1/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of Dragon Quest.

This is probably my least popular opinion on this entire site but I really hated Dragon Quest. Gonna cut the shit here, for me it’s an uninteresting, dated affair that has completely lost its lustre nowadays. I’m not really into medieval settings, like, at all for a start so this game’s story and theme was already gonna have a tough time with me, but even then I don’t think it’s interesting. Blah blah blah, some heroic knight used this magic orb to banish evil or whatever but oh no, they’re back and stole the princess so his descendant has to make things right again. Yawn. There’s minimal twists or turns in the plot, everything plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect. I can forgive an RPG with a whatever story if I at least sorta like the gameplay… but the problem is here I don’t like the gameplay either, at all. It feels like the entire game consists of grinding. If you just go through, killing whatever monsters you can, you’ll never even be close to a level where you can press into any new area. Grinding is an absolute necessity all throughout the game, if you dare have less than the exact weaponry and level the game wants, you’ll simply die, die, die, until you give up and decide to go back. Additionally outside of this it’s still not really that fun, you don’t get any party members in this game at all so every fight boils down to spamming your physical attack and your heal until the problem goes away. To figure out how you’re supposed to progress the story, the game really promotes talking to the NPCs of the game to get hints and such, but not only are some random things necessary to the game never told to you, but everyone in the entire game speaks in old ass Shakespearean English, which, I guess is something I can appreciate as the translators adding more immersion to the world, especially in the 80’s when translating a game like this was usually just the bare minimum, but 1. I still don’t care about the setting, and 2. It just makes this whole idea of talking to the locals to get clues way more trouble than it’s worth. For my money, the only way you can kinda like this game playing it for the first time in 2023 is if you use a guide. Again there’s just so much bullshit you just have to know too, like walking along the outskirts of towns to access any magic keys or Erdrick’s artefacts, or walking on this one black tile in a building to access a dungeon. All of these things are necessary to beat the game in some way, and sorry if I’m wrong because I actually didn’t feel like dragging myself through every bland NPC’s dialogue, but I didn’t see a single line referring to any of this. The worst part is how you have to go on this side quest to rescue the princess or whatever, and the item you get is basically crucial to beating the game if you don’t want to get out a pen and paper and find the exact location of Erdrick’s third artefact. Why even bother calling them side quests or secrets, you can’t win without them! Dragon Quest was a really painful experience. I get that a lot of people are nostalgic, and I do have a certain level of respect for this game just for how important it was, but otherwise it’s really not my thing. I can usually look past design decisions in old games that have vastly fallen out of favour, but even I was insulted and appalled by just how unpleasant this game is to play nowadays. It’s totally out of step with modern conventions. I can respect Dragon Quest for its influence and ambition at the time, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s still the most aged game I’ve ever played. Grade: D- Difficulty: A+