A Quest Draws Near

Quite recently I found myself living in a hotel for work purposes with a ridiculous amount of time to kill. My birthday came around and my loving girlfriend purchased a Hyperkin Retron 3 system. Access to a large retro game store and the internet may have created a monster that should not be. Today we fight slimes. A lot of slimes.

Dragon Warrior is a very charming game that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to into. To be honest the game hasn’t really aged that well but it still stands as a streamlined version of the RPG’s of the late 80’s. It’s clear a lot of the design decisions were based on computer based RPG’s that came before; the perspective is top down like Ultima, the entire game is tile based like Wizardry, and the story is nothing more than “Kill the Evil Wizard, Save the Princess” like real life.

 The monsters of Alefgard are polite enough come at you one at a time. Every encounter is the hero versus a single enemy, which is fortunate because our descendant of Erdrick is pretty adept at dueling. The player character learns offensive and defensive magic, hits like a truck, and dons the most powerful equipment in the land to kill monsters for experience and profit…to buy more equipment and learn more spells to kill even stronger enemies one at a time. Expect a bit of a grind, but while encounters can be frequent most can resolved just as fast.

The original Dragon Quest is very out dated. Graphics aren’t important, the game plays well enough. I’m sorry to admit that playing NES games on a clone console makes your 8-bit adventures sound like ass, so I can’t really comment on the status of that. The menus are obtuse; you have to open the base menu to get anything done, like talking or going up or down stairs. I understand stairs can be tricky when you are traveling alone, but when you walk around on the world map and automatically enter towns and caves there’s no reason you should have pick it from a menu. Finding certain items without a guide might seem a little difficult for newer gamers, but the overall difficulty is not as tough as other games in the genre.

I came into this game expecting a history lesson. I got one. I loved every minute of it. There’s just something  about this game where you don’t question yourself and just agree “But, thou must!”