Dragon Quest: The Dive Is A VR Attraction Capturing 40 Years of Gaming

What the report says

After forty years, the Dragon Quest series has grown from a handwritten idea from Yuji Horii at Chunsoft penciled onto publisher Enix company office paper into a global franchise, and one of gaming’s most iconic IPs.How do you celebrate that history? You could go moment by moment, carving out knowledge and archival pieces for every minute portion of the franchise, but when you have a series this large, how do you make such an exhibit truly exhaustive of every nook and cranny of the series? Which is why Dragon Quest: The Dive took a different approach, and it used VR to achieve that.This celebration of four decades of this massive franchise is split into three distinct sections.

The third and final area is the most traditional aspect of the exhibition for those wanting a pure look at franchise history. Encased in glass with a strict no-photography policy, were original design documents unearthed from vaults now on rare display. Handwritten, the original proposal lists almost all of the initial game’s very small team, which even at this early stage includes Akira Toriyama’s name as a designer of characters and monsters. Many of his initial sketches for the Slime and every monster were on display, as were entire dungeon maps and large tables that showed the specific stat increases of every level as the team sought to find balance.Even musical notation for the main theme has been preserved and displayed.

It’s a small space only focused on the first game - there are no documents for any other title in the series, but it’s such a fascinating look into the often-logical, nerdy necessities of programming and design in these early days of gaming.The second area focuses primarily on the mainline titles for the series, starting with statues that offer life-size recreations of recognizable creatures and scenes that you can enter and take photos as the hero. Inflatable slimes can be squished and hugged, while stone golems and a knight aberrant stand menacingly. If you ever wondered what a creature in these games might feel like to the touch, there was an experience where you could touch a slime, or place your hand on the surprisingly warm surface of a rock bomb.

Key details

Other areas scanned you to find out your kin monster or sprite - I was one of the many bunny girls from Dragon Quest’s history.While certainly colorful with enough to engage audiences of all ages, it’s not something that will educate you if you’re already up to speed on the series. Aside from a neat visual of the original designs of Dragon Quest XII’s protagonist, likely the last to be designed by Toriyama before his sudden passing in 2024, much of this was designed to evoke memories or emotions more than educate. There are screenshots and quotes from every mainline title to point to and reminisce about, and displays to bring scenes to life.What it does achieve by taking this approach is capturing the experience of being a Dragon Quest fan and bringing that to the space, rather than dryly recapping history that those fans already know.

It’s a space that demands that you feel what 40 years of this series were like to live through, using this concept as the design philosophy driving this exhibit, rather than a more typical recap of documents and dates. Celebrate the fans, in that sense.Which is where the VR aspect of Dragon Quest: The Dive comes into play. Rather than an introductory movie or series recap, this is a 5-minute VR attraction that speeds through locales while placing you in the role of the hero assisting a healslime named Homita with naive hopes of saving the world and a killer panther.We climb aboard the killer panther and, at first, the adventure is pretty run-of-the-mill.

Alongside Homita and his wooden sword, we wander through the woods until Treefaces, stone golems and more attack. That’s when things go far off plan, as we run and bound away till we have to jump from cliffs and ride upon a giant Hades Condor as recognizable creatures rush past and attack and we simply do everything we can to survive. Even that doesn’t go as we had hoped, however, as we are tossed into fast-paced river rapids and continue to be tossed and turned till we even find ourselves in an underground dungeon, where the most threatening creatures appear.Here we are pitted face to face with an Estark, a lord of the Underworld against pits of fire and smoke.

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All seems lost, until the wooden sword begins to resonate inside you.