One of many iconic purple dragons

Hello r/dragonquest! I have been wanting to share this with you guys and holding off for SO long but I think the time has come.

This is not about an official Dragon Quest game, but rather something I've been working on that I think might appeal to fellow DQ fans!

I am an older gamer, grew up playing Dragon Warrior I to IV and, to this day, they remain my all-time favorite games. Though I still love them, I couldn't *quite* get as much into later Dragon Quest games and have spent my entire adult life wishing we could've had more 8-bit DW games. Then, one day, I just decided to do it myself and I have been working on it for almost 2 years now.

My game is called The Book of Rynn. It is a game made from scratch for the actual NES console, *not* a romhack, and all assets have been handmade by me, a professional pixel artist and a professional music composer. Not a single asset has been lifted from anywhere. I started off wanting to essentially cosplay creating a Dragon Warrior game but over time Rynn formed its own lore, its own characters and locations, its own mechanics and vibes as well.

I had many stories to tell, so I opted for a "short stories" format rather than one long epic adventure, so I chose to break this down into 4 standalone stories. The first story, called The Royal Seal, is now out and playable as a free demo. Expect about 8 to 10 hours of gameplay.

The game is mechanically complete, and I am preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign in January 2027 to finance the production of the next 3 stories as well as making physical copies of the game on a real NES cart, with box, manual and foldable map, just like in the old days!

I will leave you with the good stuff:

Free demo: https://sebotron.itch.io/the-book-of-rynn (you'll need an NES emulator or a flash cart to play on an actual NES)

Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sebotron/the-book-of-rynn-a-new-homebrew-nes-jrpg

I would absolutely *love* for fellow fans of older Dragon Warrior games, the ones that remember the long grind fondly, the quirky NPCs, the catchy music tracks and all the evil demon wizards we sent back from whence they came, to give it a try. The final game is still in development and nothing is set in stone so feedback is more than welcome!

Thank you so, so, so much for reading and checking it out and I hope you all have an excellent day!

Sebotron

EDIT: I have to leave for a few hours, I will absolutely be back later and reply to more comments! Thank you all! I'm back!

Only 3 models and they looks the exact same shape as the tamagotchi ones I own but damn I want them!! The little diorama inside is so cute

After this, I’m swapping to Priest.

This boss ended up being a lot easier than it definitely should have been, and I’m going to get into exactly why in this description.

First things first, you probably noticed my Maximum HP is a lot higher (and my Maximum MP is higher by 10) compared to when I fought the Leviathan, even though my level is the exact same. That is because I finally took the time to grind levels in every other class (except Priest) for permanent stat boosts.

The way this happens is, as seen at the end when I leveled up from this boss, skill points can be used to grant pretty decent bonuses depending on where they’re applied. Up until this point, I only had ever played the Minstrel class, so the skill points I had earned are all the ones you see at the end of this video, mainly put into buffing my Shield skill so that I could protect myself more easily with a minor amount put into Swords to make grinding faster (and so I could unlock the Gladiator class) and a small amount into Litheness for a bit more protection (increase dodge rate at red hp). Now, though, I have gone through almost every other class, pretty much exclusively putting points into their special skills which grant those general permanent stats such as Max HP and MP. Other massively increased stats are my Strength and Resilience (Resilience is the base for your Defense stat).

To describe some of my actions for this boss fight, I looked up what Garth Goyle is weak to, and it showed that it takes 125% damage from Wind based attacks, so by using Gale Fource from the Armamentalist class in tandem from Double Up from the Gladiator class, I managed to absolutely shred this boss. And this will be the case for all future bosses that have elemental weaknesses as well. And after seeing that I was barely taking any damage before using Double Up, I was confident that I didn’t need to use Immense Defence for the protection.

Up next is The Tyrantula.

Hello all. This is my first dragonquest game and I've I've been really loving it but I've ran into an issue that's been hurting my enjoyment of the game.

I was trying to do the hallelujah + electro light combo + sleeping them with Rabs pep power at manglegrove way station but everytime I've attempted it the metal slimes run away before Rab gets a chance to sleep them, or even before I have a chance to swap in Erik and attack them with Erik or even Jade after.

Is there another way to grind decently that's not so frustrating or rng reliant? It takes way too long to pep jade up again to cast electro light even with save scumming just for the slimes to run before I get a useful turn. I don't want to burn out right here at the end because until this grinding thing I was having fun. I'm playing on harder monsters as well. Thanks for the help

Just wanted to share my current team in Arc 2 😊

Wanted to show off this Dracky tattoo I got on my leg recently! Think it came out pretty well. This was taken when I just got it so that's why the redness lol.

Also, just wanted to say I'm streaming a Full Draconian challenge run of Dragon Quest XI S over on twitch and I'm live with part 2 of the run right now!! Come hang out if it interests you or you just wanna geek out about dq with me. selene_sonata on twitch <3

My current collection of Dragon Quest games. I love this game series so much!

(Sorry if this is off-topic or against the rules; I'm totally new here and had nowhere else to ask this, so I figured I would come here🙏)

For anyone else who is a fan of both DQ and HxH and knows how much Togashi loves the series, how well-executed do you think a non-canon spin-off DQ manga would be if he illustrated and wrote it?

Tough cookie thief hp jumped from 18 to 48 Likewise my genious priest's MP went from 18 to 51, both at level 2!

Apparently, no one posted this on Reddit, but someone translated the ports of Dragon Quest I, II, and III—which were released only digitally in Japan for the Nintendo 3DS. This makes the Nintendo 3DS the definitive console for playing the entire series, especially since a translation for Dragon Quest XI is also in the works (one I’m eagerly awaiting, even though English isn't my native language).

I’ve seen countless posts on how easy this game is supposed to be but i feel that doesn’t tell the whole story.

I’ve just reached the Beacon and the game feels stupidly hard all of a sudden? Harmours one-shot me fairly consistently and most battles get out of control real fast. But i can’t seem to find any mention online of this part of the game being particularly difficult?…

And overall the balance feels off. The game starts out really easy, so i put Strong Monsters on, and Damage Dealt less but then battles drag on for way too long, so i turn Damage up again and now this.

Do difficulty sliders overcorrect this much or is this part of the game legit hard?

Hey everyone! So, with the advent of the "Reverse Engineer Everything" work in Claude taking gaming by storm right now, I took it upon myself to revisit an old old game, a sequel to Torneko: The Last Hope (PS1), called Torneko's Great Adventure 3 (PS2). This game was never translated, and as far as I know, every attempt by a fan group ended pretty quickly over the last two decades.

I wanted to see if I can reverse engineer the entire game to fully translate it, including menus, backgrounds and images in Japanese, even the title video, and all story text, and instead of machine translating the bad way, actually using the story and context to fully translate it via AI and THEN proofread it all and edit it myself. AI has come a long way in understanding context and nuance when translating, so none of that "You had your chance make your time all your base are belong to us" machine translation BS.

I'm extremely pleased with how everything has turned out, which did include editing a lot of code too. For example, there are scrolls in the game that you can write a scroll name onto, and it'll turn into that scroll. Changing the scroll library to english characters, or editing all name inputs to show english characters and increase the character limits from the japanese version (4 characters to 7), everywhere where a change from JP to ENG would have broken something, has been addressed. Resizing windows as well took some time, as did undoing a lot of hard coded work to fit english words.

I'm finalizing the translation patch soon! So stay tuned and I'll be posting an xdelta for anyone who has a legal dump of the ROM (because of course you own the Japanese game that was never localized...) and wants to play this long forgotten gem!

And for anyone who DOESN'T know, this is the grandfather of all the Mystery Dungeon series!

More to come soon- I'm doing one final playthrough trying to break everything I can and find any last remnants of things I haven't translated fully :) AND for anyone worrying, no art outside of translating signs and the title card was redone, wanted to preserve as much of the game as possible!

I didnt even find the flair for this game XD

So, I know all of us are big brain sophisticated fans, because we love dragon quest. As shocking as it sounds, sometimes, we make a good that makes us look in the mirror to question ourselves. Well, I definitely had one and that is

Equipment can cast spells

I never played another RPG where if you used let say a shield, it would cast a wind spell. Now, I knew in jrpgs you can have staffs and wand do this at times, but other equipment as well? I felt so stupid when I saw that. It did make me double check every equipment piece I had to make sure I didn’t do anything dumb like have my mage wear a magic reflective dress and would cast heal accidentally to the boss. That be silly. What idiot would do that? That’s me, I am idiot.

In my defense, no other rpg did this ever. So, it was mind blowing to see it. Got me actually checking my equipment to see if there was a spell or maybe a cool buff to help out the party. This did make me a better player at the end at least.

Any moment that made you want to do a collective face palm? Maybe question why things act a certain way? I am curious if anyone else has dealt with this or something like you can’t use zoom in buildings. That one cracked me up the most.

First time playing anything dragon quest related was when I played dragon quest 1 on the switch eshop to try out 2 weeks ago when it was on sale. Immediately bought the second after my first play session! There’s something that just captivated me when first playing the first game. Perhaps it was the art style from Akira Toriyama or the simple gameplay. I have been wanting to get into other JRPGs besides pokemon, glad to get into this series.

Was planning on playing the rest of the series in chronologic order but figured I take a quick break as to not get burned out trying to head into the next game. Next might be DQIII or DQVIII as I bought it for the 3Ds for a decent price. Although I tried the DQ builders demo I’m super tempted to go with that as my next DQ game.

Thanks for giving me your time I hope to enjoy more Dragon Quest as it has a new fan in me. 😼

I just wanted to check if that's true, any DQ2 NES fans here? I'm asking because I've always heard that FF1, FF2, Mother 1, etc. were hard and grindy, but they really weren't if you read the manuals and knew what to do. I read about the last dungeon enemies with instakill spam, is there any counter to this like e.g. Ribbon in FF?

He's the new love of my life and I love everything about him. I'm SO excited I started playing a Dragon Quest game, I'm having a blast!