Why the original Dragon Quest is a mercifully short grind
Dragon Quest (1986)
Dragon Quest (1986)
Now please believe me: I’d love to spend my days and nights playing only the very best games out there, the real champagne titles. If I had it my way, I’d be properly sinking 200 or more hours into your Witchers, your GTAs, your Breath of the Wilds, even your Saints Rows.
Alas, I’m cursed to play games from all walks of life. I’ve got this real first world problem of owning too many games consoles, which means that I’ve got access to a very wide range of games, and that’s before you even get to those beautiful creations called emulators. Not easy being me, is it?
So when you realise that I’m about to give you a lecture on the original Dragon Quest, AKA Dragon Warrior, I know you want to tut, roll your eyes and ask why I’ve bothered. Well, put it this way – at least you can close this tab now, or you can (hopefully) read on and be finished in only a few minutes.
Dragon Quest 1 took seven hours from me. And for a JRPG, 7 hours sounds like a brisk walk, a lazy afternoon, no time at all. But when you consider the amount of level grinding that’s required to get to the end of this game, seven hours is like a Monday afternoon in work, or like waiting in line at the bank. It feels like an endless tunnel.
Honestly, you may or may not have spent some of your formative years grinding up against people on the dancefloor. That kind of grinding is enjoyable, and you get something out of it. It’s not a bit like Dragon Quest grinding, where you’re waiting for a buzz that never comes, and what sounds exciting, ain’t really that exciting at all.
The Dragon Quest series is so monumentally popular in Japan that, over there, it’s been likened to Star Wars. You can’t move for Dragon Quest merchandise and references over there. Well, since they’re both the first episodes, perhaps that makes Dragon Quest I the equivalent of The Phantom Menace.
And we all hated The Phantom Menace, didn’t we? You might take the pod-race, which is a bit of brainless fun, but that’s it. Dragon Quest I can be brainless fun too, but only if you like grinding for experience in its simplest, most crude form. There’s nothing else to get excited for; this is a severely antiquated game.
Or is it? You can play it entirely one-handed (steady now), just like EarthBound, meaning you can just keep your phone in your other hand for browsing, as you absent-mindedly power through the workmanlike to-me-to-you combat. Now that’s what you call a game built for the modern need.
And the battles are almost the entire gameplay really, since the whole game loop sees you slaughtering a million monsters and waiting an aeon for your gold and experience numbers to go up. Then you end up accidentally going in the wrong direction, and your single party member ends up getting smacked around by surprisingly tough enemies.
This is pretty devastating, because if you do get blown away out there, it means you lose half your gold. They pulled that money-grabbing trick in Pokémon Red and Blue as well, but at least there was nothing to buy in those games, just more Pokéballs to throw at Zapdos. It wasn’t as if every penny in Pokémon counted towards vital weapons and armour.
Guess where all of that does count? The arse-end of Dragon Quest I, that’s where. Honestly, the need for level grinding is almost beyond belief. Yet strangely you accept it, because you know that this game is pretty much the first of its kind.
Yes, this is the grandfather of the console role-playing game, so you know you have to go easy on it. You’d just look boorish if you raised the objectively correct opinion that battling a hundred astonishingly generic enemies before getting anywhere near a level-up is a diabolical liberty.
After all, it’s not as if there’s even a compelling story to keep you going. The whole point of this game, when it first came out, was to have you march towards foreign locales and glean some info from the townsfolk. It was intended that you’d always have a few juicy hints to keep you going.
Sounds quaint and all, and it’s more insight and help than the original Zelda game gave you. But why not just get an old GameFAQs guide on your side and consult that instead? It’ll spare you many a grindy hour of backtracking, believe me. It also means you’ll get to the end way before that seven hour mark, before your brain starts melting out of your skull and through your ears.
It’s just one-on-one out there on the overworld. There’s a small advantage here in that you don’t have to look after a whole party of fools. Of course, the flipside of this is that if you get hopped on by a few ruffian knights and suffer some bad luck, then all it takes is one cadaver and that’s half your wallet gone.
Since the only real way to get ahead in the game is to earn enough coinage to get better armour for your behind, one inopportune encounter like this can cost you a heap of time. It’s just a matter of bad luck really, when all of your attacks miss and all of their magic spells (imaginatively titled HURT and HURTMORE) whack you, one after another. I hate to advocate Save States, but they’ve always worked for me.
You do get sick of the slightly too loud swirling note at the start of each battle. And there isn’t much else to do, beyond doing your very best not to die. It’s not like there are sidequests, or party members to talk to, or even interesting townsfolk to get invested in.
Some of those townsfolk are a bit Castlevania II in fact, with the nonsense they feed you. That’s another reason to not get too deep into this nostalgia trip, and just stick to using a walkthrough. No normal people actually draw maps to help them through Metroid NES, and it’s the same here – you’d have to be mad, a regular feeder of ducks at the pond, to honestly want to engage the Dragon Quest NPCs in conversation.
Gosh, this is as basic as they come. I played the game on a fan-translated Super Famicom ROM, not exactly legally gotten but the Metal Slime police haven’t quite caught up to me yet. I figured that, for a stone-age game, it’s best to go as nouveau as you can.
Actually, the most recent iteration of Dragon Quest I, and indeed the majority of the series, can now be found on mobile devices. But obviously I have some self-respect, so mobile wasn’t an option for me, and it wasn’t out on Switch at the time. So it was the fan-trans, which unfortunately meant I missed out on one of the defining aspects of the NES, United States release of Dragon Warrior – the Ye Olde English dialogue.
Quite a strange creative choice, but the NES version is famous for it. Let’s be honest though, everything being thou, thy, art and thwittens gets pretty old after the first ten screens of dialogue. And I’m not even sure whether the blunt message of “Thou art dead” when you run out of HP is twee or tragic, but it’s certainly memorable.
Another reason not to play the NES original is that the command menu is incredibly clunky and segmented. As you make your sprite wander rigidly around the world, you can interact with a few different objects – we’re talking some pretty complex contraptions such as doors, treasure chests, and staircases. But they each have their own menu command for when you wish to interact with them.
So you’ll call up a menu to choose a command, again very similar to EarthBound. And yes, I’m aware that me using EarthBound as a reference point for Dragon Quest is like me telling you to look at Spaceballs in order to understand Star Wars.
But anyway, your menu will have individual commands like STAIRS, DOOR, and SELF-IMMOLATE. Try to use STAIRS in front of a door and guess what? Thou art a dunderhead. I get the feeling that the lads in charge didn’t even have the nous to just program in a catch-all CHECK command. We’re talking Lego brick computational power here.
You can probably tell by now that Dragon Quest I isn’t an altogether fun experience. Regardless, the pervading question is, is it still worth playing? And I’d say yes, just about, but make sure you know what you’re getting into.
You can either try it for thirty minutes and possibly run away screaming, which is fine. Or you can see it right the way through to the end. If you’re a pro gamer, you might beat my record of seven grindy hours. Don’t be too proud, though - I can grind my teeth for eight hours. In my sleep. But you don’t hear me bragging about it.
22 March 2024