Or maybe Retro-Rick goes on another trip to the local flea-thrift-garage-sale-thing in 2023, and finds this game with a really cool cover, of a man in a viking helmet fighting a giant green dragon looking like something straight off a Dio Album Cover circa 1984. It says "Dragon Warrior" on it, and it's only a buck-fifty from the smelly salesman behind the counter whose missing a few teeth. "I just foun' dit' in mah' sun's closet! Dat dere' (there) game he used to play 'ars (hours) and 'ars on en(d)! Give it to yuh' fer....uh' buck fiddy'!". So you buy the cart, take it home, powere it up (diddly diddly dum dum - all your savegames have been lost) - of course it won't save anymore, but you again have a similar experience to the eight year old.

Anyway, Dragon Quest starts with Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura who entered a contest from real-estate-company-gone-game-publisher Enix (now knwon as SquareEnix). Horii entering "Love Match Tennis" and Nakamura entering "Door Door", and I believe, if I'm correct, they one 1st and 2nd place, and got to go to a Apple computer festival in 1982 or 1983, around the time Ultima III was coming out and Wizardry was getting inf ull swing.

Inspired by western RPGs, Horii wanted to design an RPG of his own, one that regular Japanese people could play and enjoy, and not have to study a ton to enjoy it either. Sort of an RPG for the layman. Together with Nakamura, as well as reknown Anime/Manga artist Akira Toriyama best known for his work on Dragonball, and the late pop song/jingle/classical composer Koichi Sugiyama, who was hired after leaving comments on one of Enix's early games - the "Dream Team" as they are called was assembled, and they began to create what would eventually become a Cultural icon in Japan.

Dragon Quest was released for the MSX Computer and Nintendo "Famicom" (Family Computer, aka Japanese NES) in 1986. It was slow to take off but once it did, oh my god how it did. By the third release in 1988 the local lore was businesspeople and school children played hooky just to purchase and play the newest Dragon Quest game, leading to an Urban legend about "Dragon Quest" day being a national law, when in reality, it was just Enix who made that decision.

However, America was a different culture at the time. There was no such thing as Japanese fans, or Anime fans at the time. Nobody knew what Dragonball was and would not until the early 1990's - about 1993 or so. We were about action games, and at the most "Japanese" Karate/Ninja games. Most people who played Nintendo were about Zelda, Mario, Megaman, or Castlevania, not about RPGs. RPG fans were in the minority, and the majority of the age group for the NES - about 8-16 years old - were not interested in spending hours at home "grinding" for gold and stats. They wanted IMMEDIATE results. All that "patience" stuff was "Nerd stuff". And nothing was more uncool, than being a "nerd" at the time. You were then put in a stereotype of the same kind of guy with a bowl cut, massive overbite, who talks about computers and dungeons and dragons, can't get a date, and makes high grades, but is worthless for anything social. How do I know - I lived it, and I was labelled as one, despite low grades, being a guitar player, and having long hair.

In 1988, Howard Philips, the star playtester for Nintendo of America, playtested Dragon Quest and felt it would be a good fit for the USA. So Nintendo and Enix, anticipating another huge hit stateside, put their ALL into this release. The ancient stick-figure-like sprites were replaced with new multi-directional sprites from the newer Dragon quest II and III releases, the oceans, rivers, and lakes got a shoreline, a handful of tweaks were made to the dialogue to keep the game "kosher" to United States puritannical sensibilities (particularly the Puff Puff lady by the bath that cures Rheumatism....she was replaced by an old nana that just tells you what the otherwise unusable bath is for). The game, almost like E.T. Extra Terrestrial was for the Atari 2600, was overprinted, and Nintendo ended up with excess copies in their warehouse, so in 1990, Dragon Warrior was given away for free with a new Nintendo Power Subscription. All other 8-bit Dragon Warrior releases would be done soley by Enix.

See, at it's core, it's a trope we'd see in all Nintendo games at the time. Save the world and the beautiful girl, get married, and have a bunch of kids with her for the sequel. That happens here, BUT, there's some nuances that make it a little less as "trope-ish".

For starters, the signs that the Dragonlord is wreaking havoc are at least a little bit obvious. The king, townspeople, and so on, all just sort of hang around their respective towns on quarantine like the Dragonlord is COVID and they're afraid of getting it.

There's a town in the game utterly destroyed by the Dragonlord and his minions, and now occupied by it's minions like a flying stinging insect infestation in an abandoned city with a paper nest the size of a skyscraper. It's like a cross between the Elephant's foot and Love Canal, mixed with Mad Max out there. This is a nice twist. It gives some scale to what this jackass is capable of, rather than making you feel like you're on a fetch quest.

I can kinda' give it a break though because who knows, if Dragon Quest had been unsuccessful, we probably would be mulling it over on various multicart and famiclone system compilations, mostly writing it off as mere "ROM Fodder". But instead this is just a tiny piece of a bigger story, a story that once fleshed out is pretty deep and pretty elaborate for a late 1980's JRPG console video game. And unlike Five Nights at Freddy's, it's not some retconned mess of incohesive lore people are still mulling over years later.

When Dragon Quest was released in Japan in 1986, it was pulling heavily from Wizardry and Ultima, including in the graphics department. Ultima III was the latest release, and if you've ever played it, Dragon Quest looks the part. Little stick-figure humanoid looking sprites that only face the camera and require a special "talk direction" function to work, no shorelines on the water, and thusly, a more blocky, and less as "charming" experience visually.

But when Nintendo of America was to released this, they had an overhaul done on the game's graphics, putting them at a little under the same level as the sequel. Now sprites could face all 4 directions, and only talk in the direction in which they are facing, eliminating a step from the "Talk" feature. Adding shorelines to the water added a little more charm and made this look like an NES game and not a lost MSX port of something. The font also got a boost into the more angular, unique, "Dragon Warrior" font we'd be used to, rather than the blocky single-case font of all other NES titles, and the dialog was all translated into a "ye olde English" style.

Where the graphics really shine, and this game stands above the rest in a way, is the battles. AKira Toriyama's designs, while cute, can still be menacing, a tough combination to put together. Slimes, the series mascot, are still somewhat menacing despite looking like a glob of toothpaste with a smile drawn on it in fondant. The ghosts are pretty snarky looking, Wizards, Warlocks, and Magicians are pretty unsettling in their Jawa-like form. Wyverns are particularly menacing yet cute, looking like flying shrimp muppets with a tint of molesty-ness to their appearance. Dragons and the armored knight class of characters get even more menasing in a way nobody has ever mentioned - color pallets. While most characters are pallet swaps, the swaps do a great job in showing more danger, going from bright, cute colors like pink, and purple, turquoise, and green, to dark, angry colors like crimson red, ruby, BBQ Potato chip orange, indicating an angrier, more aggressive, not to mention deadlier opponent. There's also a comedy element to their looks.

Of course we have the Dragon Warrior Overture in it's full glory. It's sort of like the base model of the theme, it does what's intended, gives that "epic knight on a mega-adventure" vibe with it's time-change fanfare at the start, and then it just repeats.

The city/town theme, is a shortened version than most younger players would not be used to (Koichi expanded upon it in later iterations of this game on other platforms). It feels a little Christmasy to me, to be honest, sort of like the sponsors on an old VHS I had of Jim Henson's "The Christmas Toy", where they're playing music with a similar feel, and a train rides around the base of the christmas tree around some Swiss Colony Charcuterie board confections. But it fits the feel of the game perfectly, so had to bump the score up.

The castle theme has a nice touch to it in that it changes timbres of the instruments depending on the floor you're on. Upstairs in the King's chambers is a more isolated feeling square wave, while downstairs we get a more airy sounding "sawtooth" wave for the main melody, giving a feeling of a more vast expanse and a collection of people all just doing their thing.

The overworld and dungeon themes get a bit, uh, repetitious. Both are only about 5-15 seconds long maximum, and repeat, and they are the two pieces of music in the game you'll listen to the most as you will be grinding - a lot. The overworld theme this go out is a bit clunky and has a very high pitched, oboe type tone, normally used for the bass. This can get grating on the ears after awhile. Thankfully, in later games, Sugiyama or the Chunsoft programmers chose to subdue the melody a little more so it blends and stops being a bousterous, out-front kind of sound.

The underworld theme/Castle Charlock theme is what we call "low Effort". Basically, just 8 iterations of the same disjointed melody. It DOES, however, do the job of making you feel like you're walking into darkness, a abandoned town once thriving, or a dank basement with one lone static resident that means no harm until you approach them. Each floor down you go to the bottom, it gets slower, and lower in pitch, until it sounds like a soundtrack to a boiling, very thick soup.

The Dragonlord's theme is pretty awesome....although a bit abrupt. First we get the usual battle theme, a strained sounding piece where the main melody is sliding into notes from afar and letting them ring...like a knife going into your gut. Probably fitting considering how gorey this would be as a hollywood movie vs. a video game for "kids" at the time. But then we get the Dragonlord's theme during the main event which comes off somewhat like a march and a wonderfully demented mixolydian-mode mess in a way only someone like Frank Zappa can come up with. With horns it would be downright menasing, but on the NES's paltry sound generator it almost has a cartooney "dun dun dun dun (dun dun dun dun) uh oh uh oh (uh oh uh oh)" quality to it that's both funny, and somewhat mocking at the same time.

For the original Famicom Release, Dragon Quest, QOL is somewhat less as there is no savegame battery, and instead, you need to input a code to retrieve your savegame. Lucky for us in 1989, when the USA got the NES, they put battery backed save in Dragon Warrior, so we did not have this issue.

But some warts still remain, with the most notable, and most complained about being needing to put in a bloody "STAIRS" command to use the stairs. In the sequel forward, this is eliminated by auto-triggering stairs tiles, but in this first game, I'm guessing there was a functional purpose for this. This bothers some people - not me so much - but other people might be really bothered with it. In Japan, they even had to initiate the DIRECTION in which to TALK because they had sprites that all faced the player, like in an early Ultima game (one of Dragon Quest's influences), whereas with the 1989 update we got with Dragon Warrior, we got 4-direction sprites for the player and NPCs so this feature was redaundant and thusly eliminated.

Battles pit you against enemies one at a time here, which is fair since you only play as one character - Erdrick's descendant - and have no other party members to speakof (the Princess does not fight). As an incentive for this simplified interface, we get full color backgrounds on the overworld battles which adds a bit of an air of atmosphere we don't get in the other three 8-bit releases. In fights, you only have 4 commands - Fight, Spell, Run, and Item. Basically, you can attack with your weapon, cast a spell, use an item, or run away from the battle (assuming mathmatically your dexterity and some other algorithm of stats and luck allows you to).

The gameplay, overall though, is fairly linear, in a fashion that more modern players might not catch onto. It uses very subtle cues to tell you where to go and when - usually through the form of NPC "conversational" clues (if you can call a line of dialog a "conversation"). Say, you start the game in Tantgel Castle, which lightly guides you over to the next town - Breconary - which then tells you about a town called "Garinham" and it's creator "Garin" to the northwest, which then once you're in Garinham, it leads you to more clues leading you south, and also east (Kol) - and from there, your world grows and expands. However, it does not handhold you at all, if you want to cross that bridge into a den of viscious Starwyverns, be the game's guest, but it's not going to end well for your at a low level or unprepared.

Total play time is around 8-16 Hours depending on how much you stick to the main quest or dilly dally around. I know my completion was around 7.5 hours total (450 minutes) based on 15 parts of my Let's Play at 30 minutes a run.

QoL In-game improves more as you play it. When you start off, you're beating up enemies with weak weapons and forced to use torches that only light up one block on each of eight directsions around you - later you get more powerful weapons, armor, and have a RADIANT Spell that lights up a good chunk of the room when you use it.