Dragon Warrior 1 is still pretty classically Dragon Quest. But jumping to 2 made it clear they still had a lot of work to do, with a lot of 2's issues mainly stemming from the wild goose chase to even get your first party member, the imbalance between enemy groups and your group (capped at 3 characters), unstackable items like herbs, the over-inflated world map, unintuitive direction for finding the seals, and the fact that you can end up in the endgame area like 10 levels below where you should, necessitating grinding.

Anyway, I'm glad at least I got 'em done. It was impressive that they got the two games onto the GBC, and they do deserve to be experienced.