Taloon the Arms Dealer

With the Year of the Barbarian drawing to a close, I can't deny that the biggest project it's seen has been The Saga of the Ortegids - my attempt to construct a tabletop-friendly setting based on the original Dragon Quest trilogy as depicted through the grittier, sword-and-sorcery-flavored art of Katsuya Terada, as used in early Western box covers and manual art, instead of the now-iconic work of Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama. My original intent was to have a dungeon to show for my work by now, capping off the year by revisiting my roots and adapting one of the games' dungeons to the tabletop. My work schedule has kept me from attending to that as much as I'd like to, so I won't have any of that ready to share until the beginning of next year. However, in the meantime, I did have an idle thought that refused to leave my head, and I'm making that your problem.

In my original post outlining the project, I specified that Saga would only strictly adapt the first three games in the series, which all take place in the same universe; continuity gets a lot more loose after that. That being said, Dragon Quest IV did see a Western release at the tail end of the NES's lifespan, and with similar marketing. Eagle-eyed fans will already know that a couple of references to DQ4 and beyond have slipped into Saga, though not always in their original context. Therefore, I think certain elements are still on the table, and it's one of those I'd like to discuss today.

I would consider Dragon Quest IV to be the first "traditional JRPG" in the way we understand it today. Yes, there were RPGs made in Japan before it, including the first three Dragon Quest games, but those games are almost indistinguishable from western RPGs of the era, with PCs frequently being customizable blank slates and the gameplay focusing more on player-driven open-world exploration. DQ4, meanwhile, emphasized the story first and foremost, with a more linear plot and a predefined set of characters whose struggles were told through scripted cutscenes and personal arcs. Hell, the antagonist is a brooding silver-haired twink in a black coat who wants to destroy the world because he was wronged by society, and this was almost a decade before Sephiroth made it cool.

An entire genre exists
because of this man.

It's interesting, then, that such an influential game would also introduce the character of Torneko (or Taloon if you're a Westerner, or Torneko Taloon if you're a Westerner who got into this after the 90s). Torneko is about as far from a typical playable JRPG character as you could imagine. In a cast that consists mainly of sexy teenagers with emotional baggage, Torneko is a jolly, rotund, middle-aged dad who just wants to raise money to support his family. In spite of this, or more likely because of it, he's probably the single most iconic and beloved character in the entire series. He got his entire spinoff series, which kick-started Japan's own take on the roguelike genre with the mystery dungeon, and he continues to make cameo appearances in later games to this day. If Dragon Quest has a mascot that isn't the Slime, it's Torneko.

With that context out of the way, I'd like to pivot to the much-argued dichotomy of transliteration versus localization. Stay with me, I promise we're going somewhere with this.

In adapting media produced in one language to another language, the eternal debate is this: do you translate the original material directly word-for-word to preserve the original intent, accepting that certain cultural references might not land the same way in a new context, or do you rewrite the source material to be more understandable to a new audience? There's been plenty of ink spilled on the topic of which approach is better, and it's not a subject I intend to get into in this post. I think there's a right and a wrong way to do both.

Pertinently, I'm of the opinion that the modern approach to translating the Dragon Quest games is exactly how you should not do localization - the series' current localization team takes heavy liberties with how they present dialogue and characterization, often painting things in a much more light-hearted and comedic light than what was intended in the original Japanese, to the point where the head translator had to apologize in an interview for writing horse puns into a scene where a child has his father brutally murdered in front of him. Some people like this approach, and that's fine, but it is absolutely not what the series is in Japanese, and I wrote Saga in part as a rebuttal to this very phenomenon.

However, I'd be lying if I said that the Dragon Quest series hadn't suffered from transliteration at times as well. One of my favorite examples of this is how the English NES manual of Dragon Warrior IV describes Taloon as an arms dealer.

See, if you've experienced enough Japanese fantasy media, you can figure out exactly how this happened. In Japanese RPGs, the stores where you would purchase weapons are often referred to as buki-ya, literally "weapon shop." A localization would likely render this as "blacksmith" - while that's a different word in Japanese, anyone playing an RPG would recognize a blacksmith's shop as the obvious place to upgrade your equipment (interestingly, Taloon doesn't actually appear to make the weapons he sells; rather, his operation seems to consist of going dungeon delving to loot weapons and then selling them to other adventurers). However, the NES manual directly translated buki-ya into English, and Taloon was described as an "arms merchant" - something that has a very different connotation in the English-speaking world.

Normally, this is the part where we'd all point and laugh at how ridiculous that makes this character sound. But this is an RPG blog run by a deranged autist who gets inspiration from the weirdest places. And I kind of love it.

In popular media, the stock character of the arms dealer is usually a villainous figure tied to organized crime. Think of Ulysses Klaue from Black Panther, or if you're older, Destro from GI Joe. They're usually depicted as unscrupulous cold-hearted capitalists profiteering off of senseless bloodshed, willing to prop up civil wars and tinpoint dictatorships simply to line their own pockets. With this in mind, an arms dealer turning out to be a wholesome family man is actually a very interesting subversion of expectations.

If The Saga of the Ortegids is intended to be an exploration of the implied setting of, specifically, the Western presentation of Dragon Warrior lore, resisting the urge to add context from the original Japanese, perhaps Taloon really is an arms dealer. Maybe he's not merely supplying adventurers, but covertly running weapons to different sides of an ongoing conflict to make some extra coin. It's quite thought-provoking to contemplate how someone like Taloon could have ended up in this situation. Are times so tough that he's forced to extend his trade to the black market to make ends meet, knowing that he can't fail his beloved wife and son? Is he perhaps attempting to gain favor with multiple warring factions in the hopes that they can be swayed to leave him and his family out of the conflict?

Yes, the Taloon we see in Dragon Warrior IV is very clearly not doing this, but perhaps there's an alternate universe counterpart of him that exists in the universe of The Saga of the Ortegids who is. It wouldn't be the first time a version of him showed up outside of his original context  (not even on this blog), and because the source material for Saga doesn't directly include DQ4, I feel comfortable taking more leeway on how I present him compared to how I present characters from the original trilogy. It'd make for a fun nod for any players who were familiar with the original games, as well as an opportunity to turn their expectations on their head with the true extent of his operations.

More practically, an unwilling arms dealer would also make for an interesting NPC to shake up faction dynamics. If he's supplying an ongoing conflict, does he take sides, or does he try to play both sides against each other for his own ends? The PCs could easily become involved in his schemes, perhaps running weapons for him, or bailing him out of trouble if his smuggling operations attract the wrong attention. Because Taloon's family-oriented motives are sympathetic ones, more morally-inclined PCs might be more willing to back him up than they would a stereotypical arms dealer motivated only by cold hard cash, which could open fun opportunities for faction play to parties that might not ordinarily want to get involved with the criminal underbelly of the setting. At the same time, it presents a moral dilemma - are they willing to perpetuate a bloody conflict if it means a sweet old man gets to come home to his family another night?

So, yes, this is all a very deliberate misinterpretation of a bad translation. But it's a fun one, dammit - and I can't help but feel like dropping this incarnation of Taloon into a campaign set during the Kinslayer Wars, or another conflict in a different setting, would shake things up well.