Collection essentials #54: Dragon Warrior (NES)

 

Originally this game was called Dragon Quest in Japan, but the name was changed to avoid a copyright battle with something else called “DragonQuest”. After 15 years of going with the “Dragon Warrior” change, the series switched to being “Dragon Quest” worldwide.

Dragon Warrior is on this list because it is a genre pioneer. It is known for being the first “JRPG”, which is short for “Japanese role-playing game”. Video game RPGs were descended from tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. There were RPG video games before Dragon Warrior, but the game’s creator wanted to change up and simplify the complex gameplay seen in such games to make a new and more accessible type of experience that anyone could get into. The game came out in Japan in 1986 and was a big success, and Dragon Quest as a series became an absolutely enormous phenomenon in its home country. Overseas, it never came all that close to reaching such popularity. Perhaps part of this was because Dragon Warrior didn’t come out until over 3 years after its original Japanese release, so it may not have seemed so impressive by 1989 standards. Dragon Quest as a series continues to this day, and it eventually did develop a respectable following in the English-speaking world, though it’s never been the most popular JRPG series.

What is a JRPG and how does Dragon Warrior actually play? I’ll try to succinctly give a surface-level explanation. Like in Dungeons & Dragons, you control a character who has numeric statistics that determine their abilities. As you win fights, you gain experience points, and upon compiling a certain number of them you will “level up” and all your stats will increase. You can also buy equipment such as weapons and armor in order to increase stats as well. As you explore the world, you will get into fights commonly referred to as “random battles,” meaning, when you’re in an area that has monsters, every step you take has a certain change to switch over to a separate screen and interface for a battle to take place, showing you the monster(s) you’re fighting. The combat is entirely turn-based, so you choose an action such as a melee attack or casting some kind of spell, then both you and the enemy execute your actions, then rinse and repeat until someone’s dead. When you’re not in these turn-based battles, you’re often in a treacherous dungeon looking for the next big enemy you need to defeat or item you need to find, and there may be goodies off the beaten path for those brave enough to look for them. Towns provide a break from this formula and a place to go shopping, get tips from townsfolk and inns to rest at. Playing Dragon Warrior is far simpler and easier to jump into than something like Dungeons & Dragons largely because you only have one character and you do not create them from scratch or customize them very much at all. Some fans of D&D may dislike the stripped-down nature of this and many other JRPGs, but there’s no denying that these differences create a more accessible game with a distinct and wide appeal.

How is it going back to Dragon Warrior now? Unfortunately, like I said in a previous post, RPGs in the NES era are a tough genre to go back to. Many of the improvements made in future RPGs will be sorely missed for someone who is used to them. As described before, collecting experience points and “leveling up” a lot is generally how you increase your stats and therefore get stronger, and in Dragon Warrior you will often find that enemies in a new area are too strong for your character to realistically defeat, so you are forced to fight random weaker enemies for a while in a process that gamers call “grinding”. Most gamers will tell you that mandatory grinding is a bad thing, as it can get tedious and can mess up the pacing of a game. Though I do have to say that in today’s age where we have so many podcasts, videos and things to listen to at our fingertips, putting something on to listen to can be a fine way to make the grinding much more bearable. Future RPGs would offer more compelling storylines and characters as well, not to mention features to make the experience smoother and more enjoyable. Dragon Quest/Warrior 1 has also been remade a few times, so this is likely not the most fun iteration of the original journey.

But Dragon Warrior still belongs as an essential due to how incredibly influential and important it was in molding a genre that would go on to produce some of my favorite gaming experiences ever. Without it we probably wouldn’t have a certain super-popular series starting with the letter F that you’ll be reading about soon. There are three Dragon Warrior sequels on the NES and they are better games, but I don’t consider them essential since they (inevitably) weren’t quite as historically important.