Dragon Quest has been one of my favorite RPG series for about a decade. Simple, idealistic fairy tales resonated with me in my childhood the same way colorful, idealistic shonen anime worlds did in my college years, so it’s little wonder these tradition-driven games pulled me in so strongly. But I was a pretty picky and stubborn kid growing up. I’d refuse to eat my greens, I thought all furries were gross weirdos, and I’d mostly buy games based on things I was already familiar with. I may still refuse to eat my greens today.
I never touched Final Fantasy until Kingdom Hearts’s crossovers with Disney bridged the gap for me. My exposure to traditional JRPGs in general was limited. While Dragon Quest’s popularity afforded it many commendable crossovers, we wouldn’t get Fortune Street in the west for a very long time. Instead, I found a game that appealed to one of my other obsessions at the time: motion controls.
As cool as they seemed when I was a kid, I now know most early motion control-based games have a well-earned stigma for unreliability. Practically any game using the Wii’s motion sensor for anything beyond pointing has been called a wagglefest under the pretense that is what those controls amount to — waggling at random until your objective is met. Converting a turn-based RPG into a motion-controlled action RPG sounds extremely counterintuitive to JRPG fans. And yet, the wagglefest called Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors is credited with introducing me to one of my favorite JRPG series, and it’s a game I still look back on with respect.
Source: Destructoid How Dragon Quest Swords got me into Dragon Quest