Just started Dragon Quest VII & a huge wall of text about taking your time in RPGs

(If you really can't be bothered to tackle this immense wall of text, just skip to the bottom for some images of Maribel and a link to the 15 chapters of the Dragon Quest VII official manga!)

A very late night post just to say that after playing a bit more Tales of Eternia I felt in the mood to play another RPG rather than just ploughing through ToE and decided to eventually start playing Dragon Quest VII.

Just to explain that, I have a horrible tendency to just play RPGs for way too long in each session and then forget most of the plot points. It also takes things out of perspective; when I first played FFVII it took me several play sessions to get out of Midgar - I must have been playing for less than an hour each time. When I finally got onto the world map it felt like some epic acheivement since my journey through Midgar had taken almost a week in real time at one hour a day. It also fitted in with the characters' experience since the events leading up to their arrival at Kalm are obviously meant to take several days, not just six hours.

Recently I'll do things like play Persona 3 in 14 hour sessions which really takes away that slow but steady sense of discovery and progression that can really add weight and scope to an RPG's story. It's horrible to think that had I had this tendency back when I played FFVII, I would have not only got through Midgar in one go, I would also have got through Barret's hometown at least. I'd have gone from being totally new to the game and being introduced to Barret to pretty much completing his sub-plot in one go, via all the events of Midgar, Kalm, Fort Condor, Junon, Costa del Sol, Corel Town and the Gold Saucer all in one long session.

I decided to pretty much force myself to play in smaller sessions. I've sort of managed to do it with ToE so far, splitting my 12 hours of progress into 3 different sessions and one of the ways I've done it is to switch to playing another game rather than playing the same one until I can't keep my eyes open any more.

In this case I turned to DQVII and - bearing in mind that I haven't properly played V or VI yet and that I've only now played VII for a couple of hours - found it to be a really nice mix between the things I found so great about VIII with the old school things that I to IV had but VIII didn't seem to. Even slightly negative things that you still get attached to, like the bits when you think "What the fuck am I meant to do now?" and just wander around helplessly are in DQVII but didn't occur in VIII (for me, anyway). My only complaint is that it looks pretty ugly - I'd definitely say they jumped the gun when it came to making the switch to 3D (never mind moveable-camera-3D).

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Anyway, now for some related goodies. First of all there's the official manga which has been translated by fans... Arbiter of Time, a member of Dragon's Den, posted a link to the official manga of the game. You can get every chapter released so far from here, direct downloads.

And here are some pics of Maribel. It seems that fan art (particularly hentai) of DQVII is pretty rare, especially compared to DQIII, IV and VIII.

Hentai/sexy stuff:

Innocent stuff:

Dragon Quest IV heroine pictures

I just found a nice loli pic of the DQIV heroine (or "low teen" as I call this age group in terms of hentai) so here it is along with some other DQIV heroine pics. Not all of them are ecchi/hentai but then there doesn't seem to be that much hentai of her, especially when it comes to one-off pics.

The DQIV heroine just grows on me more and more. It may be because she seems to be more human (oh ho, not quite, I know) that Loto who has this legendary status. I mean, in DQIII there are no other characters per se for Loto to interact with but the DQIV heroine has a cast of different personalities to give her a personality by association, if you see what I mean.

Then special mention goes to this pic since it's one of the first non-DQVIII pics I saved and the picture that is partly responsible for getting me interested in the rest of the series. I also saw a few female Loto pics that I just saw as "female warrior" pics and later found out were DQ-related when I started getting into the series more.

Finally, this pic gets special mention just because of- D'AWWWW!

lol McCain

Hey look, I found a decent Dragon Quest Halloween pic...

So anyway, I really don't want to be political on this blog, and I'm not American so it's really none of my business, but this just actually made me lol. I'm sure that most Americans have seen this already so this is for those that haven't along with all the people from other countries that visit this blog.

I don't want to show any preference to either of the Presidential Candidates (though needless to say I'll be downloading that Sarah Palin porno as soon as I hear it's out) so let me put it this way; I'll just leave this here...

Happy Halloween!

To be honest, Halloween isn't really a big deal here in the UK (or in most countries) and the people that most seem to enjoy it are North Americans and Japanese artists, who almost all seem to do Halloween-themed art on this day.

Over here its effects extend merely to the odd group of little kids knocking on your door and asking for sweets and sort of perfunctory appearances in chain shops (like maybe there'll be an offer on horror films or some line will appear in their promotional material such as "Devilishly good discounts this Halloween!")

Unless it's just being misrepresented by obsessives on the internet, it sounds as if in North America it's much more of an event. Over here in the UK, the only public holiday that people really make a fuss about is Christmas Day and New Year's Eve then to a far lesser extent Mothers' Day and Valentine's Day. Fathers' Day isn't seen as such a big event as Mothers' Day (though the greetings card companies are doing their best to change that) and Easter tends to pass without a trace unless you're a kid and get lots of chocolate eggs. Even the day celebrating England's patron saint, St George's Day, can easily pass without most people noticing. That said, the Irish equivalent, St Patrick's Day, seems to go off with more of a bang (and sales of Guinness going through the roof).

Anyway, that's enough of this little cultural exchange. I was looking around for Dragon Quest Halloween art and, to be brutally honest, none of what I found was any good. So I thought, OK, what fits into the following criteria: Halloween, Dragon Quest and this blog? For lack of ghost rape pictures, I decided to go for the DQIII witch (or, er, mage).

Hmm... There's not that many and I'm pretty sure a few of them have already been uploaded via sets. OK, here's some of the better Halloween artwork I've seen today (not DQ-related, sadly).

How's that for a more celebratory amount of images? Yes, some of them only got in because they have cute lolis in... Special mention goes to the next one as it's NSFW so may interest those of you who aren't too bothered about general Halloween-themed images.