Dragon Warrior NES Review

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Dragon Warrior deserves thanks from so many gamers who are now RPG fans. Why? Well, to be truthful the game started the whole ''console role-playing'' trend. Packaged for free (!) with a simple $12 yearlong subscription to Nintendo Power magazine (could it be...Satan?), Dragon Warrior was a deal no true gamer could refuse. I also have to take my hat off to Nintendo; obviously, the folks over there saw what potential the RPG genre had and they gave it a nice boost by hooking gamers to Dragon Warrior. While the game itself is far from perfect, it stands in video game history as THE chief ambassador of console RPGs, bridging the gap from a previously computer-driven genre.

The game starts off with a simple story: a long time ago, a malevolent wizard named the Dragonlord harnessed the awesome forces of Dragons and used them to pillage the countryside of Alefgard (particularly the capital city of Tantegel Castle and the surrounding village of Brecconary). A mysterious warrior named Erdrick rode into the country on a horse and pledged to the King that he would slay the Dragonlord. Desperate for a hero, the King allowed the hero to set out on his quest. Time passed, and monsters slowly receded from the landscapes they had once plagued under the evil sway of the Dragonlord. However, the King never received any word from Erdrick. With the lack of a hero returning with good tidings (and the eventual end of attacks by the Dragonlord) the King only could assume that both had fallen in combat.

Years later, monsters have begun roaming the countryside again. The Dragonlord, it appears, survived. To add insult to injury, the villain has kidnapped the Princess Gwaelin of Tantegel Castle and has spirited her away to a cave in the middle of the Great Western Swamp. As a descendant of the mysterious Erdrick, you offer to help the King by saving the Princess and rescuing the country of Alefgard from the Dragonlord's evil. Thus, you begin your long and arduous quest...

The game's visuals are experimental and functional at best, offering blocky symbols to depict the landscape and simple color palettes and little detail to illustrate the various towns and townspeople scattered throughout the land. The mountains are simple gray jutting images, and the plains are just green blocks with little black dots sprinkled on top. The hero looks enough like a knight, but he mirrors the hero of Hylide a little too much for my taste. The enemies, on the other hand, look pretty good. Although they eventually repeat themselves in palette swaps, the enemies, ranging from the lovable Slimes to the nefarious Skeletons, are well drawn. They lack animation, but this WAS the early 8-bit days so this was largely forgivable.

The music in Dragon Warrior isn't exactly orchestrated and classic, but it has this stylish and stern way about it that demands attention and respect. The music playing as your hero wanders about the overworld is rich, with fifes and strings playing in the background. It's very medieval and bleak. The music playing while you wander through caves and dungeons is always the same, and although it is nicely done and has this claustrophobic feel, it isn't really enough to hold your attention after the tenth or so time hearing it. The battle music is decent, and the sound effects that accompany it are vintage old NES. The battle commands makes a high pitched squeal and the spells that you may cast have a mystic MIDI feel to them.

The control is simple, the usual menu surfing and turn based battle systems that are now standard with most RPGs. The only real difficult part of the control is that in order to perform any action as you walk about in towns and dungeons, you must press A to access a subscreen of commands. This doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that in order to ascend/descend a flight of stairs, you must stand directly over them, hit the A button, and THEN choose the ''STAIRS'' command. This chunky interface speaks of an early system that still has a few kinks to ironed out.

Dragon Warrior's actual style of RPG was revolutionary for consoles. The system involves you fighting enemies in battles in order to gain certain amounts of experience points and gold pieces. The experience points allow you to gain levels of experience, which basically raise your attributes (Strength, Defense, Speed) and dictate when you may learn magical spells that may help you heal yourself or inflict damage or status abnormalities against the enemy. The game is a little bloated here; it often takes too long for you to level up, resulting in hours of dragged out game time. You often wish only to advance the plot, but are stuck in two hours of level-building just so you can be strong enough to venture and defeat harder enemies. Also, you never seem to get enough gold pieces, which similarly forces you to constantly battle in order to upgrade your weapons and armor.

However, despite all of this, Dragon Warrior is a fresh and exciting experiment with the console RPG genre. The quest is decently long enough and the multitiered objectives of saving Princess Gwaelin and destroying the Dragonlord serve as a deep plot for the early days of the NES. The game revolutionized console gaming in that the skeletal story development of older games was no longer good enough. Players through their approval of the game showed companies that an engrossing plot can often enrapture an audience and allow them to forget a game's lack of graphical flair or slow pacing. This is in fact why I loved the game personally. Never before had a game allowed me to fight, cast spells, travel to uncharted lands, and search for my true identity as a hero in the way that Dragon Warrior did. Sure, you may not want to play through this one again after you beat it the first time (this was, after all, and early and linear RPG), but as a chunk of gaming history Dragon Warrior holds up. It is the reason we can enjoy Final Fantasy and bash its pretenders like Beyond the Beyond. It opened up the console RPG market, and for that it can't be appreciated enough. That, combined with its solid mechanics and great plot, make it a memorable experience.