Dragon Quest 3 Gave Me a Father

 This article spoils the entirety of a major subplot in Dragon Quest 3

I’ve never had a strong relationship with my own father. We’d be sent off to his house for between two weeks to a month over the summer, and that was about it. He never made an effort to really be around, something that has carried on into my adulthood (though, for various reasons, I’m glad he keeps his distance). And I’ve never had the best of relationships with stepfathers. They’ve been bad for the stereotypical reason stepfathers are usually bad. This is all to say, I don’t relate easily to strong father-child bonds or extremely present fathers in the media.

Dragon Quest 3 doesn’t give me a present father. My father, Ortega, left when I was a newborn, leaving my mother to raise me all on her own. Immediately, this is a situation I can relate with. Ortega isn’t around, and a void is left in his absence, felt by both me and my mother, a void that is desperate to be filled but, in the likely scenario of Ortega’s death long before, one that can never be filled.

Much of the game, I followed in my father’s footsteps. When I saved the people of Norvik from their slumber, it’s revealed that, when they fell asleep, Ortega had just left. In the city of Mur I found a settlement that only exists to this day because Ortega put his own life at risk to save them, and I even found his trademark helm, the only item connecting me to this brave, strong, and completely absent man. I met one of his travelling companions, who repaired and strengthened my father’s helm into the strongest piece of headwear in the game, ensuring that not only my legacy but the legacy of my father will be passed down to the heroes of the future.

I discovered that my father had not died, but was living amnesiac in another world, still fighting the good fight, and I traced his most recent steps into the lair of the evil villain, finally seeing my own father for the first time as he fought the dread Hydra.

And then he died, in my arms, only recognizing me with his final breath when he reached up to touch my face and felt instead my helm, his helm, that he had lost so long ago.

Obviously Dragon Quest did not literally give me a father. I don’t truly have one, and at 30 years old I never will. But for 40 hours, I got to be a person in a familial relationship I could truly relate to, and have a father that I could be proud of and want to meet. And for me, that was special.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Breaking Up With Final Fantasy X: A Review

You don’t have to keep dancing with the one what brung ya. Final Fantasy X means a lot to me; I named my dog after the game’s heroine. Shortly after I received my first Playstation 2, a friend moved away and gifted me three games for the system (I only had Kingdom Hearts 2, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 , and a couple others lost to time). Final Fantasy X was one of those games, and I poured hundreds of hours into a number of playthroughs. My parents didn’t often buy me games, so I wore through what I had. There’s this idea in Final Fantasy communities that generally, someone’s favorite Final Fantasy is the first one they played. I’ve never personally believed in that, partially because while Final Fantasy X brought me to the party, when I finally got my hands on a copy of XII a couple years later (worth noting my gaming years were as a teenager; I got that Playstation 2 when I was 12 in 2006, the same years the console’s successor released, so all games I played had also been...
Read more

Keylocker Review

             I won’t pretend to fully comprehend everything going on in Keylocker . At its core the game is a scathing, if heavy-handed, critique of capitalism and the systems we create in the name of perpetuating the status quo, which you play by defeating your incredibly difficult adversaries in a grid-based, turn-based system. Keylocker is an incredible game.             It’s also incredibly frustrating.             I have one complaint about this game and that is its teeth-grinding difficulty, mostly due to the inconsistency of the parry mechanic. When an enemy flashes white as they attack you, you’re meant to press the block button, negating all damage. Failure to do so can, in some instances, lead to you being one-hit-killed. However, sometimes, the flash is not indicative of the actual timing, which can lead to hair-pulling, want-to...
Read more

Making the World a Better Place, One Step at a Time

A recent gameplay element I’ve found myself particularly attached to in a couple of games, namely Okami and Unicorn Overlord , is the effect the player has on the world around them, represented in a very visual and impactful way. These games excel at making you feel as though not only are you on a grand quest to save the world, but part of that quest is improving the lives of the souls that inhabit that world. Take Okami , as my first example. At the beginning of that game, the world is shrouded in darkness, nature is decaying, and people and wildlife alike suffer greatly. But as Amaterasu regains her abilities, she is able not only to defeat the imps that serve Orochi, but bring life back to the landscape, both in massive waves of regrowth when she revives a guardian tree sapling and in minor ways as she revives small groves of flowers and individual cherry blossoms. What really caught my wonder, however, were the animals. As you revive nature, animals will return to roam the world. D...
Read more