After finishing the 3ds remake of Dragon Quest VII, I became further interested in playing the rest of the mainline games in the series as well as some of the spinoffs. As of now I have every numbered game in one form or another with the exception of Dragon Quest X. One random day a few years ago I decided to get the mobile ports of this, Dragon Quest II, and Dragon Quest III. It took me awhile to beat it, but over the course of my playthrough I had mixed feelings about the journey that started it all.

The primary reason it took me years to beat this game was because I got very bored grinding. While it isn't a painfully long game, you will spend the overwhelming majority of your playthrough grinding for money & exp that will help in getting the best stats & equipment. It is a very tedious process and its why I intially dropped the game before deciding last year to finally go back and finish it. Even though it has been my least favorite Dragon Quest by far, it was the first of its kind on consoles and led to the many great JRPGs we have today.

Dragon Quest 1 is pretty much the basic template for how turn-based RPGs work. You got attack, magic, and the flee button if you aren't in the condition to fight enemies. You can purchase gear that will improve your stats. Lastly, there is a open-world to explore. Most turn-based RPGs follow the template that this game uses albeit with their own twist. Even if it wasn't the first ever RPG, it was the first for consoles and significantly boosted the popularity of the genre. For all of these reasons, I still have a lot of respect for the original Dragon Quest even if it shows its age a bit.

Dragon Quest 1 is a game that walked so future Dragon Quest games, Final Fantasy, and etc could run. It may not have stood the test of time gameplay wise compared to the games of today, but its contributions to RPGs and video games as a whole will never be forgotten.

I've always wanted to soak my feet into jrpgs. I've played a nice handful of RPG's, but they were always games that I was drawn to for their non-RPG mechanics or alternative design conventions. Y'know, the stuff like Kingdom Hearts, Mega Man Battle Network and Star Force, Paper Mario, Undertale and Deltarune, TWEWY - the kinds of RPG's that twitter minors always include in their 'YOU'RE one of the good ones' posts. The closest to classical, traditional RPG's I ever got into were the Shining Force series and Phantasy Star IV - both of which I only got into because of my Genesis ADHD. But hey, I loved both! Even besides the narrative and aesthetic strengths of each, I was super into the simple loop of building up your squad, then going aggro on a bunch of badass monsters. And I learned from my experiences with both that surprisingly, I kinda like grinding and a lot of the other little things that people associate negatively with the genre.

So why didn't I start getting into 'the classics' of RPG's 'til now? Cause like the entire rest of my generation, I started with all of Square's big-name games and bounced off of them HAAAAAAAAAAARD. Chrono Trigger had me hooked in the first half, but left me drained by the second half when its boss design and open-endedness went in a direction that put me off immediately. I played part of FF9 and was in love, but got slowly worn out from its sluggish, 20FPS combat. I played Super Mario RPG on Wii VC cause it had Mario in it, and while I like a lot of the things it DOES, its combat was always just a less-refined Paper Mario to me, and the rough edges, dirty color palette and bad platforming pushed me off too. The only classic Square game that I was really vibing with was FF7, which I liked for the 10-15 hours of it I played! But one thing led to another, my life got busy, I got stuck somewhere, gave it up, and never looked back. I could understand the majesty and hype behind all of these games that made them genre-defining classics, but I could never get 'deep' into them. They didn't have that basic, snappy feel that made me get saturated in Shining and Phantasy Star.

Honestly, even though JRPG haters are unreasonable bitches, I wouldn't really blame them for saying stuff like Paper Mario and Persona 'got it right' when the whole internet screams to start with the big Squaresoft names - which again, aren't bad, but understandably don't appeal to everyone. Active Time Battles fucking suck dude, I get why it's a fresh change of pace for people who are FF junkies but goddamn this shit is rancid.

So instead of picking up and dropping more FF, I pivoted the other way and tried Dragon Quest for the time being. And Dragon Quest kicks ass! The leveling feels great! The feeling of branching out and surviving through each patch of the kingdom while scraping to get back to an inn or the castle before expiring is handled extremely well! And when you start getting magic that lets you minimize the busywork of items, you feel awesome! Toriyama, for as much of an asshole as he is, breathed a ton of life into the monster designs and lets them speak to the world in a way the microscopic overworld sprites couldn't. I really appreciate how the first enemies you fight are wildlife like roaming bugs and shit, but as you progress, you take on more and more of Dragonlord's direct henchmen - they're not just random encounters, these dudes are on patrol and you got on their TURF. When you finally grind up to beat the Green Dragon, and then you get to the final dungeon and TWO more variants of it appear as COMMON ENEMIES?? That's top tier kino.

Anyway this game's great, all of its design choices are laser-focused around that thrill of adventuring in a lived-in world and slowly building yourself up. Antiquated in some spots, but it gets the gameplay loop down pat and must've been even crazier back then. This was the 'hit buttons' JRPG thrill I needed to get my feet warm into the genre and rinse the taste of ATB out of my mouth.

Mobile/Switch version is ugly as shit tho, fuckin' Minecraft mod vibes.

You know how it is. The most an artist's death has gotten me to cry in a long time - the infectious creative energy I've felt lent down to me from his work is something that'll never leave me. And just like everyone else, I've found myself pouring through dozens and dozens of heartfelt tributes to the man's legendary career. But reading it all got me thinking...ain't the meat and potatoes reputation Dragon Quest has earnt itself kind of like, an error? An impossibility?
So, lemme ask you a question: when's the first time you saw something that made you think "Dragon Quest is cool"? I couldn't tell you what mine was, but recently finishing a full playthrough of the original NES Dragon Warrior pulled me back into the correct reality in which this series was not "generic", but an outlier in style. Toriyama's enthusiasm to play the hits puts the personality on display in its monsters maybe 20 years ahead of the curve. As an aside, I also recommend to anyone playing any older Dragon Quest to look up some scans of the old manuals; the effortless coolness of his artstyle had already bled into DQ's identity.

You could call this game a "grind", but the grind is the gameplay and the gameplay is good. Each individual battle is simple to solve in a bubble, but enemies are split between the ones you can defeat with or without expending resources - instantly spiraling the world into an ever-evolving puzzle to solve. Planning out a trajectory of travel immediately prompts a dizzying amount of dice rolls in your head: how many resources should I spend to gain EXP? How much should I dice roll running away, and how much magic will I have left to heal myself up considering both the expected and unexpected outcomes? Inner workings filled with perfect math to never quite satisfy things with a clear answer; but what raises this from good to great is how through my entire time playing the game, I always undershot my potential. Enemies that are apparently stronger than you can be taken down with perfect resource management, finding consistency in a haze of lottery tickets that makes you feel genius every time you take one down and keep a little more magic for the rest of the trip than your last encounter with the same guy.
And in comparison to how grinding is often characterized as a boring chore-like task, I think playing this game is way closer to exhausting - you can do a good run, and do another, and then lose to a Skeleton you've already defeated 10 times and now half your gold is gone. You probably haven't even made it halfway to the level you want yet! But for every moment of flighty confusion, there's also a moment where you get to level 3, gain heal, and kill the first slime you see in one hit.

and that's how they get you

Random encounters are most frequently characterized as one of those unsavory bits of RPG we chop off, but playing this helped click into place how much texture can be applied to identical floor tiles simply by the difference in looming threat. The invisible encounter sheet constantly shifting under your feet giving cool and hostile sensation to each step, and when you realize you can kill something that once scared you off, the level design changes. Reinforces the process of seamless non-linear exploration with an information game unique to the format - a grind made engaging by the real question being where to even grind in the first place. This is an RPG with no vestigial limbs. Every single part of an RPG you've questioned the integral elements of is present working in perfect harmony with each other; last year, I found myself actively frustrated playing a newly released turn-based RPG in which the mindlessness of each individual encounter serves no purpose. Without long-term resource management, of course random encounters are boring! Or, in contrast to RPGs where levels feel like guided progress, here, lower level enemies to begin to run away, breaking the consistency of previously successful sources of experience and gold. Now, with every moment of newly found strength matched by a push out of my comfort zone, I'm like "ohhh i get it now"

and they got me

This is all coming from a relatively young person's perspective (i turned 22 around when i wrote most of this happy birthday me :D ), so there's this tough balance to reach when it comes to simultaneously embracing that sometimes, traits of oldness are endearing to me, and making sure I don't sound like I am looking down on something, or it's a novelty.
In the past few months, I ended up playing a bunch of games from the mid-late 2000s, and it was easy to lose yourself in a sea of fifteen year old Gamefaqs threads, and chat with people just a bit older than me who experienced all these things organically in their childhood. Especially due to growing up with games from the same era, it was easy for me to imagine myself playing these as a kid, wondering how this could've effected me sooner. Dragon Quest on the contrast is for a bit older of a generation than me, especially with some of its strongest cultural imprint existing beyond language barrier. I played this alongside someone close to me - we honestly couldn't stop gushing to each other about how satisfying the sleuthing was as we kept a million notes marked down. There's a great moment in which a secret that's visibly hinted to you in one of the last towns has an equivalent but invisible secret in one of the first towns; this is one of the oldest games I've played with a strong design language. Things like this got us close to that ideal you hear of pen and paper hint tracking. Eventually, it became natural to feel like playing the game like this was making me fall into the past footsteps of someone else; it's hard not to romanticize it like we were 2 little kids playing the game lit by nothing but the humming static of a CRT. And even though I've literally known people not even a decade older than me that grew up with this game, it's immersing myself in a distinctly different time-frame from usual that makes that era feel so far away. It's that solidarity with a perspective just out of reach that starts positively haunting the game with the ghost of lived experience.

So, this is my "official" start into the Dragon Quest series. I initially had tried Dragon Quest IX as my first game, and it didn't go so well...I don't blame that entry for not catching my attention, after playing the first game, I realize this series has a different world building than most RPGs and shouldn't be treated as traditional.

Granted, I know I'm playing a remake of the original game, but even looking at this version, it still has that graphical charm of a rather old RPG. everything while stylized is very retro, but pretty at the same time. I always thought of Final Fantasy as the game most RPGs imitate, (which is somewhat true) but when most media is imitating real retro RPGs this is the game they are likely emulating.

The story is about as basic as you can get...the princess is missing, evil has run amok, you're destined to save the world...that's it, there's VERY little extra to any of that. While that does sound kinda simple...I kinda dig it, with other RPGs having you find a group and take down organizations and cults or gods or whatever...Dragon Quest has you be a one man army and just go on an adventure of your own and take things at whatever pace you want it. This is your adventure, GO!

And this leads into the gameplay and this is the part that threw me off of DQ IX, it's difficult walking into a world like Dragon Quest and not understanding what monsters do and what spells mean when a spell is called "Sizz". In this game, you basically do one-on-one battles all the time, so the strategy is always you learning about the monster types and how to defeat them without feeling cheated since you never have to deal with multiple types at once, so you feel like you're learning and focusing on what an enemy does and it's role and how to counteract what it does. It really added more to the combat than I thought, and I appreciated it for it's freshness. Aside from battle it's pretty much explore the lands and grind to improve your level and equipment, the standard stuff.

The music is really hard to judge for me. On one hand, I liked what I heard as far as the battle theme and I love the sound effects of spells and attacks. On the other hand, I can't say I really remember a lot of the games music, and this could be because it's orchestrated and that's not really my jam, but nothing stood out badly at all.

Since this game is pretty retro and was well done, it's hard to think of any negatives as side from the only real thing that was bugging me from start to finish.

- The writing of NPCs is annoying. I can't stand that "olde English" medieval fantasy type of talk...I can tolerate it when voiced, but can't stand to read it.

This was a really great experience, I couldn't really give it a perfect score, because while I had fun, I felt like the game needed more in spots such has job/classes or a bit more modern writing and I think this version would have benefited from a "retro mode" to it and used the games old music or similar graphic style to add flavor in spots, but as the game is now, I loved my adventure.

I thought I'd work my way through the mainline Dragon Quest games, so I booted this up on the Switch. It's intriguing how much of what's to come is in this game: items, enemies, the levelling system - some of which are unchanged even in the latest DQ11.

I enjoyed my time with it overall. The grind was real. But also hypnotic. I disliked the long spiel the King gave you every time you booted up your Save. Listen, by the time you've finished telling me how much EXP I need for the next level, your daughter will be dead, old man!

A great work. It can be described as the template or foundation of the series.

A clear article explaining the history of this game before it was created. (It is in Japanese.)
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/column03/game-gatari01

Of course, it's not "particularly" interesting to play now. But it's a great game. (So I hesitate to give it a star/rating.) Without this game, the MOTHER series and the Pocket Monsters series would never have been born.

The majority of NES games at the time of release usually had no consideration for the player.
It was needlessly difficult, mean-spirited and had no intention of entertaining the player. That was the normal game at the time. It was a time when normal was not normal. (The exception was The Legend of Zelda?)

Yuji Horii may not be appreciated outside Japan, but he's probably as great as Shigeru Miyamoto.
When it comes to difficulty, the feeling of playing, and making adjustments that are very difficult to put into words, there is no one like him. One word: genius.

Eu não tenho uma relação tão boa com o primeiro console da Nintendo. O NES apesar de ter sido extremamente importante e revolucionário, hoje em dia eu acabo vendo ele só como uma plataforma cheia de designs arcaicos e jogos que envelheceram terrivelmente, diferente do Super Nintendo que ostenta vários títulos que até hoje são perfeitamente jogáveis e extremamente cativantes. Então, eu acabo regressando para os jogos deste console só por fins de estudo ou curiosidade como é o caso aqui.

É interessante observar o quão ambiciosos foram os desenvolvedores em tentar fazer este mundo parecer vivo, com cada cidade tendo suas próprias partes importantes e serem esteticamente diferentes umas das outras. Para acrescentar ainda mais a isso, a maneira como o texto dos NPCs são proficientemente uma mistura de diálogos inúteis - mas muitas vezes engraçados - ao mesmo tempo em que alguns fornecem informações vitais, para os padrões de hoje em dia isso é bizarro de expositivo mas para época até que era uma sacada bem legal.

O papel do primeiro Dragon Quest foi estabelecer o padrão dos jogos JRPG, como o conceito básico de batalhas por turnos, a exploração de masmorras, os sistemas de menu, detalhes do mundo e cidades com itens/equipamentos para serem adquiridos.. elementos estes que seriam replicados e melhorados posteriormente dentro e fora da franquia. Aqui tudo é executado da maneiras mais simplória e como já dito, envelheceu super mal, o combate é pífio e repetitivo, a seleção de feitiços é muito óbvia e nada variada, o sistema de compra e venda de armas é super clichê - bem naquele estilo de "compra o mais forte, vende o mais fraco, repete" sem status ou algo que torne mais interessante o gerenciamento de equipamentos - as masmorras são desinteressantes, a curva de upgrade é super maçante basicamente forçando o jogador a passar horas grindando, péssimas condições de qualidade de vida..

O jogo não é de todo mal, a maneira que a história brinca com o clichê de "o herói que salva a princesa" permitindo que o jogador ao invés disso tome outra decisão que até acarreta em um final alternativo é genial para um jogo de 1986, outro ponto forte é o design dos monstros criados por Akira Toriyama que continuam excelentes e fazem os primeiros jogos dessa franquia serem muito mais atraentes esteticamente pra mim do que os de Final Fantasy, por exemplo. Aliás, ótimos designs de monstros e personagens é algo extremamente recorrente na série Dragon Quest.

Na época que esse jogo saiu já existia Wizardry e Ultima, e eu acho super interessante observar o quanto eles envelheceram muito melhor do que os JRPGs no geral.

The NES is a console that I've time and time again kinda dismissed as a platform full of archaic design and games that have aged terribly all over the place, and yet, I keep finding myself returning to the system regardless, and it's for stuff like Dragon Warrior that I do this for. I honestly went into this expecting the worst, a cryptic grindfest full of unfocused ideas with too much ambition to properly fit on such primitive hardware, and while the game definitely was a lot of this to some extent, what I got was something pleasantly surprising. Now I won't say this has necessarily aged gracefully by any stretch of the imagination, it was the starting point for JRPGS as a whole after all, so it was all a bit of a learning process, but at the same time, this is such a well realised artistic vision that I can't help but be impressed at the same time with how much I actually enjoyed this and what a strong starting point this style of game had.

I think a huge reason for this is that the game manages to feel both ambitious yet also extremely restrained in what it has going on. There are very few items, certain things feel very streamlined, such as buying equipment instantly having the strongest option equipped and selling the piece it replaced, and having a small selection of spells that are fairly obvious to understand what they do. There feels like there's a fair amount to the game in terms of its scope, but at the same time, almost every aspect of it feels intentionally simplified in such a way to be as digestible as possible, which is appreciated for a lot of reasons. The biggest one to me is that due to this intention to make a game that can be easily understood for the most part, there's way less cryptic nonsense than one would think to the point where a guide is barely necessary, with ample hints and avenues to figuring out how to obtain what you need to beat the game, at least once you start to understand the way the game generally operates and works. Despite this simplicity however, in terms of atmosphere and general vibes, this honestly works really well at creating the sense of adventure set in an inhospitable land.

I respect how the game just starts off, gives you a very quick and basic rundown of your goal "rescue the princess and defeat the dragonlord" and then sets you out on a journey without much direction, having the player just explore the land and figure a lot of things out for themselves. While this easily could have led to a game that you'd be required to take a walkthrough with you every step of the way, Dragon Warrior leads the player pretty nicely for the most part through a combination of vague hints and directions and through expecting the player to thoroughly look into everywhere they can go and figure when it's time to go back into uncharted territory. The game doesn't hold your hand but doesn't make you feel hopelessly lost either, you can go anywhere from the start, the only thing stopping you is the fact that enemies are of varying strengths, so if you get destroyed, chances are you just need to look somewhere else for a bit and come back stronger. The idea of having crossing bridges on the overworld being the indicator for a jump in difficulty is pretty clever as well, both signalling the player of some key information while also not feeling totally out of place.

Despite the limited overworld sprites, there also felt like there was a lot of effort put into making the world feel alive, with each town having its own important parts to them while also feeling aesthetically different from one another. To further add to this is the way the NPCs are cleverly a mix of useless but often funny dialogue to make the towns feel lived in, while also often giving vital pieces of information that are just clear enough for it to feel more like a puzzle to figure out what the game wants from you, rather than another signal to look something up online. One of my favourite examples of this is the way that the final boss takes 1 damage from anything other than the ultimate sword, so to telegraph this in game, you've got one NPC who says "The Dragonlord's scales are as strong as steel" and then another one later who says that this ultimate sword can easily cut through steel. It's stuff like this that I find clever in that it's conveyed in a slightly higher order way than simply telling the player exactly what to do, while also not keeping it entirely hidden and borderline impossible to figure out on your own, and this sort of storytelling and instruction is used throughout the game as well, often requiring you to put a few bits of information together to get the full picture.

I also feel like the artwork in general goes a long way in making this feel appealing, thanks to Akira Toriyama's monster designs being super appealing to look at and giving some very clear and cohesive visual direction to the game that makes you a bit excited every time you're able to see yet another fun enemy. The issues of limited inventory size also feels somewhat mitigated thanks to the way there are barely any actual items, so there'll basically never be a point where you'll have too many and feel like you need to pointlessly micromanage, but also, the way that spells work in this further contributing to needing very few consumables. When the spells you get from levelling up don't directly contribute to dealing a lot of damage or some other vital combat utility, these often will have the same effect as one of the consumables in the game. This essentially means that after certain level ups, you no longer require dedicating a slot to said item, making things a constant process of streamlining your own inventory in a pretty seamless and satisfying way. I also think it's a nice touch how from the very start of the game you get a clear sight of the final destination and ultimate goal of the game, with everything being dedicated to working your way towards it, providing both a sense of cohesion and a strong driving force towards your goal, it being in sight but always out of reach. This is made all the more powerful by the way that they really make you feel like the world's against you, not only having monsters after your throat at all times basically, but even having the townsfolk express little faith in you, saying that they believe that the Dragonlord is far too powerful and other statements in the same vein.

While I've had a lot of positive things to say about this, Dragon Warrior is also far from a perfect game either, in fact, in some ways it's borderline painful to play. A lot of these issues come down to enemies as well, as despite how awesome they look, there's also a lot of frustration associated with them. The one that is most irritating is the way that while these spike in difficulty might result in a world that somewhat immerses you in the fact that it feels overrun by evil, it also means grinding, and quite a bit of it. I'd hazard a guess that most of the time spent playing this game was dedicated to grinding, and while this at first wasn't anything too bad, there being a certain relaxing quality to hacking away at things for a bit while playing some music in the background, it definitely hits a point where things begin feeling very tedious. This is exacerbated by a terrible EXP curve that sees the player hitting a point near the end of the game where they'll be needing around 3000 EXP per level where the average enemy at that point yields around 50, which I'm sure is pretty easy to see, it's kinda ridiculous and a real test of patience and kills some pacing especially near the end. Further adding to my grievances with the monsters is the encounter rate being painfully inconsistent. There'll often be these stretches of time where you'll barely encounter anything and then all of a sudden, it feels like every other step results in another encounter. I'd argue that this inconsistency is not just annoying, but the worst way this could go, as despite how frustrating it would be to constantly have these random encounters, it would at least make grinding far quicker, and if the opposite happened, where the encounter rate was low, exploring would feel more enjoyable even if grinding became a more tedious process. This middle ground simply feels like it has the annoyances of both sides of the spectrum without much of the benefit.

There's also a point in the middle of the game where I feel like the pacing gets thrown very far out, with this largely intuitive progression being completely destroyed, where it feels like you're expected to traverse into lands far outside your power to get information, leading to a situation where you're either grinding against weak enemies for a while or having to pray that you can get through that part of the overworld while successfully running away from everything. This once again makes the latter part of the game feel a bit off despite still carrying a lot of previously mentioned positive qualities as well. The menu system here is also kinda weird with how you need to talk to people or even walk up stairs by going into the menu and hitting a certain option, but this honestly just took a bit of time to get used to before feeling natural, so it isn't too bad. In the end there are enough drawbacks to this game that I can't really wholeheartedly recommend it or say that I outright loved it either, but I really respect this and think that it's way cooler than it had any right to be. By essentially having the absolute core mechanics and systems of a JRPG and very little else, this actually feels like it suits the limited nature of the NES and feels very streamlined and cohesive in the end. An amazing example of less being more, with the things this game leaves out ultimately contributing to a more fulfilling experience, even if there are still some serious flaws with the experience as a whole.

Perfect on iOS. More of these tiny, old RPG titles need to be put in portrait mode and ported to smartphones. So many of them, because they were made for the NES, were designed to be these little games you can pick up and play a little of at a time, which is perfect for mobile since sometimes you just need to twiddle your thumbs. I much prefer playing an actual game with a narrative rather than completing daily tasks in some free-to-play time-sink so these little ports that Square Enix, especially, are putting out are perfect. Dragon Quest is so primo, too. There’s a lot of simplicity in this first one but that just makes it perfect for portability because it just doesn’t need thought put into it; you grind against monsters for levels and gold and the map is small enough to keep track of. You just work toward the next best items and explore all the dungeons for better stuff and then kill the guy! It’s so satisfying fighting monsters that you had trouble with a few levels ago and decimating them with the strength and weapon you grinded for. chef’s kiss mwah!

The template laid down by Dragon Quest remains undefeated in the genre of Japanese RPGs. There is a remarkable level of care that has gone into making sure that there is an appropriate level of friction between the adventure of the player and the objective of the game.

The game is fairly small and "spherical". By that I mean that there is a centerpoint that is Radatome Castle, and then there is the rest of the map that is equally long in both directions, east and west. This allows the game to justify (a poor word to choose considering they had legitimate technical limitations, but it gets the point across) making saving exclusive in Radatome Castle, at King Lars's. No distance then is great enough to be too tedious to traverse. Planning your travels is easy as well, considering you can purchase Wings of the Chimera early in the game to teleport back to Radatome Castle, and later on you can access the Return spell to use in place of the Wings. It also bears reminding that death doesn't bring any particular penalty other than interrupting your exploration and bringing you back to the centerpoint, which is farily forgiving given what was said for distances. The game is also crystal clear. The combination of the game box manual along with the initial indications from King Lars give all the tools you need to understand and clear the game. People in towns rarely gives you cryptic messages.

Ultimately, the game is lenient and fair with its player. And this lenient structure allows the game maker to be more thoughtful of the points where is wants to increase friction, rather than just make the game all friction. There are of course parts of the experience that suffer because of this. Battles become a matter of simple attacking arithmetic with no further complexity involved whatsoever, besides the Sleep spell that can come in handy in certain parts of the game where the dps race does not particularly work in the player's favour. This already highlights how random battles have been a particular point of strain in the genre since the beginning, which few have ever really dealt with correctly. Moreover the inherent small size of the world makes for a short experience, alothough for sure not unpleasant (I think it is fair to remember I have played the SNES remake which has some quality of life improvements that might have shaved off almost an hour of game time). And in particular the endgame feels a little anti-climactic, mostly because of its lack of active narrative and letting the player decide for themself the moment of ending the game.

In the end, this game embodies a level of playfulness that is perfectly encapsulated by Akira Toriyama's artistic design for the series at this particular moment in the author's artistic development. Simple, rotund, clear, uncomplicated.

Dragon Quest is a groundbreaking and iconic game from the 80's. It did what Mario and Zelda did for their genres and kickstarted the JRPG genre. The Dragon Quest series has been a modest success in recent years in the west, but it has always been a massive success in Japan.

With Dragon Quest being the first game in the franchise, it's interesting to see the roots of this important franchise. Does it hold up today? Is it a worthwhile playthrough? Well, yes and no.

The story is super basic. The Dragonlord stole the Orb of Light and kidnapped Princess Gwaelin of Tantegel. As the descendant of the legendary hero Erdrick (or Loto in the Japanese version), you are called upon by Tantegel's king to defeat the Dragonlord and reclaim what has been lost. The story is only blatantly conveyed in a few text boxes at the beginning and end of the game (there are others in the game, but more on those in a bit). The story is told through its NPC's and visually through its overworld. An amazing example of this is with Charlock Castle, the lair of the Dragonlord. It is right across a river from Tantegel Castle, but there seems to be no way to get to the castly by foot. As such, your quest already has its end goal in sight, and you just need to find a way to get stronger and reach that end goal.

Another clever thing that Dragon Quest's narrative does has to do with the princess. Most games where you save a princess at the time (i.e. King's Knight or Super Mario Bros) see you beat the final boss and then find the princess in the next room with little trouble. That's fine and all, but it's not super interesting. In Dragon Quest, saving the princess is optional. If you don't find her, you don't get the best ending, but she's still optional nonetheless. You have to search the world for her. She isn't even in Charlock Castle, and I think that's very clever.

The enemies are iconic. Slimes, skeletons, chimaeras, dragons, they're all here. Many enemies are series staples, not missing a single mainline installment, and even the more obscure enemies like Drohl Drones and Lunaticks make reappearances now and then. The only enemy that never saw a reappearance was the Prestidigitator line, which would reappear in name, but the design never returned. Akira Toriyama's work on this game's bestiary, and those of the other Dragon Quest games, is a masterclass in making lively and iconic monsters for an RPG.

Traversing the world is a large puzzle. NPC's will give you pointers on where to go, but very few paths are laid out for you. While some may find it frustrating, it aids in a sense of exploration and discovery that leaves you curious. It's also satisfying to find an important item. The worst thing you can do is play this game with a guide.

Combat is simple. You can attack, use items, defend, use spells, and run. You only have one party member and you only fight one monster. Magic is alright. Healing magic is always useful. There's field spells that can clear up your limited inventory from carrying chimaera wings or torches. However, I've always found offensive spells to be underwhelming and status spells are useless. Combat boils down to attacking and healing. It's serviceable, but there's no variety. Never in the game are you expected to be strategic and exploit weaknesses or change tactics.

The worst part of this game is the grinding. Play this game blind, I implore you. The monsters you fight going back and forth will keep you adequately leveled and you'll still feel like you're making progress. I didn't play the game blind, and when I reached the southeast corner of the map, I was too weak to take on any enemies, but too strong to get any significant gains in XP from any other enemies on the map. Grinding took an abhorrent amount of time as level up times took longer and longer and the value of the XP of weaker enemies grew smaller and smaller. I beat this game, however on an emulator with the speedup function to make it bearable. If you know what you're doing, avoid official hardware to avoid the frustration.

Does Dragon Quest hold up? Yes. While VERY simple, it was very innovative for 1986 and it's not bogged down by any game design flaws that many NES/Famicom developers fell victim to in those days. Is it worthwhile though? I don't know. One blind playthrough is a joy to experience. However once you know how to beat the game, it loses its magic and becomes a slog.

I give this game a 7/10. It's enjoyable, but not replayable.

excellent. intelligent design and writing with lovely music and character designs.

coming right off the development of what were just choice-driven adventure games, this is an amazing attempt from Enix to distill open ended 80s computer roleplaying down into a simpler format. I think it's no exaggeration to say that this game is a big part of why the video game industry today is obsessed with games that have (at least on the surface) large scopes and open ended gameplay.

this game is now characterised as being a basic grindfest, but the truth is that it allows for different approaches to completing objectives without necessitating constant grinding. the game will slowly provide you with new tools such as status effect spells and navigational assistance, then leave it up to you to figure out the best strategies that utilise them. case in point: I completed all but the very last objective at level 13, making maps and taking notes of hints without sticking my nose in walkthroughs and going through other people's motions. I even rescued the princess at just level 10! dragon quest is an adventure, not a checklist.

I really can't understand where people are coming from when they say the game needs guides, has hours upon hours of constant grinding, lacks any real strategy, etc... I think that's a failure on their part and nothing to do with the game.

it's a smart first entry that understands what makes itself fun. unfortunately, the game has received less than ideal translation and porting treatments that simply cheapen the experience. if you want the ideal way to experience DQ1 then play it on NES with this excellent retranslation patch, much care and love has gone into it: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4275/

Dragon Quest absolutely rips dude it's such a cool artifact of a half-formed genre. Having the only save point in the entire game be in the starting castle means slowly edging into new, scarier territory, and the consequence of dying being losing half of your money in a game where money really only matters for maybe the first half of the game lends a real feeling of danger to the world when you still haven't quite gotten to know it. Then, once you do have your sea legs, you start hitting the other side of the power curve and the back half of the game is, for the most part, pretty easy from a combat perspective.

Which is fine because this game has a lot of walking around talking to people, with cute little puzzles like figuring out where and how to use certain items or how to navigate screens in unexpected ways. None of them are DIFFICULT but they're fun to tease out and importantly they don't take very long. A lot of this game is just gathering information, finding the order to piece that information together in, and acting on it, and the world map is small enough that doing all of that never feels frustrating.

Plus, aesthetically, yeah man, DQ has had it from day one, huh?

It's not like, PERFECT. The combat IS basic, magic IS a little less actually useful than I would prefer it to be, the dungeon map design just being a bunch of random dark mazes is never gonna be my favorite, but in the scope of how well everything else fits together none of my issues with it feel like they coalesce into anything worth ruminating on when everything else about it is so overwhelmingly charming and pleasant.

I beat this game over the course of four evenings while I half paid attention to the tv show my partner was watching, and that's when Dragon Quest is best in my limited experience with them. Nice to know they've been the ultimate chill out games the entire time.

Hot off the hype of Dragon Quest XI, I figured I'd dive into the earlier games in the series and see where it all began.
Naturally, it's not quite on the same level as XI, but this game holds up surprisingly well if I'm being honest. It's very much a classic JRPG, the map is fairly small and there are maybe 10 enemy types with varying colours but little more. The whole game can be completed using only the D-Pad and A button, but that's to be expected of an NES game.

The combat, like everything else, is incredibly simple. For a time you're best off putting enemies to sleep or stopping them from casting spells, but other than that a standard attack and heal when needed are all you really need.
I'd definitely recommend finding a map online that labels the locations to get an idea of where to go and in what order, I even referred to a level-by-level "guide" as a way of checking if I was ready for a certain enemy or location just yet because - and this is likely the most off-putting aspect of this title - the game forces you to grind.

I joked to my girlfriend early on about this being a 1 hour game with 7 hours of forced grinding, and honestly that's not entirely inaccurate. You can travel to almost anywhere on the map from the very start, but you won't stand a chance in most places unless you've done a bunch of encounters in a lower-level one to buff your stats and save money for better equipment. That very much is the game.

For that reason, this was best experienced (by me) as something to do on the side while working or cooking, just run a few circles and bop a few enemies while attending to something else, worked a charm and made for a nice easy completion for the month :)

The story is just enough to allow the game to exist, the world isn't very "alive" like I praised XI for, nor the characters, but for the first instalment of the franchise there's still enough charm here to keep it enjoyable rather than just tedious.

In conclusion, Dragon Quest is not a phenomenal game, but it doesn't have to be either, well worth trying for the low price. It served me well as a distraction from work and to tide me over while I desperately wait for news on XII...
Speaking of, onto Dragon Quest II :)

Fascinating for how systemless it is. Obviously there's leveling, statistics (like health and mana), and currency basics in here that work well as the constant measuring stick for your progress, but the experience is mostly flat.
What's even crazier is that this works completely for what they are going for here! The lack of complexity really coalesces with the Akira Toriyama art style for just a super chill and charming vibe. The game doesn't challenge you to think much harder than "oh I died, I probably shouldn't be in this area right now" or "oh fire spells work well on this enemy". Death is hardly a punishment, just a bump on the road that resets your position in the world. It's nice! It's also very flawed!

I wish I didn't have to go through junk mobs every time I explore through areas I've been through. I wish fights didn't just result in me, dead brained, pressing attack most of the time. I wish armor changes felt more significant than,
"oh my numbers are bigger".

The vibes here are prem-o, the content, less so. I definitely find myself bouncing off of it but appreciating it in the context of the larger series. The Chillitude has been there since day one 😤

Old RPGs are what idle games wish they could be.
They place context and an explorable map around a simple loop of: 1. Grind 2. Get weapon 3. Use weapon to grind more.
The exploration is incredibly intuitive, I only resorted to GameFAQs on two occasions: Once to verify I was right (I was), and secondly because I was stupid and forgot to note down a hint (which you should do). The design of this game is so tight that if the philosophical idea of game design could be wrapped around a watermelon, said melon would explode.
Play dragon quest, you will enjoy it, if you don't, you just haven't gotten to a stage in your life yet where you will enjoy it.

(Played on SFC)

From the first moment of stepping out into a hostile new world and hearing the timid opening melody of the overworld music, this game instills a sense of mystery and wonder that carried throughout my entire experience with it. I was genuinely stunned by how well this holds up even after playing more recent entries in the series. What I thought would be a quaint but ultimately inscrutable trip into JRPG history turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience that was on par with everything else I've played of the series so far. It makes perfect sense that this game near-single-handedly spawned an entire genre, and so many of the foundations of said genre are executed here flawlessly. This game has no map, no quest log, almost none of the conveniences of modern JRPGs and yet communicated its information, narrative, and tone to me effortlessly. The only time I truly got stuck was while looking for the Token of Erdrick late into the game, and that was apparently due to a translation mistake.

While exploring the sparse (and frankly rather small) landscape of Alefgard, I felt more immersed than I have in any AAA open-world power-fantasy playground. This is in part to do with the sense of mystery I opened with: this game gives you very little up front. In the absence of a map, a quest marker, or really much of any guidance at all, you are thrust into a world that does not care about you and will probably kill you if you're not careful. And it's just so... empty. This is, in my estimation, a good thing. I have a big thesis about game worlds that make you feel like a person inside of a world instead of the biggest, most sapient kid in the sandbox, and I will have to elaborate on it elsewhere, but one of the main contributors to this feeling, at least for me, is precisely this emptiness. There isn't that much in this world. A few towns, some caves, and a whole lot of empty, green space. In comparison to increasingly expansive modern open-world JRPGs, or even later Dragon Quest games within the same console generation, this world is tiny. But it FEELS huge. When you're standing in the middle of an empty field that fills the screen, reeling from an encounter with a monster you weren't prepared to fight, unsure of where exactly you are, praying to see a town slide into view from the periphery ahead, it's hard not to feel dwarfed by the scale of it, humble as it may be in retrospect. A game doesn't need record-breaking square-footage to feel big. It just needs to make YOU feel small.

The real shock of this experience is that I think I somehow like this game more than XI. I kept expecting the illusion to break, for my modern goopy gamer brain to kick in and cringe at Gross Old Thing and look up a guide or just give up entirely and write it off as an antiquated product of its time, but that never happened. I was so damn in it I drew a fucking map. I took physical notes. With a PENCIL. Depending on who you ask, "talk to every NPC" may or may not have originated here, and it remains one of the best examples of it. In the same spirit as the sparse world, the thin threads of connection that spread across the map as you explore towns and meet new people add up to far more than the sum of their parts. The simple, low-tech excitement of receiving information that sparks a mental connection with information received elsewhere and elsewhen represents the narrative meat of the game, and it's deployed with a surprising sense of pacing for a game so absent of any visible railroads.

All of this adds up to a thoughtful, immaculately constructed game that impressed me with its charm and ingenuity at every turn. Dragon Quest owns.

(Also, play the SFC version of 1+2. Fuck that weird mobile-game-lookin switch version.)

É inegável a inovação que Dragon Quest trouxe ao mundo dos jogos, criando uma fórmula que até hoje segue forte com Dragon Quest XI, um dos meus RPGs favoritos. Porém, ao contrário da sua sequência mais nova, a qual eu aproveitei por horas e horas, o original do NES me trouxe poucas alegrias. Claro, eu ria quando lia algum um comentário inesperado de um NPC, me sentia muito poderoso ao derrotar inimigos mais fortes do que eu, adorava a tensão de ter que voltar para uma hospedaria rezando para que nenhum inimigo me pegasse despreparado e até passei a curtir o combate a partir do momento no qual o jogo te dá opções.
Só que, simultaneamente, foram jogados na minha cara inúmeros encontros aleatórios que repetem a mesma musiquinha e atrapalham a exploração do vasto mundo, ainda mais bloqueado pelas barreiras de dificuldade que forçam o jogador a dar grind. O combate, que era legalzinho e até estratégico, tornou-se algo maçante que se resumia a usar o feitiço de sleep e rezar para que os inimigos não acordassem. As “dungeons” são corredores iguais que ofuscam completamente a minha visão, seriam mais interessantes de se explorar se, a cada 5 passos, não surgisse algum monstro novo para te matar. Para mim, que mal sabia o que estava fazendo na maioria do tempo, perder metade do dinheiro toda vez que morre para algum inimigo aleatório é um saco, porque o jogo tem uma progressão que, de maneira direta ou indireta, é ditada pela quantidade de ouro no seu bolso. Podem me chamar de “filtrado” ou de “not a JRPG guy”, só que eu preciso admitir que eu praticamente parei de sentir qualquer coisa a partir da quarta ou quinta hora jogando, era só grind, tentativa e erro. Pelo menos os outros RPGs que eu joguei tinham músicas boas para me distrair da monotonia…

Eu sou uma pessoa extremamente manipulável e com pouca capacidade para pensamentos próprios, então comecei a jogar Dragon Quest com as análises mais curtidas do Backloggd em mente. As pessoas elogiando a estrutura e rebatendo acusações sobre grinding, tratando o jogo como um RPG condensado ao ponto de quase perfeição, de que qualquer um que precisasse usar um guia tinha que botar suas habilidades de interpretação de texto em dia. Ao chegar em áreas de grande dificuldade, eu obviamente pensava “ok, isso é para depois” e tentava explorar mais do que estava ao meu alcance, mas uma hora eu não tinha mais para onde ir. Eu voltei para esses lugares de alto nível e, obviamente, morria. Depois de meia hora vagando pelo mundo clamando por ajuda, eu desisti e olhei um guia para saber onde deveria ir agora, e era justamente em uma cidade escondida no meio dos monstros que tantas vezes me destruíram. Eu tinha feito tudo disponível até então, mas ainda não tinha dinheiro para comprar armas que dessem dano e não tinha vida para aguentar mais do que dois ataques de um escorpião ou magidrakee.
Minha impaciência também custou pontos de auto respeito quando queria olhar imagens para saber se havia perdido alguma coisa nas cidades e recebi as soluções de puzzles na minha cara, me privando da alegria da descoberta. Depois de tempo o suficiente perdendo a cabeça com alguns comentários obtusos de NPCs e sem vontade de dar mais grind só pra poder avançar uma área, eu decidi assistir a uma longplay do jogo e, caramba, eu não tinha chance alguma. Eu tava me forçando para chegar no final de Dragon Quest e tive que abandonar o caminho pra não perder o meu gosto por games no geral.

Por mais que eu tenha começado a jogatina desejando muito gostar de Dragon Quest e tenha ficado bom tempo tentando me convencer de que estava curtindo, não creio poder aproveitá-lo agora. Acho que as principais lições que eu recebi da experiência não envolvem a natureza dos games, mas sim duas: eu preciso começar a pensar mais por mim mesmo; e preciso tomar medidas para impedir que as opiniões dos outros penetrem tanto na minha mente. Só que isso é conversa pra ter com o psicólogo, não com um bando de anônimos em um site de reviews de games.

Espero que DQ 3, DQ 4 e DQ 5 sejam melhores.

Respeito muito esse jogo.
Queria escrever algo sobre ele mas nossa meu cérebro tá caindo da cabeça esse jogo cansa demais apesar de simples, a estrutura livre e aberta onde abre possibilidade de diversos caminhos e escolhas pra um jogo de nes e pra época isso é um clássico e é um clássico hoje em dia apesar de um sistema de XP que envelheceu mal mesmo no remake que aumenta bastante o xp ainda é meio desbalanceado.
Enfim eu respeito MUITO esse jogo ele é incrível pra época e olhando pra trás penso até como eles conseguiram fazer isso.

There's a common misconception that the original Dragon Quest, as most early JPRGs, is a bit on the grindier side. That, of course, is not true. The game does not have periods of grinding taking you away from the progression. Instead, the core of the game, the one way to solve all problems and what defines the progression, is grinding.

Let me back up a bit. Released in 1986, originally on Famicom, DQ1 is one of the earliest attempts to translate the complicated and rather niche CPRGs of time to a simpler template and simultaneously lower the barrier to entry by releasing the game on a home console. As a result, the first Dragon Quest is a very simple game. You control a silent hero, named by the player, who happens to be a descendant of a legendary figure of ages past. The king of the land asks you to save his daughter and rid the kingdom of a powerful Dragonlord, whose minions are terrorizing the surrounding continents. A simple premise goes along with simple game design. There's no party to control, just your one protagonist. As a result of that, there's no separation of roles -- the hero is a warrior, a mage and a healer all at once. Stats exist (strength, vitality and speed) but have no real importance beyond showing your current power level. Thus, the core gameplay loop is laid down: follow a clue and investigate the world map -> encounter new enemies -> beat the enemies until you get your numbers up/save enough for new gear/feel comfortable doing random encounters -> go to the next region with stronger enemies to pursue the plot and repeat.

The combat does not offer many options. You are limited to:
- sword swings;
- fire spell;
- stronger fire spell;
- sleep spell;
- silence spell.
The thing about the damaging fire spells is that, since there's no stat governing magic damage, eventually (just in a couple levels even) your basic physical attack with outnumber the spell. Sleep barely works (at least on the SFC version I played) and is thus a waste of a turn. Silence is situationally useful as a counter to the enemies' Sleep spell, but usually it only saves you from one or two unnecessary hits. This lack of options means that all the fights in the game can be represented as a battle of resources, where the player's actions follow a simple algorithm: exhange hits with the enemy until your HP reaches x, then heal, repeat; if no more MP, use healing herbs; if no more herbs, go and grind until your numbers are high enough to not run out of resources in the fight. The only exceptions to this seem to be the first boss battle against a dragon, whom you can apparently put to sleep, if you're lucky enough, and the second boss battle against the Golem, whom you can also put to sleep by using a key item, which is the intended way to do that fight. For the rest of the game, grinding is your only solution.

The other design choice that you might notice is that a lot of parts in the system become outdated and replaced. The initial Fire spell is a good example, as it lasts exactly a couple levels until your physical attacks become as strong as the magic spell. But there are also various items that are at some point replaced by field magic. Torches are an important part of the early game. You absolutely need them to explore various pitch black caves on the map, so you need to have a couple torches in your inventory at all times (your limited inventory, mind you). But only until you learn a spell that functionally replaces torches for good. The same happens with teleport items and holy water, an item that turns off random encounters. It's all convenient and welcome, but it also feels less like an upgrade and more like the game presenting you with solutions to a problem it itself created.

Now, I realize the paragraphs above read exceptionally negative, but it's not my intent to bash a pioneering game for having outdated design philosophy. In fact, there are a lot of things DQ1 does right and that have formed (at least part of) the skeleton of the genre for years to come, from map design and random encounters to town layouts to multiphased boss fights. But what I think the game does best is the Quest part of its title. The adventure you set out on is actually quite simple as it leads you back and forth across the rather small-scale map of the kingdom. Every step makes logical sense and talking to NPCs in towns gives you clues about where to go next. They never feel particularly cryptic, and right away you're given several clear long and short term objectives. It's never "uhhhh I need to find a generic NPC in one of the towns and show him this new key item, because apparently that generic NPC is not so generic after all".
You also constantly keep looping back to the starting castle, which in the older versions of the game, is the only place where you can save. So you're actually slowly exploring the world outwards from the center, going in alternating directions, which works quite well for a world this small and densely packed (the final dungeon is literally visible from the starting point on the world map). The whole thing feels like a tabletop short story presented for a single player, which is the vibe the developers were aiming at here, I'm guessing.

The other thing I admired about DQ1 is its character and presentation. The admittedly limited writing here manages to not only set up the general conflict and the backstory, but also not be as dry as some of the other titles of the era (looking at you, FF1). Talking to NPCs in towns often gives you little stories to go along with them instead of the generic greetings and information about the town/next dungeon. There's a couple in the castle who are deeply in love, there's a girl in the starting town who says that you're so handsome she's not gonna lose sight of you, and she then proceeds to follow you around town until you leave. Even the generic weapon shopkeeper is like "well, yes, why wouldn't you want to equip this fantastic gear you bought right away? it's only natural" every time you buy something. The protagonist is a blank slate with no standout features, except for the horned helmet. Yet I was delighted to see that, after you rescue the princess from the dungeon guarded by a dragon, the hero carries her in his arms and it's actually reflected in the spritework. The fact that you have to carry the princess back to the castle (suprising the NPCs on the way with good news) is also a neat bit of character to remember the game by.

In the end, DQ1 is more of a historical curiosity, offering insight into very early JRPG design. But its short runtime (6-7-ish hours for me) and colorful presentation counterbalance the chore of grinding, resulting in a surprisingly enjoyable experience for a game that is more than 35 years old at this point.

Hot take alert: the first ever NES JRPG is wildly obtuse and grindy! I used a guide, a map, and like 4000% speed and it made the game not awful. Granted, it was effectively a waste of like 10 hours, but it was far more bearable than the first couple Final Fantasies. Instead of backtracking all the time, you just kind of go all over the place. I'm not sure how much of the navigation issues were with the game itself and how many were with the order the guide was taking me in, but the game itself has no direction at all so it's probably the former. The grinding is awful, but unlike Final Fantasy it doesn't pretend that you can beat it without grinding your ass off. I think the honesty and humbleness of Dragon Quest 1 is what makes it better than the game it directly inspired. Still sucks tho lol