I've always loved RPGs, but I've never played a lot of the original games that many people have fallen in love with.
My first RPG was Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64, and much what that series did sculpted my tastes and expectations for the genre. I tried other games like Final Fantasy 7 and the original Persona when I was older, but I ended up despising both of them. Very deeply.
It mostly came down to my own biases — I played the original Final Fantasy 7 back when I thought things like anime were the embodiment of "cringe" and the breeding ground for piss-poor story-telling. I had played Persona 1 after realizing I was wrong about that. When I played those games though, they set up a lot of expectations for what JRPGs used to be like. An unbearable amount of boring grinding, random encounters that crop up way too often, maze-like levels that were hard or confusing to navigate, a world map you ran around on that didn't exactly make you feel like you were on an adventure, and a general disdain for medieval settings. Those aspects have been present in a lot of JRPGs, but for the most part, as long as the game has only maybe one or two of them, I was able to still have an enjoyable time with it, but I'd have a lot of trouble stomaching all those aspects at once.
With all that being said, you'd be a little confused why I ended up enjoying the original Dragon Quest whole heartedly. I'm honestly a little confused as well! Part of the reason is that, I've grown older, and I've come to appreciate games even if they don't play directly into my preferences. But I think it mostly has to come down to execution.
Grinding in this game takes a bit of time in Dragon Quest — you mash the A button a ton. But a lot of the mechanics here, as basic as they are from today's standards, are still fun. It's actually kind of refreshing just how simple it is. In fact, everything about Dragon Quest is deceptively simple. The dungeons are mazes, but they're designed in a way where you'd have trouble getting too lost. There's grinding involved in the game, but the game is so short that it doesn't really over stay it's welcome, since the enemy variety and difficulty are quite well balanced. It can actually be quite nice to grind for a bit. They also give you options to lessen grinding with spells like Holy Protection, which is genuinely really smart. While you're battling, you're essentially fighting to keep your health from going too under, and having things like a better sword or defense to work your way up towards helps drive the game. The items are actually very effective for how simple they are, and obtaining each one feels like a great little progression marker, given that they also act as gates for having the player lessen the difficulty of the world around them, and helping them by letting them have immunity to things like poison beds, or health regeneration. For a game from 1986, and being the first of it's kind, it's genuinely surprising how fundamentally solid the game was.
There were parts that had me scratching my head as to why they were designed to be so secretive, but most of these situations were like fun little puzzles. I'm still not sure how I was supposed to find the entrance to the Grave to get the harp, but finding out for myself that I had to skirt the edge of the map screen to find the magic key shop had me pleasantly happy with myself. It helps too to have townsfolk point you in the right direction, but never quite tell you exactly what it is. It's little things like that that I really appreciated about the game.
I had a positive take away from not being able to find the grave too; it made me realize that you could approach the game in a non-linear order! And that made me really appreciate the game even more! So in part, those open world maps weren't the reason why it never quite felt like you were going on an adventure — it was because the adventure maps in games like FF7 and Persona were often very linear in how you progress through the game.
If there's anything I've learned from Dragon Quest, it's that execution is the key to getting a player to like anything. If your game is fundamentally solid, the preferences that I have for games can go straight out the window. Do I still not like it when RPGs have those types of elements? Sure. But it all comes down to how they're designed, and it is no wonder that Dragon Quest took the world by storm like it did. It makes me genuinely curious how games like Final Fantasy started off, and if their design was as fundementally solid.
My first RPG was Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64, and much what that series did sculpted my tastes and expectations for the genre. I tried other games like Final Fantasy 7 and the original Persona when I was older, but I ended up despising both of them. Very deeply.
It mostly came down to my own biases — I played the original Final Fantasy 7 back when I thought things like anime were the embodiment of "cringe" and the breeding ground for piss-poor story-telling. I had played Persona 1 after realizing I was wrong about that. When I played those games though, they set up a lot of expectations for what JRPGs used to be like. An unbearable amount of boring grinding, random encounters that crop up way too often, maze-like levels that were hard or confusing to navigate, a world map you ran around on that didn't exactly make you feel like you were on an adventure, and a general disdain for medieval settings. Those aspects have been present in a lot of JRPGs, but for the most part, as long as the game has only maybe one or two of them, I was able to still have an enjoyable time with it, but I'd have a lot of trouble stomaching all those aspects at once.
With all that being said, you'd be a little confused why I ended up enjoying the original Dragon Quest whole heartedly. I'm honestly a little confused as well! Part of the reason is that, I've grown older, and I've come to appreciate games even if they don't play directly into my preferences. But I think it mostly has to come down to execution.
Grinding in this game takes a bit of time in Dragon Quest — you mash the A button a ton. But a lot of the mechanics here, as basic as they are from today's standards, are still fun. It's actually kind of refreshing just how simple it is. In fact, everything about Dragon Quest is deceptively simple. The dungeons are mazes, but they're designed in a way where you'd have trouble getting too lost. There's grinding involved in the game, but the game is so short that it doesn't really over stay it's welcome, since the enemy variety and difficulty are quite well balanced. It can actually be quite nice to grind for a bit. They also give you options to lessen grinding with spells like Holy Protection, which is genuinely really smart. While you're battling, you're essentially fighting to keep your health from going too under, and having things like a better sword or defense to work your way up towards helps drive the game. The items are actually very effective for how simple they are, and obtaining each one feels like a great little progression marker, given that they also act as gates for having the player lessen the difficulty of the world around them, and helping them by letting them have immunity to things like poison beds, or health regeneration. For a game from 1986, and being the first of it's kind, it's genuinely surprising how fundamentally solid the game was.
There were parts that had me scratching my head as to why they were designed to be so secretive, but most of these situations were like fun little puzzles. I'm still not sure how I was supposed to find the entrance to the Grave to get the harp, but finding out for myself that I had to skirt the edge of the map screen to find the magic key shop had me pleasantly happy with myself. It helps too to have townsfolk point you in the right direction, but never quite tell you exactly what it is. It's little things like that that I really appreciated about the game.
I had a positive take away from not being able to find the grave too; it made me realize that you could approach the game in a non-linear order! And that made me really appreciate the game even more! So in part, those open world maps weren't the reason why it never quite felt like you were going on an adventure — it was because the adventure maps in games like FF7 and Persona were often very linear in how you progress through the game.
If there's anything I've learned from Dragon Quest, it's that execution is the key to getting a player to like anything. If your game is fundamentally solid, the preferences that I have for games can go straight out the window. Do I still not like it when RPGs have those types of elements? Sure. But it all comes down to how they're designed, and it is no wonder that Dragon Quest took the world by storm like it did. It makes me genuinely curious how games like Final Fantasy started off, and if their design was as fundementally solid.