Dragon Warrior (1986)
What a lovely time. I've already played the GameBoy Color version and other remakes, so I knew I loved classic Dragon Quest. It was just time to prove to myself I could enjoy it even in its oldest and most cantankerous form. And I did! Effortlessly!
I've played a number of classic western PC RPGs at this point, and an odd thing about them is how decentralized the "fight monsters → get money and XP to get stronger → fight stronger monsters to get money and XP faster" loop is. Ultima III has only a few equipment upgrades, and leveling up only increases your HP — you have to find a specific endgame area to increase your stats. Questron's main progression method is save-scumming the casino. Grinding is important in Wizardry, but it's hard to feel a strong connection with your characters' growth when they could get decapitated by a ninja at any moment.
None of that's innately bad. (I'm also not saying this represents the full swath of CRPGs of the era; I'm just talking about what I've played lately.) The focus of those games is more on exploring, resource management, and puzzles than on the "make number go up" loop. But it can make them feel more like oddly presented adventure games than "RPGs" in the sense that I understand them. Dragon Quest centralizes and codifies the grind loop, and it felt exceedingly comfy to me coming off its more demanding contemporaries.
The language is admittedly bare. Devs needed the added complexities of Dragon Quest II (many of them borrowed from western PC RPGs, of course) to turn "the console RPG" into something you can spin a million lovely stories out of. But I'm glad to have the first Dragon Quest as a foundational one-off to enjoy and build on.
It's just a nice chill game to veg out to. (I played it while jet-lagged to hell.) The puzzles are nicely telegraphed. The dungeons are mazey enough to keep you paying attention. The mood and art are lovely. The princess is cute. I finished the game with a smile plastered across my face.
The arc here is the churning engine of a genre I adore. It's executed with a bare minimum of moving parts. It feels good to start off weak and grow strong; it feels good to leave a little digital world a happier place than you found it. What more do you need?
Dragon Warrior II (1987)
Dragon Quest took me three days to clear. Dragon Quest II took me a month of on-and-off play. The first game is a fun console romp; the second is undeniably a full-scale RPG.
It's divided into three acts. The opening is linear and gentle. You're led from one location to another as you recruit your full party. The second starts when you get the boat. The whole world opens up to you, and you're left to your own devices to slowly piece together its mysteries. The last act is a grueling climactic dungeon gauntlet.
The second act is the beating heart of the game, and to me, of Dragon Quest in general. Exploring the world, taking notes, and gathering crests is so goddam fun. Famicom Final Fantasy doesn't have anything as open-ended. By the time you get the airship in the first Final Fantasy, you've already explored a huge chunk of the map, and you're constrained in the order you can take on the remaining dungeons. 2 and 3 are even more linear. The overworld is a much larger part of Dragon Quest 2's character than many of its peers and successors, and the game's vastly richer for it.
The climax is what gives Dragon Quest II its dungeon crawler grit. I think its evil is a little overstated, especially on the NES version (where the final save shrine resurrects dead characters for free, which wasn't true of the Famicom version). The hit rate on the much bemoaned instant-death enemies is very low, and I didn't see a single casting of Sacrifice from the Gold Batboons. The possibility of getting screwed by bad dice rolls isn't an unforgivable design sin. It's a fundamental component of the genre's history and identity. If you want something you can mathematically solve, play a puzzle game.
But the dice rolls on the final bosses are admittedly very mean. They each have full heal spells, and use them randomly. Winning depends on raising your damage as high as you can, then hoping for a lucky string of turns. On top of that, even an extremely attentive player is unlikely to find the hero's best sword. Missing that tilts the odds even less in your favor. I had a lot of fun slowly making my way through Dragon Quest II's finale. But if every RPG had this much bite in the endgame, I'd probably get worn out with the genre.
If you step outside the big players into the larger world of Famicom, Super Famicom, and PC-Engine RPGs, you'll see an ocean of games that straightforwardly copy the language of Dragon Quest II. RPGMaker 2000, a tool which helped birth thousands of lovely personal expressive games, is software specifically designed to help you make games like Dragon Quest II. The game synthesized dozens of lessons from its predecessor and its PC contemporaries and codified the language of the console RPG.
It's an important game, but it's also a joyful one. There's a certain warmth to it that's hard to put my finger on. This is my third time through, and every time Traveling with Friends first plays, I well up. The challenges here are far more frightening than in the first Dragon Quest. The world is vaster, its mysteries deeper, its caverns deadlier. But you don't have to face them alone this time. I think that's really nice.
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