Dragon Warrior (NES)

Often regarded as the grandfather of the Japanese role-playing game genre, Dragon Quest certainly caught on well in it’s home country. Releases in the series continue to be explosive events in Japan, and the influence of the original release helped to inspire plenty of amazing games that could build off what it had created. While a rights dispute with a tabletop game meant it would have to change the name of its first game to Dragon Warrior when it came to America, it still managed to find a large audience here, perhaps mostly because it was offered as a free game that came with the fairly cheap Nintendo Power magazine subscription available at the time. This popularity and importance certainly makes it sound like Dragon Warrior should be a classic, but reader beware, because this old RPG has aged horrendously.

Dragon Warrior is a game almost entirely about grinding. This is no hyperbole, nor is it something where a negative experience has lead to the player focusing too closely on the problem. For almost the entire time you spend playing Dragon Warrior you are focusing solely on the repetitive and unengaging task of repeatedly and easily killing available monsters to level up your character and acquire gold. A good RPG, even the tabletop versions that inspired the video game versions, try to pace your progression through the plot and world with a level curve that allows the fights to stay challenging without being too repetitive to participate in. Even in the games where your opposition is easily dispatched, your strength scales as you explore new areas so that you don’t have to waste time holding A to attack enemies until you’re strong enough to move on, and if grinding does arise, it’s to overcome a skill deficiency of your own or it is used to engage with optional content. Dragon Warrior was essentially constructing its video game genre as it went though, and they didn’t have the results and experimentation of others to reference for how they built their gameplay loop. That doesn’t excuse the fact the game is at least 90% building up your experience and gold so you can get stats and spells with level ups and buy marginally better equipment.

Making progress in Dragon Warrior is not about finding a new area and plunging in to see what strange creatures or new story situations await. To survive this harsh game world, you need to linger in an area for far too long fighting the same few enemies repeatedly to build up your power. If the boredom becomes too overwhelming, you can try to head off into a new direction in the fairly open world map only to be shown why you shouldn’t be traveling outside of the area you’re meant to be grinding in. Stronger foes can make quick work of you, and your options for dealing damage to them are very limited. Mostly you just hold down attack to deal however much damage your stats allow, but you do get magic over time that does allow for a bit of punching above your weight class. You can heal to survive a tougher battle, cast a Hurt spell to sometimes deal more damage than your weapon would, and if you’re lucky, you can put a foe to sleep for a while so you can get in free hits before they wake up. Items can augment things a little as well, but if you do try to head off into an area where the enemies are consistently tough, you’ll be worn out quickly and the experience and gold rewards aren’t that big of a step up from the weaker monsters you’re meant to be fighting.

The monsters do have a bit of personality to them at least. I can’t deny the charm of Dragon Warrior’s goofy Slimes and the odd vulture-like Wyverns, and while the dragons, ghosts, and wolfmen aren’t intimidating, it is nice to see these stylish sprites the first time you encounter them. You’ll encounter them hundreds more times after that first meeting, but there are a few foes that are actually meant to be overcome through a challenging fight rather than robotically holding A to win. Boss monsters are one of the few moments when you might actually have to use your spells strategically, but even these can’t be won unless you’re the right level, the final fight of the game tight even at high levels and somewhat exciting because of it. Of course, to get that brief thrill of facing off with a true threat that requires some strategy to conquer, you’ll spend far more time just walking back and forth on the world map to trigger the random battles, easily killing them, and going back to town to heal up whenever your health and magic are too low. A death sends you all the way back to the castle town you start the game in as well while taking away a lot of your gold, so being reckless just to try and push the action along can end up lengthening the adventure if a foe gets the upper hand against you.

Usually, a JRPG will present the player with an interesting plot, some games able to make up for the dull grinding of the combat with a compelling narrative. Dragon Warrior is a pretty cliche adventure though, save for the fact the princess you need to save is rescued halfway through instead of at the end. The Dragonlord has caused monsters to overrun the world of Alefgard by stealing the balls of light the legendary hero Erdrick uses to seal away such darkness. The hero of Dragon Warrior must set off to reclaim them and defeat the Dragonlord, but besides saving the princess from a dragon, you don’t really have any story steps between the start and finish.

You do get to head off and find different towns with people to talk to, and Dragon Warrior can be a little bit interesting when you’re interacting with these locations. The right people can inform you of secrets like where to find Erdrick’s equipment, sell you helpful items, and add a tiny bit of color to a world that would otherwise just be a big green continent filled with creatures you need to throw yourself against repeatedly. Heading off to a dungeon to plunder its treasures is an interesting concept before you realize it’s again going to be a check of if you’re strong enough to successfully navigate the place. Dragon Warrior’s towns and stakes are definitely simplistic, but they aren’t bad when viewed in a vacuum. They could have guided you from place to place, the small bits of lore and hidden secrets enough to make the adventure feel like more than random monster fights if the drip feed was done well, but they are far too few to make up for the problems with the game’s barebones action and general monotonous design.

THE VERDICT: Dragon Warrior helped create a genre that can contain intense battles that are strengthened by the narrative weight they carry in an intricate plot. However, you would not be able to predict the course of JRPGs if you looked at this game alone. The majority of your time spent with it will be engaging with a barren combat system focused on the amount of battles you get into rather than their quality, all that grinding necessary to move into new areas where only shreds of story and more monotonous fights await. You can still squeak the rare interesting battle out of the hundreds of mindless filler ones and the sense of adventure briefly returns when you can finally move into a new area after hours of repetitive monster killing, but it’s not enough to make the experience worthy of any praise for the actual quality of its mindless gameplay.

And so, I give Dragon Warrior for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. Dragon Warrior is awful so that future games could be amazing. It set out into virgin territory, and its efforts helped to establish a wonderful new genre. It would be able to carry on the marvelous theme music it had, the character-filled monster designs, and the sense of adventure into its own sequels, but it committed a grievous sin in constructing an entire experience based almost solely around the repeated shallow random battles where your input boils down to holding the button properly and knowing when you need to refresh your character at an inn before you go out and continue doing the same boring grind. The modern day does make it easier to stomach an RPG grind since you can put on a movie or listen to a podcast while you barely pay attention to 90% of Dragon Warrior, but even those rare interesting fights or moments like finding a new town or dungeon aren’t the kind of payoff you’d want for such an enormous time sink. Those small bright spots are why I can’t knock the rating any lower, and thankfully the grind is easy enough to execute that you won’t be made miserable trying to make it work, but it’s such a lifeless and long playthrough that anyone curious about the series history of Dragon Quest is probably better off skipping the actual gameplay experience of its first title and experiencing what little it has in something like a Wikipedia plot summary.

This is not an attack on the Dragon Quest series, as I have played other Dragon Quest games I enjoy and I’m sure the titles after the first one realized that a prolonged grind won’t captivate its audience another time. Perhaps I was too naive in thinking the first Dragon Quest game would be bearable in the same way the first Final Fantasy game is, but the truth of the matter is Dragon Warrior fails because it is too focused on the bland task of grinding without providing the proper rewards for such efforts. A better story or more thrilling bosses could have made it easier to ignore the grind, but it’s such a dominant part of the game it overwhelms the meager offerings meant to be your payoff.  I will respect Dragon Warrior for what it established and thank it for its influence, but I am definitely glad that more games didn’t copy its obnoxious dependence on endless empty enemy encounters.