Me? I'm a Dragon Quest superfan. So we have a lot in common. Like an awful lot of the Japanese RPG field, Pokemon borrows a lot of what Dragon Quest does, from the piddling and superficial to the downright integral. Here's a few:
5. Footsteps
Every time you walk through a door or up or down stairs, you hear the approximation of footsteps. Compare!
4. Lights, Please!
In the original Dragon Quest/Warrior you had to stock torches so you weren't completely in the dark in any of the game's dungeons. Or, once you were a high enough level, you could use the spell Radiant, which gave you a much larger view of the area. For all intents and purposes Radiant = Flash, except that it had a limited duration so you had to keep using it as the area of effect shrank. Personally I jumped for joy when most Dragon Warrior dungeons from 2 forward turned out to be well-lit affairs. While we're at it:
3. Fly = Zoom
DQ gives you this ability a lot sooner- like as soon as you can spend the 25 gold (A handful of Slimes at worst) to buy a Chimaera's Wing- which is pretty much a one-use version of Fly. Then there's Zoom spell, which you can use whenever. Just like Pokemon you can only return to towns, and only ones you've already visited. I'm not sure whether I prefer the handy Dragon Quest list or the Pokemon map view- DQ is quicker but it's harder to forget which town is where when you're looking right at the map.
2. Level-grinding like a mofo.
This cracks me up. One of the things that people complain about with Dragon Quest is the level-grinding. Odds are you will reach a point in your DQ experience where you have to wander around and raise your experience levels before you can advance. People hate this. It is the most-frequently cited complaint about JRPGs. But Pokemon has made this into an artform. Pokemon is Level-Grinding: The Game. Pokemon decided that the JRPG needed more level-grinding, and somehow they made it work!
Part of what makes level-grinding less of a hassle in Pokemon is that the game gives you a hell of a lot more to do at any given moment. The modern Dragon Quests have gotten a lot better about this, with a less-steep experience curve and lots of sidequests and other things to do. But while you're grinding in Pokemon, you can be catching things to fill out your Pokedex, wandering around collecting berries or Apricorns... you're rarely just level-grinding in Pokemon unless you want to be, and that's why Pokemon is a darling in the US and Dragon Quest, much as I love it, is struggling not to be a niche title.
1. Capturing Monsters.
In 1991 Dragon Quest V was released in Japan for Super Famicom, the first 16-bit DQ. At many points in the game your hero travels alone, and you're given the ability to tame monsters to fill out your party. Somewhere along the line somebody realized that monster-training had enough potential to be a game all its own, and so they made it into one. And that game, of course, was Dragon Quest Monsters.
No, no. Dragon Quest Monsters is the spinoff Enix did well after Gamefreak had taken the idea and run with it, resulting in the Pocket Monsters we know and love. But the idea of recruiting monsters- like a lot of the ideas that make Pokemon what it is, come directly from good old Dragon Quest.
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