2.5/5 ★ – ilestsixheures's review of Dragon Quest.

I can appreciate the historical importance of this game, and it's visual charms- which are helped greatly by Toriyama's artwork, and which provides an interesting cross-over of talent from the manga Shonen jump scene into the nascent video gaming world. I can appreciate the limitations of both experience and the NES console itself, and the attempt to break ground by providing a Japanese counter to the complex RPG's budding up in the west. I appreciate the attempt at accessibility, to provide an RPG that anyone could (and it would seem everyone truly did) play. From little boys to mothers and grand-mothers, the game is appreciable and complete-able by anyone with enough time on their hands. And there lies the problem: the amount of time required to beat this thing seems to be upwards of tens of hours, and almost all of that is spent in grinding. A slow, long, grueling process if you have anything else you need to do with your time. For kids this problem is largely null. They have no responsibilities, and rarely anywhere to be outside of a classroom or a dinner table, so for a child the game must seem a great deal more adventurous. For them this is where they need to be. Saving the world is important, and sometimes a hero has no time for a warm cooked meal. Just five more minutes I swear... For anyone else though, the actual rewards begin a slow decay. The game starts with a simple set-up. There's a missing princess and a dark lord who has stolen a magical object to cast the world into evil. That tracks. Got it, kill the bad man and save the girl. Check. From here players will find the design to be both remarkably familiar and strangely alien. The way to interact with everything comes through an adventure-game style menu screen. This includes accessing stairs, doors and talking with characters. It's easy enough to get used too, but it slows things down quite unnecessarily. Movement otherwise is like any other 2D JRPG you've ever played. The battle system is the usual fair: a windowed encounter pops up displaying your HP and MP (along with your total gold and exp. points) and you battle through a selection of four commands: Attack, Spell, Run, Items. Defeat the enemy and gain experience points and gold. Gain enough of either of these and you can level up, either through your personal stats or by buying equipment which help modify with extra points. It all works out fine early game, though once your level passes into the late-teens any additional level takes entirely too many encounters of even the stronger enemies in game, and your weapons will likely be maxed out at this point. It's a small inventory, with only a few swords and an amour set or two. It is quite interesting to see how little things have actually changed for the genre, outside of graphical improvements or balance issues. In fact decades would pass and this games design would remain relevant, which I'm sure accounts for part of its revival in ports and remasters over the years. It's not a bad game, and its DNA is in everything from Pokemon to Dark Souls- two games I never would put together before having played this, but which I now can't help but see as part of the same family. The punishing death, where you restart from your last save hub with your hard earned gold halved, only to make your way once more through the horde of strong enemies- sometimes dashing your way through, mashing at the RUN command in hopes of reaching a new city somewhere for shelter and improved weapons before you're beaten down once more- is such a reminder of my time playing the Souls games. But where Souls games make up for punishment by rewarding the player with new exciting locals to explore, great level design, and a growing cast of strange creatures to encounter-to say nothing of the deep and enigmatic lore that pervades the series- Dragon Quest instead finds itself limited (likely by system memory) to the same handful of recolored creature encounters in the same wide open spaces and dull dungeon mazes. The cities are few and the inhabitants have little of interest to say. I don't hold this against the game, it still does well for what it's working with, and the later games expand on all the good and fill in a lot of what is missing. I also oddly enjoyed playing this bare-bones proto-type-of-a-game. As someone coming much later in history, and having played a lot of other RPGs that this inspired, I can feel all the things that are missing, and wonder at whether the early players of this felt the same thing or if they were able to accept the game for what it was. It's an interesting experience. The interviews I've read by Horii seems to point to someone who just wants people to have a good time. Someone who just wants to entertain as many people as possible and spread the fun and joy of playing games and building worlds. To go on an adventure. I think it's a really noble thing to do and I'm glad that over 30 years later he's still plugging away at it. This game could be a lot of fun for some people out there, but as I've already warned, if you don't have much free-time, maybe skip it and try one of the many other games to come out of the series. I personally used this as a chance to catch up on all the episodes of Retronauts that I have discovered recently in my diving into classic games of late.