How Dragon Quest created the Survival Arc

The world of Alefgard is made up of 64 squares on a 8x8 grid, each populated by up to four kinds of monster. The discrete lines that divide these grids aren't normally visible to the player, but are usually flagged by geographic features--terrain changes from plain to forest or vice-versa, mountain ranges, bridges, and the like. At the outset of Dragon Quest the player is dropped into the Ladutorm/Tantagel region, a rectangular area of the map populated by Slimes and Slimebeths/Red Slimes.

The player character's starting stats in Dragon Quest are determined by the first four characters of their name; each character had a hidden numeric value, the sum of those values would be divided by 16, and the remainder would be used to determine the player's starting stats and growth type.

Japan has two phonetic writing systems, hiragana (for native words) and katakana (for foreign words), as well as a third writing system called kanji used to compress long phonetic words into shorter logograms. (For example, byouki "sick" is 4 characters long in hiragana びょうき but only 2 characters in kanji 病気.) However, Dragon Quest only uses hiragana in its text, for several reasons: it costs less memory to store 46 characters than the 82 including katakana or 2000+ kanji would require, and because hiragana is the first writing system a Japanese child learns. This makes the game accessible to people of all ages. Thus Dragon Quest mapped the 46 hiragana characters and two punctuation marks (゛and ゜) to numeric values 0~15.

Dragon Quest is a lot of things, but low-effort isn't one of them. Believe it or not, this system is streamlined compared to what came before--Japanese PC RPGs like Dungeon. For the better, Phantasy Star et al. rendered it archaic within two years.

Without going into great depth as to how the system works--you can find a Japanese-language guide archived here--let's use an example to gauge relative player strength. The common boys' name "Touya" is written とうや in hiragana, and so is three characters long. Any unused space in a name less than four characters is treated as a 0. と is worth 10 points, う is worth 13 points, and や is worth 14 points. Added together that's 37, divided by 16 we get 2.3125 rounded down to 2, and to get the remainder we multiply 2 by 16 and subtract that from 37: 37 - 32 = remainder 5.

The remainder is then compared against a table that assigns Strength, Agility, Hit Points, Magic Points, and Growth Type based on the remainder's value. In this case, remainder 5 gives us 4 Strength, 3 Agility, 15 Hit Points, 4 Magic Points, and Growth Type II. There are four Growth Types in all, with each one having higher growth in two stats and lower growth in two others. (Think like Natures in Pokémon, but they affect four stats instead of two and apply to every level-up instead of just being a flat 10% increase and 10% decrease.) Growth Type II raises Strength and HP growth but decreases Agility and MP growth, making a beefy physical attacker with low defenses and low magic.

The hero in Dragon Quest learns their first spells at levels 3 and 4--Hoimi/HEAL and Gilla/HURT, Hoimi recovering 10~30 Hit Points and Gira dealing 5~12 damage. Focusing on the early game, our sample hero Touya is relatively well built for survivability, but that isn't the case for all heroes. The lowest possible starting stats in Dragon Quest come from "remainder 6" names; these names produce heroes with 3 Strength, 4 Agility, and 13 HP. Only names whose sum is 6, 22, 38, or 54 can cause this. (Names that come to mind are the female names Aoi, Kirino, and Sara, the unisex name Yuu, and the family name Rikino. Yuu is particularly notable because it's also a common nickname for Yuuta, Yuuto, Yuuko, Yuugo, Yuuichi...etc.)

The first objective of the player in Dragon Quest is to get to level 3 so they can learn Hoimi and thus have the stamina to travel far enough to reach the Roto's/Erdrick's Cave, and eventually Garai/Garinham. Since magic is inaccessible until that point, the player's relative difficulty is going to be based purely off of their physical stats. For our examples, Touya is a 4/3 Strength/Agility with 15 HP, while Yuu is a 3/4 Strength/Agility with 13 HP. Agility is used to calculate the Defense stat in Dragon Quest while also determining one's probability to escape from battle, with Defense being equal to [Agility / 2].

In general, the damage formula in Dragon Quest is:

(Attack - ([Defense / 2] + Armor Defense Bonus)) / 2 = Damage

With 1 as the lower limit. The fact that the bonus from equipped armor is applied after Defense is calculated for the player is important. The structure of this formula means that it generally takes four points in Agility to equal one point of damage reduction, and reductions from armor are four times as effective as reductions from level-ups. This is a very influential formula, one that was mostly reused in future Dragon Quest games and copied by games that tried to emulate its style, especially with regard to RPGMaker. Odds are if you've delved into the world of Japanese Role-Playing Games beyond just Final Fantasy, you've played at least one game that used this formula or a variant of it.

The monsters of Dragon Quest will kill you with a smile.

Regardless of Growth Type, the hero's Agility is 0 until level 3 and from there goes up by 2 every level until level 7, after which those with enhanced Agility steadily gain one more point over those without until they cap at level 30 with 12 more points. This means that during the Survival Arc, the player will take damage equal to half an enemy's Strength until they equip some form of armor. Fortunately the game does give the player a pittance of Gold Pieces from the castle throne room to start with, but if they blow that allowance on a weapon instead of armor then they're in for a rude awakening.

Slimes are 5/3 Strength/Agility with 3 HP, Slimebeths are 7/3 Strength/Agility with 4 HP. If the player ventures to the south they'll be in the northern part of the Rocky Mountain Cave region and won't be able to pass over the mountain tiles, but they will start to encounter 9/3 Drackies with 6 HP. Closer to Roto's Cave they'll run into 11/8 Ghosts with 7 HP, and nearer to Garai 11/12 Magic-Users/Magicians with 13 HP. Not only are they physically stronger, the Magic-Users can cast Gilla, which deals a flat 3~10 damage irrespective of Agility.

Remember, at this point Touya is 4/3/15 and Yuu is 3/4/13. Unequipped both of them will deal 1 damage to any of these opponents, because the minimum damage output in Dragon Quest is 1, while on Critical Hits Touya will always instantly kill a Slime and deal 1~4 to a Slimebeth. Touya will take 1~2 damage from Slimes, 1~3 damage from Slimebeths, while Yuu will always take 1 damage from Slimes and 1 or 2 damage from Slimebeths. These enemies are both easily survivable since any hero we make will always have a 1:1 damage trade with the monsters each turn while having 3~5 times the number of Hit Points.

Dragon Quest in Famitsu #1.

The problems come in when you factor in the Drackies for the first time. A Dracky deals 2~4 damage while always taking 1 outside of crits, outpacing both heroes 1:2 or 1:4, taking between four and eight turns to defeat the player depending on variance while the player needs 6 turns of normal damage to defeat them. Critical Hits only have a 1/32 chance of occurring, meaning the player has a ~1% chance to take out the Dracky in two turns and not much other hope. Ghosts likewise outpace the player 1:2 or 1:5 and Magic-Users can go as high as 1:10.

This is the first Survival Arc. The only monsters in the game the player can survive against when they first turn the game on are Slimes and Slimebeths. This is a mathematical fact. The only means of changing this fact is gaining levels and/or equipment, and the +4 Defense Leather Armor costs 70 Gold Pieces out the gate. Both Slime variants award just 1 Experience Point on defeat, but Slimebeths also give 2 GP instead of 1. The player needs 7 XP to reach level 2 and 23 XP to reach level 3, which means that the player's first real objective in Dragon Quest is to run laps around Ladutorm Castle fighting 23 Slimes while running from Slimebeths to conserve their HP. (Grinding for the 60 GP Club for +4 Attack takes longer than grinding to level 3 even if the player purposefully only fights Slimebeths.) 

Past authors have thrown up their hands at this point and plead "Why?"

This is the first Surival Arc, and it is a seminal moment in the history of Role-Playing Games for also being the genre's first grind. Not in the literal sense of being the first game to have grinding, but in the sense that this was the model of grinding emulated by a greater industry, the first grind played by millions, the grind that inspired Sakaguchi, Itoi, and Naka. But as Leeroy Lewin illustrates in discussing Phantasy Star, the Survival Arc is not meaningless no matter how it unconscionable it may be. The Survival Arc establishes the hostility of the world and how unwelcome the protagonist is inside of it; the hero's job is to perform a role fighting monsters, but at the outset of their adventure they can do so only inside a limited space in which the conditions are right for them to thrive.

The hero of Dragon Quest can only survive fighting Slimes and the occasional Slimebeth until he reaches level 3, Alisa/Alis of Phantasy Star can only profit from fighting Monster Flies/Sworms on the outskirts of Camineet--and encountering nearly anything else is a death sentence until her first level-up. The Warriors of Light in Final Fantasy are stopped cold if they try to fight Gigas Worms before Goblins, and Ninten of MOTHER/EarthBound Beginnings won't get far against Alligators if he doesn't stop to beat up some Hippies first. Each and every one of these games follows a delicate but soul-crushing sense of balance in which the player must slowly acquire strength in a hostile world where power rules absolute over all else. So it goes for Courageous Perseus, Mugen no Shinzou, and Xanadu.

Over the course of a traditional Japanese Role-Playing Game the stat paradigm governing the Survival Arc shifts. The oppressor-oppressed relationship between the monstrous world and the player character transforms into one of predator and prey. The endgame of any RPG has the player hunting down rare monsters rather than hiding from them; chasing Grand Kuwagamon parties in the Destroyed Belt of Digimon Story for that maximized 4000+ XP, or hunting the Jachol Cave Skull Eaters in Final Fantasy V for 5~10 Ability Points. This curve reflects the development of the party into a functional and destructive force in the world.

Games which lack a Survival Arc and the subsequent transformation of the paradigm provide an entirely different qualitative experience. Pokémon has no Survival Arc to speak of because its encounters and roadblocks are designed in such a way that strong encounters are gated behind bosses the player naturally keeps pace with, resulting in the early game and the endgame often feeling identically-paced throughout. The progression of the player character(s) is presented wholly through the acquisition of new moves, new items, and changing forms. In fact, few games after 1991 have a "true" Survival Arc in the Dragon Quest sense of it. They may have a more abstracted form of "grinding," but the immediate threat of a game over from stepping too far out of bounds is rarely present. Instead, invisible walls or physical borders keep the player from going where the game designers don't want them.

"In the real world, doing all the right things doesn't guarantee you peace of mind or economic security. You can say all the right things, get the best grades, go to the right schools, and at the end of the day be passed up for someone else. In the real world most people must work hard, but only some of the people that work hard will be rewarded; in these video games, everyone who works hard will be inevitably rewarded, and everyone who does not will never make it."

This arc expressed in play what early RPGs lacked in words, demonstrating the growth of the player character(s) through their struggle and gradual progress towards overcoming difficult monsters. It also expresses an idealized model of work; there is no equivalent template for success in the world that created the RPG. There are strategy guides, but they don't always help. You can get the best education imaginable, place in the top bracket of your nation's standardized tests, graduate from an incredible university--and in the end, be passed over.

The numbers in real life are against you rather than on your side; there's a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand other people applying for the job you found and your application may never even be seen by a human being. The real world requires hard work and good die rolls to succeed, and success isn't inevitable. Look at Lovecraft, at Marx, at Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe. You can create world-changing literature or art, capture the voice of your people or write the course of history in the next century, and never live to see your labor bear fruit. It's so easy to live and die poor.

Any one of us may live that life, dying unknown in some forgotten corner of the world, with no modicum of control over it. Even you; even me. There's no use fearing it, there's little we can do about it. Despite our pretensions to the legend of the self-made man, in truth we are eternally at the mercy of chance.

The Survival Arc stands in opposition to this. It imagines an alternative to our system, provides the hope that perhaps there can be a world where it is not our genes, the circumstances of our birth, or the fickle hand of fate that determines our course in life, but instead our choice to pursue a direct and obvious path to success. Perhaps one day everyone who desires financial and occupational stability will be able to have it simply by choosing to have it. Until that time comes, we will need to be reminded of what could be.