(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.)
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.)