THE GOOD:Incorporates many, many elements that will be used in future RPGs, such as statistics, turn based battles, inns, shops, dungeons and the need to talk to many townspeople to know what to do next; Visuals and Soundtrack, as simple as they seem, are very appealing to the senses; Cheesy middle ages dialogue; Plays pretty well for what it offers to the table...
THE BAD:
...although it feels like a total grind fest; soundtrack gets repetitive.
SUMMARY:
Introduction:
As one of the titles I never played as a kid, I could never feel any sense of nostalgia for Dragon Warrior. I actually only got this game in 2008 and played through it, expecting some state of the art stuff! What I got out of it was... Well, it was state of the art for 1986, but unfortunately, when compared to Square's Final Fantasy which was released 4 years later, it is nothing more than just the very first installment of a series of handbooks known as "RPGs for dummies" - nothing more, nothing less. One thing that will be etched into my retina for the rest of my life about this game has to be the fact that what we got out of this may be very simple, but also very memorable and also quite an enjoyable experience. Hell, I could see a kid playing this game (in '86/87 anyway) due to how easy it is to learn, but hard to master...
Anyway, let’s get stuck into it.
Story:
Even by today's standards, the story of this game - or rather, its backstory - would be considered awesome, although less so today than then because it feels kind of cliched. Apparently, long ago, the mighty hero Erdrick restored light to the darkened world by using the balls of light to defeat this powerful enemy who make the world plunge into darkness in the first place. He then passed the mighty sword onto his liege, King Lorick. Once he passed away, the world was thought to be safe, until many centuries later, the Dragonlord rose to power by stealing the balls of light and plunging the world into darkness. Now, as the unnamed descendant of Erdrick, you have to defeat the Dragonlord, while resuing the princess who got kidnapped, and recover the balls of light in order to push away the darkness of the world. In many ways, the backstory could fare very well even in today's games...
...however, the main story wouldn't fare too well today. It was top notch shit back in '86, but in '09, it is nothing short of rudimentary stuff. Basically, you're on a linear path to save the world. No sidequests or anything of that nature, you are just on this linear path with no other options and no plot twists. If you didn't like it, put up with it. Trust me, the game plays well enough to overshadow the main story, despite a lack of plot twists and such that RPGs end up incorporating in the future.
Gameplay:
RPGs at its roots best sums up the gameplay of Dragon Warrior. You spend a lot of time either exploring the huge world map, battling monsters, exploring towns talking to people or exploring dungeons searching for that special item you need (or killing some really strong monster). It doesn't get much simpler than this. However, if something is dubbed as "RPGs for dummies", simplicity doesn't hurt. If anything, I find simplicity to help it a lot.
Overworld exploration is nothing more than running around, looking for the next town or dungeon. There is very little more to do, other than run into enemies and kill them. On occasion, you can open up the menu and use the search command to search for items on the ground, and sometimes uncover some. Of course, you'd have to be pretty damn lucky to get any. The one thing that separates this overworld from every other is that you cannot save on it. You have to head to the castle and talk to the king in order to save. Not too much other than that. The overworld serves the purpose of bridging towns, as well as giving you enemies to fight outside of the dungeons. Speaking of dungeons, you move around them just like you would the overworld, except there are multiple rooms and you need a torch or the lighting spell to actually see where you're going, plus the dungeons tend to hold the big items you need.
You also navigate towns much like the overworld, but towns have more content than them. Each of them have inns so you can restore your health and magic points, weapon shops to hold all the weapons and armor you'll need to defeat enemies whilst defending yourself, and other sorts of houses to either cure a curse you get from a cursed item you may find (otherwise you won't be allowed to enter the castle and save), or to just chat with the locals about what's going on. After all, it may affect your quest, so it pays to talk to everybody in town. In order to actually buy weapons and rest in an inn, you have to get gold, and in order to get some, you have to kill some monsters.
Now here’s where it gets good – the dungeons. They will hold the treasure you’re looking for, but to get there, you have to kill some powerful monsters. And just a bit of a warning: You are a one man party; no other people around to help you so keep your balls on the prize and keep healed. They always start dark so lighting them up should be priority number one. Using either a torch or the lighting spell, you’ll be able to see where you’re going. To keep the suspense up, the light will dim after a while, so it forces you to hurry up. There isn’t really much exploration to be had as there are no sidequests to speak of, so you should only really see these dungeons once or maybe twice throughout the entire game.
...which would turn off the mainstream gamer who expects millions of hours of gameplay from a freaking NES game, but the one thing that makes this game so good in the first place (aside from being one of the first RPGs out there) is its simplicity. No complicated combos, no unnecessary cutscenes littered all over the place – no bullshit, in short. Yeah, I know good RPGs have a lot of cutscenes and crap, but they weren’t all pointless and whatnot, they all had relevance to the plot, as does all the dialogue put into this game, and since you spend all your time talking to people, well, that just makes exploration that much sweeter.
The one other part of Dragon Warrior is the battling itself. As this game’s approach would be considered as the “no bullcrap” approach, it’ll be a simple concept to grasp. Attack, defend, cast spells, and use items! You also level up after defeating lots of enemies (or getting enough experience points to be more accurate), and can get stronger! I know, typical, but if it failed here, then it wouldn’t have caught on in later years, preventing RPGs from existing...at an earlier time anyway.
Unfortunately, it does suffer from a problem that kind of destroys the game. It’s a total grind-fest! Seriously! You could spend quite some time just grinding for experience points and money so you can get stronger statistically and with better weaponry and armory! This got quite boring after a while, and then infuriating as you realize you’re still short about 20 gold for that shiny new sword you need, all the while you’re getting your ass handed to you by enemies in the next dungeon because you’re weak defensively. This kind of shit really gets on my nerves, especially when later RPGs improve this by having enemies that don’t dramatically increase in power later on! Goddammit this gets annoying!
The only other part I find annoying is the fact that you can only save at the castle. I mean, yeah, it makes the game a bit more challenging in the sense that it forces you to be more careful on your journey, but unfortunately, this also becomes a problem because it’ll make you either run more often or have you using up your healing items/spells when you don’t really need it, and when you really do (at like 10HP/100HP, and taking about that much damage each time), you can’t heal yourself and BAM HERPES!
Also, it becomes inconvenient because you could be in the middle of a dungeon; you’re screwed and need to quickly get back out, and without that spell that lets you leave the dungeon no problemo, you get bumrushed by a warlock, he sends you to sleep, summons the devil and kills you, forcing you to start back at the castle – and at times, the dungeon you were just at is far as hell away from the castle. It’s not a HUGE problem, but it gets aggravating when you die lots, forcing you to grind just near the dungeon so you don’t die again, and we all grinding is annoying!
Grinding and some annoying saving problems aside, the game plays well.
Controls:
It’d be kind of hard to screw this up...Each of the buttons respond to what they’re meant to do, the scheme makes sense to what each button does, yadyaydyaydyasy Seriously, it’s a turn-based RPG, how can you screw up the controls?
Graphics:
Quite good for the most part, really is. Everything looks like they should. Trees are trees, people are people, etc etc and it all looks nice. What steals the show are the enemy portraits. They look finely detailed (at least for 8-bit graphics) and they look like they’re going to kill you or even molest you...except the Slimes – they look like they’re inviting you over for a tea party.
Then we would almost hit rock bottom. What was Enix’s animation budget, like five bucks!? What I mean is that there’s only a tiny, tiny amount of animation. In fact, the only animation is when the character moves, or when the environment scrolls with you. That’s it!
However, as I am unsure of the limits that an NES cartridge has, I’m not sure animation additions would be a wise idea. The graphics are fairly simple, yeah, but the overworld is big – like really big, and I’m not too sure if the NES could handle extra animations. If it could, the game would look heaps cooler and the graphics would be perfect. If not...
Eh... Just a thought.
Sound:
One real stand out part of the game is the soundtrack. Although each and every song is a small loop, it still sounds pretty good. It all sounds the part, like the overworld theme having a flute with some 8-bit beats over it, and... Well, it all fits into the situation and sounds good. The only problem is that it gets repetitive after long periods of time, although due to the fact that grinding gets boring after about 50 minutes, the problem rectifies itself.
Replay Value:
Unfortunately, after finishing this game, there is nothing else to do, as Dragon Warrior offers no sidequests or anything of that nature, plus it is too much of a grind fest to actually consider playing a second time, unless it’s been a long while since the end of the first time. In other words, low replay value.
Overall:
Dragon Warrior was a pretty good stepping stone for what we all know as a console RPG today. It’s definitely not the greatest or the most mind blowing RPG of all time, but it’s still a good RPG to play. With a good story, awesome however repetitive soundtrack and nice yet grinding gameplay, Jak recommends.
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