Ah, the RPG in its purest form. A dragon is searing my flesh with its fiery roar? No matter! I dost have the perfect stratagem to slay the fell beast!

decimates the local slime population for an hour

What sayest thou now, green dragon? Mine numbers are higher than thine own! Who'm'st've else could have come up with so bold, so daring, so wonderfully thought out of a plan to rend thy scales from thy wretched hide? Wouldst you flee in terror at my superior level? Wouldst you not fight to the bitter end? But thou must!

Seriously though, despite every fight in this game being a one-on-one slugfest, (and, I know I could put the bad guys to sleep but like, when it doesn't work the first time I'm not too inclined to try it again lmao) it's still a fun game! Alefgard is a charming little kingdom, thanks in large part to its inhabitants. The townsfolk might not say anything particularly interesting, but they speak with such charm. I couldn't help but want to see their kingdom saved.

Unfortunately, this was my third go at saving their kingdom, and this game really suffers on repeat playthroughs. The way the game is structured requires that no real story triggers be hit; if you know which items need to be taken where you can just go do it without talking to anybody. And the bonk-or-get-bonked nature of the combat means the only thing stopping you from having full run of the map is that you'll quickly die if you go too far out. So the only thing left for it is to grind until you can successfully Not Die.

Now all of that is fine on a first playthrough, because there isn't much time spent actually grinding. At least, that's how it feels to me when I'm exploring and just happen to be killing every slime I see along the way. It isn't grinding, it's just a fortunate coincidence of my wanderings! Grinding is only grinding when it feels like a grind. And a second or third playthrough of this game definitely feels like a grind.

But it's one of the first JRPGs ever. So, ya know, can't be too hard on it lol

(One last side note: your mileage may vary depending on which version of the game you play. This Switch port that I played gives you more gold and experience compared to the NES original, which speeds things up tremendously. But it does give you a map that shows you exactly where all the towns and caves are, which could cause similar issues to doing a second playthrough. And it's missing a pleasant graphical effect when you build a bridge near the end of the game. There's always gotta be tradeoffs with these things.)

I'd recently been looking into Tolkien's work and how he inspired the fantasy genre. I used this as a reason to research early RPGs, how they were inspired by his work, and how they branched off.

I see Dragon Quest as a good starting point for RPGs and the standard when it comes to making the bare minimum. It's not filled with overwhelming lore or a bunch of items to collect. It's just freely exploring and grinding until you can get a good enough level, armor, weapon, and the item necessary to access the final boss.

I made sure to take my time and collect all the most overpowered stuff. The only thing I dislike is the grinding. It wasn't as annoying as I found it to be in other RPGs, due to the game's small number of enemies and how easy it get to 1 shot them after reaching level 20 (the max is 30), the game just becomes easy to zone out to while the gameplay takes the center stage.

Honestly 8.5/10, would play again. And to anyone wanting to make an RPG (like in RPG maker or something), i'd suggest playing this title first.

Anyways, on to Dragon Quest 2

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.

I was still SUPER in the mood for more Dragon Quest after beating DQB yesterday, so I started looking up ways to play the original legit. I didn't really wanna wait a month for a copy of the Super Famicom remake to come from Japan, so I turned the the Virtual Console. I nearly bought it on the Japanese Wii VC, but it turns out the Japanese 3DS eShop has 3DS remakes of the first three DQ games, so I bought it there instead for just 6 bucks :)

It's Dragon Quest, but FAR easier than the original. This took me about 6 hours to beat, and even though I got lucky on a few fights, especially the Dragon Lord, I was still able to beat the Dragon Lord at level 19 on my first try. This is a fairly streamlined port that really narrows down the level curve (like every level after 17 or so is just 4k EXP, which is like 12 fights against the monsters in the Dragon Lord's chamber). It also gets rid of the menu system like talking, stairs, open, and replaces it with a mechanical and graphical style far more reminiscent of the DS remakes of DQ's 4-6 where A is just your universal interact button. They also dumb down some things, like the Fairy's Flute, Loto's Armor, and even the hidden staircase behind the Dragon Lord's throne being marked with shiny, unmissable stars, but for what it's worth, the location of Loto's talisman is still hidden (although you still get a big interaction '!' above your head when you walk over it).

Verdict: Recommended. It's Dragon Quest like it always was, but way easier and palatable. There is some grinding still, but this is far more beatable in an afternoon/evening than an entire weekend+ affair like the original was. It's pretty to look at and the music is great, so it's a great version to play if you can either read Japanese or just know the game well enough to ignore all the dialogue x3

The plan from here is to move onto DQ2, which I also bought from the eShop for around 9 bucks, so I can partake in this month's TR in a way that won't be an insane time vampire like the original NES port is x3

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.

Eu não gostei do jogo. Não dele como um todo, pois eu mesmo adorei a trilha sonora que é bem agradável de se escutar enquanto você lida com diversos encontros aleatórios para subir de nível e ficar mais forte(até mesmo isso não chegou a me incomodar muito).

Eu não consegui ligar pra história desse jogo o suficiente para saber o que fazer em seguida. Eu sei que tinha uma princesa, um lorde dragão e eu, que sou descendente de um grande herói. Talvez isso seja mais um problema com a minha relação para com a obra do que a obra em si.

Mas, uma coisa que eu preciso admitir, é que pode não ter sido uma das melhores experiências, mas ainda assim foi interessante conhecer o primeiro jogo de talvez a maior franquia de JRPG do mundo(talvez).

This game aged surprisingly well. usually NES games are stupidly and annoyingly cryptic but Dragon Quest is pretty simple to follow as long as you're paying attention. The game is very short I think it only took me about 7-8 hours to beat it but for a NES game or the 3 dollar mobile port I got that's fine. I mostly played this game to kill time and it does that well. The problems are mostly ones that were with age and the genre not being perfected yet, every fight is a stat check, there's no real strategy, you either have the stats to win or you don't. The game is VERY backtracky, granted I think it's in favor for the game's design as the world's pretty small, you kinda wanna be fighting enemies to grind, and exploration with future items (mostly keys) gives you more items and hints for further progression. The only time I REALLY had to stop and grind was toward the end of the game for the best equipment and even then it was only like 40 minutes. Overall it's really solid for an NES rpg and I'd say if you're a fan of the genre it's worth a look for the novelty.

Honestly, very short and sweet. The story was simple and I think it does a good job of leading you through the world with a clear mission.
As long as you have a world map pulled up on any version where you don't have access to one, you should be okay.
Random encounters are never fun, but what can you do, it's an 80s jrpg. I had fun though, the atmosphere and music were great and the npcs were funny. There's something so baller about being the one guy with sick ass armour, on a mission to get the ball of light and save the princess. Like it sounds so generic, but it created THE blueprint and it's the ONE to do it right.

Games like these can be a little hard to rate. Should I rate them based on how fun they are to play now, to a modern audience, or how influential they were? I'm being a coward here by going with "a little bit of both", but I do know that despite how barebones DQ1 was, I had a fun time with it. I might have had a different tune if I'd played the original instead of a version with some quality of life added in, but it was a nice little game to zone out to. Sometimes, all you want in a game is Number Goes Up, and this one was short enough that the grind didn't overstay its welcome. It was also really neat to see what did or didn't eventually become a JRPG staple. If I had to make one big complaint, though, it's that the Switch version looks like a cheap RPGmaker port. When I realized the SNES version had great sprite animations instead of static jpegs I felt extremely cheated. What gives, Squeenix!

I don't know why I expected a better game. Dragon Quest is known by many as the first jrpg. It is the standard that so many great games were built upon. And built is correct, for what is here is so barebones it is barely enjoyable.

You leave town, fight monsters, level up, get money, buy new equipment, move on. That's pretty much the whole game. And combat is mostly just hitting attack against the one monster on screen. There aren't enough options to have much in the way of strategy.

Play it for the history if you want, but there is nothing of substance here. This game could not be simpler and the formula has been greatly improved since.

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.

When you imagine a 30+ year old first-entry in a long standing series, usually the image in your mind is kinda clunky or “outdated” but Dragon Quest is still pretty fun! It’s a little obtuse but I think everything can be figured out someway. It’s a very quaint and quick little adventure that I still think is worth playing. It’s not the greatest thing ever but a small 5-hour quest can be enjoyable. I remember a major grind fest before the Dragonlord’s Castle being unfun but the rest was rather charming. That said, in a world where Dragon Quest Plus exists, you might be better off just playing that fangame instead (better sprites, additional cool story moments, better gameplay, etc.). Plus, I’m knocking off extra points because I’m not fond of how the sprites in this version look.