I love Dragon Quest
beautiful art
The year 2000 really sucked for my entire family. When we rang in the new year, bombs didn’t drop, electronics still worked, but we were essentially homeless, and had been for a decent chunk of 1999. All we had was our motorhome, which we’d move from campsite to campsite on a bi weekly basis. I was enrolled in school of course, but it’s difficult to make friends when you’re constantly moving between 3 different campsites. At the time, I played a lot of Pokemon on my Teal Gameboy Color. Our homelessness didn’t stem from my parents' financial failures. Rather, it was a side effect of my fathers inability to remain tactful in tough situations. To this day, we rarely speak because I simply don’t tolerate that kind of shit. He is a rough guy, and will tell you what he thinks regardless of whether he has any evidence, logic behind it, or even an understanding of what is happening. Having fallen to this trait repeatedly, he lost all credibility in his line of work, which generally, would provide us housing.
The entire industry as it was in 1999 era San Diego had blacklisted my father from further participating. The first place we hit was my uncle's house in Santee, where our stuff would be stored for, in some cases, over 20 years. Then it was the campsites for 6 or so months, after which, he found a spot for rent. We ended up living there for a few years. It was a beautiful place, forests, creeks, horse ranches, chickens, little club houses built all over the place, bamboo occasionally. Rock formations were everywhere, like you’ve never seen, with large peaks and valleys all over the place. It was a paradise. In 2003, the Cedar Fire would burn it all to the ground.
So yeah, a chunk of my childhood was spent living in the woods in a motor home. The landlords lived on a huge hill directly north of us. It felt like living in the Oblongs. They were nice though, and let my dad build a really nice little cabin for my brother and I to more or less live in. By design, it had no bathroom, to ensure that we’d occasionally return to the motor home. While he was planning out how to build this cabin, my dad had set up an NES for us in this weird little pocket room he’d built. It was plywood, about 6 feet deep and tall, and 3 feet wide. He intended to use it for storage, but his desire to get my brother and I the hell away from him got the best of him. Generally, we’d spend most of our time exploring during the day, and playing NES after dark. Mind you, this was around the time the PS2 was coming out, so we were a little behind but none of us cared. The games were still fun. Eventually, the landlord would bring a large garbage bag filled with video games to us.
it was very small
It was almost entirely NES games save for 2 or 3 Game Gear games and the console. The Game Gear didn’t work, and the battery requirements meant I was never getting a chance to play it. The NES games, on the other hand, were pretty cool. A lot of stuff I’d never seen up to that point. Conquest of the Crystal Palace, Rush’n Attack, and Dragon Warrior. Not just Dragon Warrior. Dragon Warrior III and IV as well. It’s insane to think that those games were just given to me as a child. I consider now how long it took me to find them again as an adult and shiver at my child selfs lack of foresight.
At first, I was more interested in playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mega Man 4. Both new to me, but also familiar. I’d played TMNT at other kids houses in the past, and owned Mega Man 5 already. Mega Man 4 quickly became my favorite game, even more so than 5, because I could get the game to work more frequently.
Eventually, I became curious about the other games.
"Rush’n Attack? Nah, boring. Why am I stabbing people? I want a gun.""
"Karnov? What even is this....? I don't like anything about it."
"Bart vs. The Space Mutants? These aliens look sick, but the game sucks"
"Dragon Warrior? Look at this cover! what is that thing? That's a dragon? is it smiling at me? "
I was hesitant to try Dragon Warrior and its sequels because the cover art of the first game creeped me out. I was 9, I really don’t understand what was so upsetting about the dragon's teeth in hindsight, or if those were actually teeth to begin with. All I remember is that I didn’t like them.
He had braces at some point
When I first put Dragon Warrior into my NES and powered it on, it was dark out, and I was alone. The first thing I saw is what I would later find out to be the animation of the Dragon Lord turning into a dragon. Basically, the NES was dirty, and when I booted the game, it looped that animation over and over again. I remember it over the 1000’s of NES glitches I’ve witnessed because it was so weird. Just a constant loop of the dragon lord phasing in from the darkness. Later on, when I tried to play Dragon Warrior again, it worked like it should have at least for that moment.
That glitch happened several times over the course of my time with that cartridge. To this day, I don’t know what exactly was going on there, beyond that it was dirty. Why of all things would it boot to that? I almost don’t want to know. It’s one of the very few video game mysteries I have left. I don’t think anyone else beside myself ever saw it. Nobody wanted to watch me play Dragon Warrior, so I almost always played it alone. I’ve owned my current copy of Dragon Warrior since 2008, and it’s never done this, though, my NES consoles are all much cleaner than the machines I was using in 2000.
What I saw the first time I booted the game
What I should have seen
With my first impression of Dragon Warrior being so weird, I was surprised to realize how primitive it truly was.I had played through exactly 1 RPG in my life at that point. Gen 1 of Pokemon. Gen 2 wasn’t out yet. That’s all I had to work with in terms of knowledge of this genre. I’d played Mystic Quest for SNES as well, but never finished it. I didn’t understand RPG mechanics at all. I brute forced my way through Pokemon every time I played through it. All I could really tell you at that point was that having a higher level character was better than having a lower level one. Neither Pokemon nor Mystic Quest have any kind of equipment mechanics, so I learned how those work from this game.
Dragon Warriors' main claim to fame for me at that age was exploration, which mimicked the kind of exploring I did during the day. Massive hills, forests, bamboo, it was all there. Caves were a plus, since none of the ones nearby were explorable. My friends and I would pretend to fight monsters while we were exploring anyway, so seeing what in essence was the game that we pretend played on screen was really appealing to me. While you couldn’t climb trees to get a better view of your surroundings, explore drainage canals, or tag under bridges, it felt so close to the real thing.
I never beat Dragon Warrior until I was well into adulthood, I had a really good time with it. All of my time spent playing it was focused on exploration. The continent you explored in game felt as massive as it was mysterious. Just the act of having to buy torches in order to descend into caves made the game feel much bigger than it is. It made spelunking feel like a deliberate act that required real preparation. I never got far enough to get Rimuldar to buy keys, so every door I saw peaked my interest. I spent years wondering what was in those chests in Tategal castle, only to learn as an adult that the game was trolling me with them the whole time.
my imagination did most of the work
Dragon Warrior III and IV were a different story. I did try to play them, but stupid things kept me from actually doing so. I don’t know why, but I was very hung up on the fact that the protagonist of Dragon Warrior III was 16 years old. It upset me as a 9 year old and made me dislike the game. I didn’t want to play as a 16 year old, and I always imagined the guy from Dragon Warrior 1 to be my age. I did experiments with it, creating characters and running around. I didn’t like that you’d fight multiple enemies, and I didn’t like that there was no background during battle. I was a pedantic little ass. As an adult, I now consider Dragon Quest III to be one of the best games ever made. How dumb I was to be put off by such nonsense. One of my lifes regrets is not having an open mind about this game. To have experienced Dragon Warrior III as a child, in the proper way, must have been incredible and I squandered my opportunity.
As for Dragon Warrior IV, I barely touched it because I though Ragnar was the main character and I didn’t want to play as a guy with a moustache. Never mind the fact that Mario games were constantly in my rotation. I don’t remember anything about playing that game at all beyond that. I wrote this and its prequel off in favor of the first game for quite a while.
imagine playing a video game staring a guy with a moustache. How ridiculous.
Eventually, I’d sell my NES and nearly every game I owned, including all the Dragon Warrior games, but also Mega Man 5, for just enough money to buy a Game Boy Advance. It was 2001, and my NES barely worked. I thought that for sure I’d never play NES again, and was pretty upset by that, so this was the silver lining. I still have that Game Boy, by the way. Luckily, my very first NES ever was still sitting in my uncle's garage, and I got my hands on it again back in 2022. This story does have a happy ending after all.
In 2008, I bought an NES at a flea market. Of course, it didn’t work. I spent the time needed to learn how to fix it, and successfully did so after some trouble. The first game I bought on eBay for it was Dragon Warrior 1. Not because it was something I wanted to play, but because it was absurdly cheap. While playing it, I remembered how much fun it was. Memories I’d long hidden away of the forest I lived in came rushing back. A lot of regret and shame followed. It had only been five years since it all burned down. There was literally no going back.
By now, I understood fully how to play Dragon Warrior. No longer was I messing around, I knew the mechanics because the mechanics it created had been copied by everyone. Final Fantasy on PS1 dominated my gaming time a few years prior. I now understood, at least to some degree, RPG mechanics. That’s when I realized how grindy it was. See, as a child, the grind-iness never bothered me, and wasn’t noticeable because my primary goal wasn’t rescuing Princess Gwaelyn or defeating the Dragon Lord, it was exploration. All I wanted to do was see how far I could get on that massive island before a skeleton knocked my ass down. It took me a very long time to beat that file I started in 2008. About once a year, I’d sit down with it, plugging away. In 2019, I finally defeated the Dragon Lord, nearly 20 years after I’d first played the game and a full decade after starting that file. I was also a decade into NES collecting at that point. Dragon Warrior is well known for including multiple guides on how to complete it. I owned all of it by then. but never used any of it. I just wanted to explore, and I did it. I explored I worked my way through the game, and completed it.
As insane as that sounds, that’s really how it went down. Dragon Warrior was such a simple game that it wasn’t a problem putting it down for a year and picking it up again. There’s almost no progression in terms of story or location. You always start from the same place, and always end in the same place. The only thing that changes is your level and equipment, which follows a very obvious hierarchy. Hell, all I really did was check out places I knew I’d never been until I could successfully defeat everything that came after me. It felt really good, and I fell in love with the game all over again by the time I was done.
I downloaded and beat it on my phone. I downloaded and beat it on Switch. I beat the GBC version. I feel like at this point I’ve played though and beaten every version of the game at least once. It’s a game that I can knock out in a couple hours and have a great time doing it. I’ve yet to attempt to beat the NES version again. I know that all of the re-releases adjust the math to make the game less grindy, but those are still extremely grindy. The NES version took me 11 years to beat because of how grindy I perceived it to be. I wonder how long it would take me now that I know the game like the back of my hand?
Dragon Warrior is special to me because I discovered it at an extremely weird time of my life, and it’s first impression was like something out of a dream. That dragon, blinking in and out of existence, made the game feel like it was more than it is. It’s intrigue then lost to what the game turned out to be. Something even better, if you ask me.
I'm cheap, so getting these took over a decade
Dragon Warrior was the first NES game I bought when I decided to rebuild my collection. By no intention of my own, Dragon Warrior IV would turn out to be the last game I needed to complete it. I acquired it in 2021, in exchange for Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness, a game I don’t care at all about. I felt really good, having rebuilt my childhood collection. A year later, my cousin would give me my very first NES, which I thought was one I’d sold in 2001. This NES had been sitting in my uncle's garage for decades. Apparently, the NES consoles I used in 2000 were all picked up by my dad from various other family members to give to us. I figured it was long gone, among those that were sold. But there it was, in my hands. The proof was that it had my dads signature on it. He wrote that after it had been briefly stolen from an apartment we were living in when I was four. All of the regret I felt for selling that NES, only to learn I never did. I don’t know what to think of that. The homelessness I experienced in 1999 inadvertently saved my NES. There’s a silver lining in everything.
Dragon Quest, or as I still sort of know it, Dragon Warrior, is a series I absolutely cannot forget and it’s always welcome in my life. Series Artist and world famous Mangaka Akira Toriyama tragically passed away last year. His art direction may be the thing that makes Dragon Quest stand out to me the most. Even on the NES, where they were clearly trying to hide the games’ Japanese origins, his influence could be seen all over the place. His contributions to video game history cannot be understated. My personal opinion on the matter is that Dragon Quest would not have taken off without him, Shonen Jump shenanigans or not. You can’t effectively create a genre so utterly alien to the gaming landscape at the time and expect it to do anything without massive names attached to it to sell the idea. Akira Toriyama will be missed, and I wish his family the very best. his contributions to humanity are more than any executive or politician. His work brought people out of ruts, sowed common ground among enemies, and spread joy to the entire planet. I never watched or read Dragon Ball, but I can see it all very clearly.
Akira Toriyama was a great man and he will be dearly missed.
