weird way. It's kinda hokey in a fun way.>>12198407I was gonna say DQ7, but that didn't come out until November in the west. It was 2001, so DBZ hype train was going full force thanks to toonami.
>>12199872maybe schizo, but it wouldn't be out of character considering the other practices nintendo did in the market at the time.
>>12198290Did any kid ever say this? I was always happy to get to play a new game no matter what it was.
>>12202864nah, that's just some retard who grew up on counterstrike spouting off.
>>12202864Nobody ever said or thought this. All the cartoons, comic books, movies, video games, and all their makers and marketers from that time period? They were all dead wrong. Dragon Warrior should have kept the Japanese key art because (You), who wasn't even born at the time, know so much better than they did.
>>12201916>kinda like the GBC 1+2 american boxart in a weird way. It's kinda hokey in a fun wayWell it's chibi art basically, very much "anime" like in a way. They also chose this art style since the only reason Enix published again in America was because THQ had published Dragon Warrior Monsters and sold a bunch of copies and they used a very similar Chibi style artwork. It also made sense for this type of art for a portable game.
>>12198356Honestly the 3d monsters are actually pretty cool but the heroes look weird
>>12203130The appeal to authority fallacy is a logical error that occurs when a claim is asserted as true simply because an authority figure supports it, without providing additional evidence. This is fallacious because the authority may be unqualified, biased, or the claim may require evidence beyond the authority's opinion. Not all appeals to authority are fallacious; the fallacy occurs when the authority is irrelevant, the argument relies only on their opinion, or the authority is not a legitimate expert in the relevant field.
>>12204549Thank you ChatGPT for your hard work, as always.
>>12198247No. The reason they failed to take off in the first place is they decided to release outdated games like 1 and 2 first in the west instead of 3.
>>12198247the games bombed because they were released after the Super Nintendo was on sale, and none of the SNES titles got translated. had nothing to do with the box art.
>>12199884France was essentially the only country to get Dragon Ball within a few years of it airing in Japan. I think they started airing it there in 87 or 88, starting with Kid Goku and carrying on chronologically. Most of the world, notably the Anglosphere, started with Z first and didn't get the series until after it had already wrapped up in Japan.
>>12201002Pokemon got as big as it did because it was a gameboy game, and was basically designed as a multimedia franchise to shill merch to kids. DQ was fundamentally a video game first, and didn't get all the multimedia stuff until way after.
>>12203130>All the cartoonsLike Muppet Babies?
>>12205729Pokémon is also different in that it generally meshes well with its visual style. The cute monsters are put at the center and the cute, wacky setting fits them. Dragon Quest has a European-style questing knight at its center, fighting monsters in a far less cartoonish way, with blade and fire. Tacking cutesy infantile styling onto that is awkward and stupid. It doesn't fit well. The developers had bad taste and the Japanese audience had bad taste. Fixing this obvious flaw on the NA side was a good idea. You can't expect two very different audiences to randomly turn out to be insane in the same way.
>>12206548one of the most popular pokemon is a firebreathing dragon. DQ may be fantasy, but it's still quasi-chibi and cutesy despite the subject matter. Gen 1 pokemon especially were a deliberate and overt reference to the monsters in DQ, with some designs stolen near 1:1. the gameplay came from a minigame in DQ5. Dragon Quest had most of the ingredients, but didn't cook them right. that was the problem. Pokemon realised they needed to cater to the hoarding dopamine receptor, and they needed to have toys and TCGs and cartoons and tie-in cereals and thousands of other useless trinkets ready and waiting for the launch day of Red and Green.
Dragon Quest and Pokemon are just two slightly different iterations of the exact same themes and concepts. If you like Pokemon you also like Dragon Quest by extension.>Tacking cutesy infantile styling onto that is awkward and stupidNo, it's the basic formula for a fairy tale. There's something inherently whimsical and picturesque about knights and dragons, an objective, self-evident fact that has been known since real knights were a common sight.Dragon Quest is more in line with European folktale than the american D&D stuff from the 80s, which is an imitation of greco-roman epic with a LotR coat of paint.
>>12198262kino game idea
>>12200981I'm not sure that CT is that big, it's just a beloved game, but it's lifetime sales are like 3 million or something across all platforms.
>>12206720Five million:https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2025/03/chrono-triggers-lifetime-sales-have-now-surpassed-the-five-million-mark?utm_source=chatgpt.com
>>12206720>>12200997
>>12205729>>12206548Having cute monsters is half the point of both franchises. Toriyama's art style lends itself well to both cute and badass, and so does Sugimori's. Girls might find pikachu cute, boys might find charizard badass, and by association and interacting with the series a lot, girls might end up finding charizard cute and boys might start finding pikachu to be badass. Same for Dragon Quest, it has cute and cool monsters and characters for a wide appeal. I don't know how someone would think it doesn't fit for either franchise
>>12206548A post so retarded it belongs in a museum
>>12198407>>12198453Rate case of American cover being better
>>12198247Probably, the cartoon which was just DBZ was also a bomb, Saban only dubbed 13 of the 40 something episodes
>>12198247dragon quest would've done better in the west if they released them at all. instead they>released the NES games 3-4 years after the JP release so they always looked dated as fuck>didn't release any of the snes games>dq7 came out in late 2001 so nobody gave a shit because of the ps2 and 9/11dq8 actually did well because it didn't look massively dated compared to every other jrpg being released in america at the time, but because it also happened to have annoying ren-faire accents square became obsesed with THAT being the reason why it sold good, not because they didn't blatantly fuck up its release in the country
>>12199867The big difference is that FF1 wasn't even released until very late in the lifecycle. They had to choose between localizing 4 and getting a head start in the 16-bit era, or delaying 4 to ship 2 and 3 on the rapidly aging NES.Good decision, too, because the 16 bit era was the sweet spot for this subgenre of RPG.
>>12210145I think Saban went as far as Ginyu Force before giving up.
>>12210147Pretty much, DQ8 was only successful because it looked like a good ps2 game despite being one of the most boring Dragon Quest following the style of "it's just a few predetermined characters and there is no interesting gimmick" like 4. 9 is so much more ambitious.
>>12210250FF2 US was announced in January 91. The SNES was released August and FF4 US in November. They had ample time to release FF2 before the SNES and before 4. Not only that but the SFC and SNES had a VERY slow start with most third parties not releasing for it as they were in a "wait & see" mode because they didn't trust that it would be successful since up to that point nothing could dethrone the NES and Famicom.So we're supposed to believe that Square would hold off on releasing FF2 on an already established market, within a time table that would allow them to release 4 later that year anyway, because they wanted to hold off and focus on FF4, for a console that wasn't installed yet and that few trusted to become a success?And again, this, even though the translation was almost complete and they had the money to release thanks to the success of their GB titles.Does not compute to me hence the schizo theories.
>>12211734>FF2 US was announced in January 91. I mean the NES game in case that's not clear
>>12202864Me neither, must have been some really insecure kids.
Dragon Ball wasn't quite as popular yet, so probably not. Does anyone else remember how big OVER 9000 got because of toonami?
