Game Review: ドラゴンクエスト I (SNES版)
2024-Feb-29, Thursday 07:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This is the game that made JRPGs.
Not sure that Horii Yūji knew when he decided to adapt the Wizardry and Ultima games that he loved on computer into a console RPG that he would change Japanese culture permanently. Words like クエスト ("quest"), 勇者 (yūsha, "hero"), 魔王 (maō, lit: "Demon King" but more often just "main bad guy") that are all over the place in Japanese culture now can point here as the source of their popularity. The series that rapidly grew so popular that Enix only released new games on weekends so that schoolkids wouldn't skip school--and so salarymen wouldn't skip work. It never really made it big in America, though, because Final Fantasy came out first and so when Dragon Quest came in America in 1989--a year later than Final Fantasy here, and three years after its initial release in Japan--it looked extremely dated, because it was. By then they were already onto Dragon Quest IV in Japan. Even Nintendo Power giving away free copies didn't help.
I didn't get one of those free copies because I didn't know RPGs existed. I didn't encounter Dragon Quest until I got to university, discovered how many people had uploaded things on the internet, and tried some of the games I had missed either because I had no way to play them (I never owned an SNES) or because my interests were different and I played through "Dragon Warrior." And it was fun! So when I was looking for short game, I thought about how there's supposed to be an HD2D remake of Dragon Quest III coming at some point and I wanted to play through this game and Dragon Quest II before it comes out, and I thought about how I need more Japanese practice.
Descendant ofErdrickLoto, defeat the Dragon King!
"[NAME]! The descendant of the hero Loto! I have been awaiting you!"
You begin Dragon Quest talking to the king, who tells you literally the entire plot in the first thirty seconds of the game. Things used to be great, but the Dragon King showed up, conquered an old castle nearby as the crow flies, unleashed floods of monsters that ravaged the countryside and made travel between the towns suicidally dangerous, kidnapped the princess Laura (Eng: Gwaelin) and now stands poised to wipe out all hope and light in the land of Alefgard. Many heroes have set out and tried to defeat the Dragon King, but all of them have fallen. In the castle of the king and the nearby town of Ladatorm (Eng: "Brecconary"), the people talk in hushed whispers of the end of the world.
And...that's it, that's all you need to know. Some of these reviews I've written have multi-paragraph discussions of the plot and setup, either because I think it's interesting or to explain why the game is compelling, but there's none of that here. There's no plot twists or mysterious revelations. That's why the opening of Final Fantasy I was the way that it was, because it was dunking on the idea of "save the princess and beat the bad guy" as the entirety of the plot. And you technically don't even have to save the princess, you can beat the Dragon King without her and it slightly changes the ending. The only material benefit saving her grants you is that you get a token of her love that allows you to search through the swamps south of Mercado (Eng: "Cantlin") for Loto's token, thus proving the hero's descent from the legendary hero of old. If you already know that the token is there you can find it yourself.
Okay, I lied a moment ago when I said there's no plot twists. The one twist in the entire game is that when you finally confront the Dragon King, he'll be like, "Hero, good job getting to me! I could use a man like you. How about you join me and rule at my side. I'll give you half the world." And then you get the option to accept, and if you say yes, the game ends. Dragon Quest Builders takes that as its starting premise, that the hero sided with the Dragon King and smashed humanity so far down into the dirt that they forgot the very act of building. It's neat that a whole game series came of it, but it's not so exciting in Dragon Quest I. There's no cool cutscene or anything, it just basically goes straight to game over. Nice job breaking it, hero.
Or at least, originally it did. In the SNES version, and I presume later ones, taking the Dragon King's offer causes the hero to wake up at an inn and the innkeeper to say it looks like he was having a nightmare. The hero would never betray the kingdom, of course, otherwise he wouldn't be the hero.
A slime draws near.
Without a complicated story to follow, the gameplay is the thing. Most of Dragon Quest is what we now call "grinding" but was just the game back in 1986. When you start, you have a bit of gold to buy weapons and armor and a mission to slay the Dragon King, and so you head out to the world crawling with monsters and you fight slimes. And then you fight drakees, and then you fight magicians, and you use the money you earn to buy a better sword and better armor, and so on up the chain until you're fighting dragons using Loto's old weapons and armor with which he defeated the ancient Demon King. The progression is vertical with no real digressions. There's nothing like Final Fantasy I's elemental damage weapons or armor that casts spells when you use it. When you find or buy a weapon that has better stats, you equip it and you can do more damage. This is most of the game, going out and fighting, going back to town to stay at the inn, and repeat until you level up.
The only innate progression is magic. At level three, the hero learns Hoimi (Eng: "Heal"), and that extends your time out in the field geometrically because you no longer need to go back to town to heal when your HP is low, only when your MP is low. At level four the hero learns Gira (Eng: "Frizz") and so on as levels go up. These spells mostly just replace items and normal attacks--Hoimi replaces the medical herb, Rūra replaces the Chimera Wing item and allows you to instantly return to the king's castle, Remīra replaces torches by causing light underground, Toherosu replaces the Holy Water item by warding off monsters, and so on. Most of this is out-of-battle utility, and you'll rarely need to use magic in battle unless you're suffering serious damage, in which case Hoimi or the upgraded version Behoimi is very useful. Combat magic rarely does much more damage than just attacking, and while casting Rahirō (Eng: "Sleep") can help in some cases, I think I only ever cast it twice over the entire game. So without much useful battle magic, combat is thus Fight to win. There's no strategy beyond getting better equipment, and there's only two in-battle status effects, the aforementioned Sleep and the anti-magic Mahotōn (Eng: "Stopspell"). If your health gets low--and if you're facing appropriate challenges, it won't--cast Hoimi or Behoimi. Otherwise, Fight. When you win, heal up if you need to and then repeat. You only ever fight a single enemy at a time, so there's no prioritization. Coming back to it nowadays, it even simpler than the stereotype that people think of when they think of early JRPGs.
The best use of magic in battle is casting Rahirō for tool-assisted speedruns, where people will cast it on the Dragon King, have it work immediately, and then murder him while he's asleep. I did that the first time I beat this game at university and let me tell you it took me a lot of save states to pull it off.
"But that cave is just full of monsters. There's no way a beautiful woman would be there."
I didn't do that this time, though. Since I'd already beaten the game, I tried to play it completely straight. Even though I knew where certain things were, like Princess Laura in the cave between Maira (Eng: "Kol") and Rimuldar, I didn't go anywhere that actual dialogue in the game didn't tell me where to go, so I waited until I was told that there was a great treasure in Ladatorm Castle to go find the Sun Stone, I waited until someone told me where the Faerie flute was in Maira before I went and go it, and so on, just to make sure that the entire game was playable and comprehensible without resorting to a walkthrough. It was, of course--people who talk about how these old games are impossible to play are too used to modern signposts and quest markers and view time spent actually exploring as a waste. They'd never be able to play a game like Morrowind, especially in its pre-quest-journal state. I've heard the same complaint recently about the original Final Fantasy I, that how could anyone know what to do? Talk to everyone in every town, that's how. Why play the game if you don't want to interact with the game?
That was the fun part of these old games that modern players with walkthroughs in hand are missing. The discovery and exploration were one of, if not the, biggest parts of the game. In something like Super Mario Bros., there's no real exploration, you just go from left to right and there's no one to talk to, but in a CPRG you can go anywhere and talk to anyone. Like the couple in the castle, where the woman talks about how she wants their love to last forever but her boyfriend is being a downer, and the man talks about how all he can think about is how the Dragon King's legions of monsters are going to kill everyone. Like the bard in Garai town (Eng: "Galenholm"), who wants to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Garai. Like the merchant who went on a trip and got stuck in a far-away town, cut off from his wife by the legions of monsters. If you're not interested in those moments, you're just going to look at Dragon Quest as a boring game where you walk back and forth and press Fight to win, and you won't understand what made these old games so magical.
You have to enjoy the journey, or why are you playing the game at all? Just to say you "beat" it after following a walkthrough to the letter and never knowing where you are or why you're going to the next place it tells you to? Just watch a speedrun.
"But if you side with me, I'll give you half the world."
That's the thing about old games. People talk about advances in game design, but there's a reason why the OSR movement was so popular in the tabletop space and there's a reason why people like playing old games with pixelated graphics, no voice acting, and no arrow constantly telling you where to go and what to do. Maybe it's harder to do now when we're old and jaded, but as kids playing these games, those simple pixels and beeps and boops were an entire alternate world that the game transported us into.
Okay, this is the point where I say that yes, I played a big chunk of the game at 400% normal speed as I walked back and forth and fought metal slimes in the hills south of the ruins of Domdora (Eng: "Damdara"), but that I didn't feel like I was doing it to get it out of the way. I was still having a fun time slashing those slimes and dragons and magicians, getting XP, and hearing the little chime jingle. After I beat the Dragon King, I had a smile on my face when I noticed that all of the poison swamp tiles had changed to fields of flowers. This is the origin of basically everything about JRPGs that doesn't come from the Ghibli movies Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, from slimes as enemies, to the Legendary Hero, to being able to overlevel bosses if you can't beat them in a straight fight, and it is still worth playing to this day. You'll have a great time and you can beat it in 6-8 hours.
But yeah, maybe play it somewhere that has a speed boost option.
Not sure that Horii Yūji knew when he decided to adapt the Wizardry and Ultima games that he loved on computer into a console RPG that he would change Japanese culture permanently. Words like クエスト ("quest"), 勇者 (yūsha, "hero"), 魔王 (maō, lit: "Demon King" but more often just "main bad guy") that are all over the place in Japanese culture now can point here as the source of their popularity. The series that rapidly grew so popular that Enix only released new games on weekends so that schoolkids wouldn't skip school--and so salarymen wouldn't skip work. It never really made it big in America, though, because Final Fantasy came out first and so when Dragon Quest came in America in 1989--a year later than Final Fantasy here, and three years after its initial release in Japan--it looked extremely dated, because it was. By then they were already onto Dragon Quest IV in Japan. Even Nintendo Power giving away free copies didn't help.
I didn't get one of those free copies because I didn't know RPGs existed. I didn't encounter Dragon Quest until I got to university, discovered how many people had uploaded things on the internet, and tried some of the games I had missed either because I had no way to play them (I never owned an SNES) or because my interests were different and I played through "Dragon Warrior." And it was fun! So when I was looking for short game, I thought about how there's supposed to be an HD2D remake of Dragon Quest III coming at some point and I wanted to play through this game and Dragon Quest II before it comes out, and I thought about how I need more Japanese practice.
Descendant of
"[NAME]! The descendant of the hero Loto! I have been awaiting you!"
You begin Dragon Quest talking to the king, who tells you literally the entire plot in the first thirty seconds of the game. Things used to be great, but the Dragon King showed up, conquered an old castle nearby as the crow flies, unleashed floods of monsters that ravaged the countryside and made travel between the towns suicidally dangerous, kidnapped the princess Laura (Eng: Gwaelin) and now stands poised to wipe out all hope and light in the land of Alefgard. Many heroes have set out and tried to defeat the Dragon King, but all of them have fallen. In the castle of the king and the nearby town of Ladatorm (Eng: "Brecconary"), the people talk in hushed whispers of the end of the world.
And...that's it, that's all you need to know. Some of these reviews I've written have multi-paragraph discussions of the plot and setup, either because I think it's interesting or to explain why the game is compelling, but there's none of that here. There's no plot twists or mysterious revelations. That's why the opening of Final Fantasy I was the way that it was, because it was dunking on the idea of "save the princess and beat the bad guy" as the entirety of the plot. And you technically don't even have to save the princess, you can beat the Dragon King without her and it slightly changes the ending. The only material benefit saving her grants you is that you get a token of her love that allows you to search through the swamps south of Mercado (Eng: "Cantlin") for Loto's token, thus proving the hero's descent from the legendary hero of old. If you already know that the token is there you can find it yourself.
Okay, I lied a moment ago when I said there's no plot twists. The one twist in the entire game is that when you finally confront the Dragon King, he'll be like, "Hero, good job getting to me! I could use a man like you. How about you join me and rule at my side. I'll give you half the world." And then you get the option to accept, and if you say yes, the game ends. Dragon Quest Builders takes that as its starting premise, that the hero sided with the Dragon King and smashed humanity so far down into the dirt that they forgot the very act of building. It's neat that a whole game series came of it, but it's not so exciting in Dragon Quest I. There's no cool cutscene or anything, it just basically goes straight to game over. Nice job breaking it, hero.
Or at least, originally it did. In the SNES version, and I presume later ones, taking the Dragon King's offer causes the hero to wake up at an inn and the innkeeper to say it looks like he was having a nightmare. The hero would never betray the kingdom, of course, otherwise he wouldn't be the hero.
A slime draws near.
Without a complicated story to follow, the gameplay is the thing. Most of Dragon Quest is what we now call "grinding" but was just the game back in 1986. When you start, you have a bit of gold to buy weapons and armor and a mission to slay the Dragon King, and so you head out to the world crawling with monsters and you fight slimes. And then you fight drakees, and then you fight magicians, and you use the money you earn to buy a better sword and better armor, and so on up the chain until you're fighting dragons using Loto's old weapons and armor with which he defeated the ancient Demon King. The progression is vertical with no real digressions. There's nothing like Final Fantasy I's elemental damage weapons or armor that casts spells when you use it. When you find or buy a weapon that has better stats, you equip it and you can do more damage. This is most of the game, going out and fighting, going back to town to stay at the inn, and repeat until you level up.
The only innate progression is magic. At level three, the hero learns Hoimi (Eng: "Heal"), and that extends your time out in the field geometrically because you no longer need to go back to town to heal when your HP is low, only when your MP is low. At level four the hero learns Gira (Eng: "Frizz") and so on as levels go up. These spells mostly just replace items and normal attacks--Hoimi replaces the medical herb, Rūra replaces the Chimera Wing item and allows you to instantly return to the king's castle, Remīra replaces torches by causing light underground, Toherosu replaces the Holy Water item by warding off monsters, and so on. Most of this is out-of-battle utility, and you'll rarely need to use magic in battle unless you're suffering serious damage, in which case Hoimi or the upgraded version Behoimi is very useful. Combat magic rarely does much more damage than just attacking, and while casting Rahirō (Eng: "Sleep") can help in some cases, I think I only ever cast it twice over the entire game. So without much useful battle magic, combat is thus Fight to win. There's no strategy beyond getting better equipment, and there's only two in-battle status effects, the aforementioned Sleep and the anti-magic Mahotōn (Eng: "Stopspell"). If your health gets low--and if you're facing appropriate challenges, it won't--cast Hoimi or Behoimi. Otherwise, Fight. When you win, heal up if you need to and then repeat. You only ever fight a single enemy at a time, so there's no prioritization. Coming back to it nowadays, it even simpler than the stereotype that people think of when they think of early JRPGs.
The best use of magic in battle is casting Rahirō for tool-assisted speedruns, where people will cast it on the Dragon King, have it work immediately, and then murder him while he's asleep. I did that the first time I beat this game at university and let me tell you it took me a lot of save states to pull it off.
"But that cave is just full of monsters. There's no way a beautiful woman would be there."
I didn't do that this time, though. Since I'd already beaten the game, I tried to play it completely straight. Even though I knew where certain things were, like Princess Laura in the cave between Maira (Eng: "Kol") and Rimuldar, I didn't go anywhere that actual dialogue in the game didn't tell me where to go, so I waited until I was told that there was a great treasure in Ladatorm Castle to go find the Sun Stone, I waited until someone told me where the Faerie flute was in Maira before I went and go it, and so on, just to make sure that the entire game was playable and comprehensible without resorting to a walkthrough. It was, of course--people who talk about how these old games are impossible to play are too used to modern signposts and quest markers and view time spent actually exploring as a waste. They'd never be able to play a game like Morrowind, especially in its pre-quest-journal state. I've heard the same complaint recently about the original Final Fantasy I, that how could anyone know what to do? Talk to everyone in every town, that's how. Why play the game if you don't want to interact with the game?
That was the fun part of these old games that modern players with walkthroughs in hand are missing. The discovery and exploration were one of, if not the, biggest parts of the game. In something like Super Mario Bros., there's no real exploration, you just go from left to right and there's no one to talk to, but in a CPRG you can go anywhere and talk to anyone. Like the couple in the castle, where the woman talks about how she wants their love to last forever but her boyfriend is being a downer, and the man talks about how all he can think about is how the Dragon King's legions of monsters are going to kill everyone. Like the bard in Garai town (Eng: "Galenholm"), who wants to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Garai. Like the merchant who went on a trip and got stuck in a far-away town, cut off from his wife by the legions of monsters. If you're not interested in those moments, you're just going to look at Dragon Quest as a boring game where you walk back and forth and press Fight to win, and you won't understand what made these old games so magical.
You have to enjoy the journey, or why are you playing the game at all? Just to say you "beat" it after following a walkthrough to the letter and never knowing where you are or why you're going to the next place it tells you to? Just watch a speedrun.
"But if you side with me, I'll give you half the world."
That's the thing about old games. People talk about advances in game design, but there's a reason why the OSR movement was so popular in the tabletop space and there's a reason why people like playing old games with pixelated graphics, no voice acting, and no arrow constantly telling you where to go and what to do. Maybe it's harder to do now when we're old and jaded, but as kids playing these games, those simple pixels and beeps and boops were an entire alternate world that the game transported us into.
Okay, this is the point where I say that yes, I played a big chunk of the game at 400% normal speed as I walked back and forth and fought metal slimes in the hills south of the ruins of Domdora (Eng: "Damdara"), but that I didn't feel like I was doing it to get it out of the way. I was still having a fun time slashing those slimes and dragons and magicians, getting XP, and hearing the little chime jingle. After I beat the Dragon King, I had a smile on my face when I noticed that all of the poison swamp tiles had changed to fields of flowers. This is the origin of basically everything about JRPGs that doesn't come from the Ghibli movies Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, from slimes as enemies, to the Legendary Hero, to being able to overlevel bosses if you can't beat them in a straight fight, and it is still worth playing to this day. You'll have a great time and you can beat it in 6-8 hours.
But yeah, maybe play it somewhere that has a speed boost option.
