Finished Dragon Quest/Warrior 1 (GBC)
I recently finished "Dragon Warrior I", from the Dragon Warrior I & II collection for GBC. It was a port of the SNES version of the collection.
I was warned, several times, by several different people, that playing this game was probably a waste of my time. After a first few interesting hours I eventually discovered that it is, indeed, a very slight and insubstantial game, with a gnarled main quest. Without hints, help, or guides, it seems like something that could only be completed through careful note-taking, which I frankly was not willing to do. I wasn't willing to poke and prod every corner of every map, either - not in a game with random battle mechanics.
Poking and prodding is crucial. Several plot-critical areas are concealed by a trick of visibility; two different dungeons are hidden off the edges of castles or towns, in such a way that you must complete QA-tester-like actions to find them, like pushing at seemingly-solid walls or walking offscreen. If you unlock enough doors or walk laboriously around the edges of enough towns, you will find people who tell you the exact locations of things - hidden not by gameplay challenge but rather by your willingness to systematically grid-search every inch of the entire world.
The worst example of this philosophy is probably the A button action - searching beneath your feet. It is used several times to retrieve invisibly-lost objects in locations with no local clues or hints. You gotta go halfway around the world to find the hint which leads you there, write it down, and trudge back, through hordes of fairly-repetitive monsters. I was so shocked to find a hidden staircase in the final dungeon, DracoLord's Castle, which had an actual clue hidden on a tile nearby. If only they'd been able to use that kind of thing - and art! - to make clue-hunting more rewarding!
I think it's this world design and clue-hiding philosophy that annoys me the most about the game. I am actually kind of more willing to forgive its extremely repetitive combat. Games, like industrial technology, are an additive art. Nobody invents a new machine out of nothing; they add together the other simple and complex machines, mechanisms, and techniques they already know about. Dragon Warrior I feels like a simple machine, like a lever or a inclined plane. It has pretty much only five combat spells, and two of them are upgrades of the other two. Its final battle forces the use of the melee attack only. I can only accept that this was good and smart and correct to the creators, in their time, with their resources. I can't expect the people who made it to possibly imagine the JRPG standards I now bring to a game like this.
The expectations I brought to this game were, very specifically, the experiences I had playing NeoQuest 1 and 2 on the Neopets website. These games were very simple JRPGs built for the web browser, and were very clearly inspired by the early Dragon Quest games. As a kid raised in a household where handhelds and consoles were forbidden, they were probably the first JRPGs I ever played. Discovering them was like being shot in the brain - I remember spending a whole weekend playing this game, zombie-like, trying to hide my growing "computer time" from my parents.
If you're curious, the website neoquest.guide is probably worth checking out for an idea of what they're like. They were pretty exploitable games. I was shocked to remember doing this myself in NeoQuest 1:
Rapidly click the compass arrows to move quickly. You will move 1 tile each time an arrow is clicked, so you may move and turn in multiple directions by clicking the arrows in sequence before the page reloads.
NeoQuest 1 has many of the features you would expect to find in a modern RPG, though - the player can craft gear, upgrade abilities and spells, spec their character into different builds depending on their preferences, and so on. The game isn't balanced to provide multiple good build strategies - there is one dominant magic type, and one magic type which is obviously worse at higher difficulty levels - but it's certainly more robust than Dragon Quest 1 for GBC.
I'm also shocked to learn that many of the things I saw in DQ1 were added for the GBC port - stat seeds, selling things back to shops, battle screen backgrounds, and even spell animations. So the original version of the game was even more insubstantial than I realized. I think this just re-confirms my desire to emulate the later revisions of these games, not the raw originals. I'm not looking to have a historical experience, but rather a moderately-entertaining, somewhat-enlightening one.
Things I liked about Dragon Warrior I for the GBC:
Slimes and Drackys. True genius here. The only actually good monsters in the game (okay, maybe also the knights with the codpieces a mile long). Toriyama did not hit very hard with all of these designs, but the first two monsters you see in the game are fucking perfect.
LoraLuv. Extremely funny. I kept showing my husband: look! Lora loves me, Laura! Lora is how many people who speak Spanish fluently assume my name must be spelled, because that's how they would do it phonetically. I have gotten a lot of Starbucks cups for Lora over the years.
My first 5 hours in the game, which I played without a guide or hints. I managed to get the RainStaff without looking up ANYTHING, even a map of the world. I was so hopeful that the rest of the game would be something like that. Then I hit the wall of "not actually taking written notes of everything the characters say and correlating the various hints to one another."
The condensed names. LoraLuv. DvlBelt. MysticNut. (Speaking of DvlBelt: it is very good that the first item in DracoLord's treasure room in the final level of the game mere feet away from DracoLord's actual face is a "Devil Belt" that curses you and forces you to potentially return to the very first town to get the curse lifted? This was the FIRST CURSED ITEM I'd found in the ENTIRE game, right at the very end!!)
When I made the little bridge with the Rainbow Drop. That rules primarily because I had predicted much earlier that THIS is EXACTLY where the bridge would appear, someday. I knew it even before I knew for sure that an item would exist to create a bridge. I love how easy it is to tell this, and how it's still satisfying to make it happen. Simple things!!
The guy protecting the Sun Stones going into his little cave and going to sleep permanently. Poor dude!
DracoLord asking you to join him two times... and what happens if you say yes!
It's very fun and good to play a game so rudimentary and pared-back and constrained, it feels like a flint-blade knife... but it also has these little moments where the creators stuck their heads above the water, so to speak, and somehow gasped out a clearer version of their own ambitions. The people who made this had such rich dramatic and visual ambitions! I'm glad that I can now see what they did next.
I'm not sure what Dragon Quest game I'll play next - I do agree, now, that it was silly of me to play this game. I think I'll take a break from Dragon Quest and do some research and play the one which best lives up to - or even surpasses! - my memory of the Neopets adventure that marked my brain so permanently.