Quote Originally Posted by Gameguy View Post
Or just spoil it because I'm a person that's never going to bother playing any of these games. Basically from what you've said, the spoiler is that the third game references an area from the first game. I'm not quite sure how emotionally impactful this reference would actually be beyond "Neat, I remember this".
I'll give you more detail. So in Dragon Quest 1, you play through the entire game and beat it.

In Dragon Quest 3, you start the game, completely different world. As you're playing through the game, you fight what is intended to be the games "final boss." Or so you think, and there's this hole that there are guards guarding so people don't fall down. That hole increases in size later on and one of the guards falls in, the way is no longer blocked.

So you jump into the hole, instead of a dungeon or cave it looks like a world map. The music is a bit familiar, and then when you go east a little bit, you see a castle and town, and as the castle across the lake draws into distance with the poison marsh around it, you then realize with the music and this exact map that it's the original Dragon Quest's map.

So sure, the feeling may not mean much if you don't experience it first hand, and even when you do experience it, it quickly goes away, but it's an extremely important part of why playing the first game before the first game means so much.

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Because again, you play the third game, you progress normally, that entire section is meaningless to you as a player. I mean it's not meaningless, you're still getting a completely different world map and you're only 3/4 through the game when you thought you were near the end, so similar to something like SotN, but you're getting that feeling the other way as well. You're still missing that one emotional experience you'd get by playing the first game.

And if you played Dragon Quest 3 first, you'd never understood that this was intended to be such an experience because when you go to the first game, the game that is clearly the direct sequel to Dragon Quest 3, you're in the same map, which would be obvious at that point.

So it's not quite like the experience you're getting by seeing the inverted castle in SotN, or playing through SMT4 and then seeing that there's an undergroud world map like Tokyo, that's similar to Dragon Quest 3 without playing the first game.

Now I've never played Pokemon Gold and Silver, and I only learned this awhile ago, but Dragon Quest 3 after the first game would be like playing Pokemon Blue and Red and then playing Gold and Silver, finishing the entire game map on Gold and Silver getting all eight badges, and then taking a train to the original games world and having an entire games worth of content to complete with new badges, Pokemon, etc. That same feeling wouldn't be there if you never played the original Blue and Red. Even if you've only played Blue and Red and not Gold and Silver like myself then learned about that, it's not as strong of an emotion just experiencing it right at that moment, but it's like oh wow that's awesome. The same sort of feeling you provided. But if you play Gold and Silver and you never played Blue and Red, you'd just be experiencing the game, even learning about it second hand after the fact you'd have no feelings about it because you already played through what you assumed to be "the game as it was."