When I finished Dragon Quest VIII earlier this year, I was hungry for more of its lighthearted, hopeful fantasy world. Following the arrival of our first child a few weeks later, the cosy allure of fighting adorable slimes beneath terrific blue skies grew all the more powerful.
The Game Boy Color remake of the original Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior as it is known in the West, fast became a staple of my late nights with my son. Game Boy in one hand, bottle in the other – we were ready to overthrow the notorious DracoLord…
Dragon Warrior is, structurally, about as bare-bones a JRPG as I can imagine. This makes sense when you consider the fact that this is where the genre began! The story doesn’t get any more complicated than rescue the princess and defeat the villain, and you don’t have a party of characters to accompany you on this quest. I think that this simple narrative is compensated for greatly by the charm of the monster designs by Akira Toriyama.
As a child, I was not a fan of Akira Toriyama’s art style – I really didn’t like Dragon Ball Z! I wonder what I would have thought to Toriyama if I was exposed to Dragon Quest at a young age? Here I am at aged thirty-something and I am utterly addicted to the smiling optimism of those now-iconic slimes. I love them! The artwork for the world itself is also very inviting – I especially adore the landscape backgrounds in the battle screens, which switch to reflect the environment you are currently in. It’s a great detail that succeeds in pulling the player down from the bird’s-eye view and into the boots of the hero.
Though the game is narratively very light, the writing still manages to be filled with character. One of my favourite encounters occurred early in the game when a man opened a conversation with “Did you know?” followed by a yes/no response. This bizarre conversation starter definitely earned an audible laugh from me! Though dialogue is sparse, compared to the lengthy scripts that JRPGs would come to be known for, there are charming interactions like these intentionally scattered throughout the hero’s journey.
And what a journey it is! One of the magic tricks this game achieves through its lightweight narrative and blank-slate protagonist is a wonderful sense of immersion. There are no cutscenes (beyond the delightful introductory animation) to explain the plot or the direction of your journey, nothing to explore or expand upon the personality of our hero or their role in the story – just your own pure, uninterrupted experience of this world, its people and its monsters.
The game doesn’t handhold you from one location to the next. You need to seek the answers you need from townsfolk, connecting the dots between this and that, and navigating your own way through your own adventure. This freedom and trust placed on the player really makes it feel like YOU are the one embarking upon this exciting journey, not some predetermined character. And, consequently, you have the power to shape and interpret the narrative in your own way.
I must have missed or forgotten the line of townsfolk dialogue that clued me into the fact that the princess was locked away inside a tunnel between two of the game’s islands. In fact, I had traversed said tunnel multiple times before accidentally taking a “wrong” turn and being faced with an intimidating green dragon.
I thought I had stumbled upon a secret boss. Perhaps some legendary loot lay waiting for me behind the door the dragon guarded. I had spent a couple of hours training against the highest level monsters I could currently hope to defeat, and so felt mildly confident in my ability to vanquish my scaled foe.
The battle was arduous, and my supply of healing herbs didn’t last long, but as I began to think I wouldn’t make it, the dragon fell before me! I continued through the doorway to claim my treasure – imagine my surprise when I found the missing princess awaiting me there!
In a more narratively dense and scripted game, would our hero have kind-of-sort-of forgotten about the missing princess, and only “rescued” her by happenstance? Unlikely, and it was absolutely delightful for events to have unfolded this way here. As I proudly returned to the castle, princess in arms, I felt like I had somehow delightfully cheated or chanced my way into being a hero.
Much of the game felt organic in this way. My victories and failures were my own, and this immediacy granted the admittedly simplistic world and its inhabitants an undeniable illusion of life. It’s roleplaying in a much purer form!
If I had to fault anything with the game (which I don’t like to do!) I would say that the implementation of the music became unfortunately quite irritating. The soundtrack itself is wonderful – I especially love the overworld theme! The problem is that the game has quite a high encounter rate, and so after just a couple of seconds of traversal, you are faced with a random encounter. The overworld theme is replaced by the battle music, which itself only plays for a handful of seconds before you win and return to the overworld… where the music begins anew.
Unfortunately, this meant I was hearing was a constant repeating loop of just the first few seconds of two songs. It’s a shame, as whenever I stood still and just let the music play, it was an absolute treat. When I hear this music, I really do feel like I am on a vast and unknowable adventure!
That’s enough complaining! Bah! Really, if this is my one complaint – fixed by just reducing the console’s volume when it became annoying – then it can’t be all that bad. I really had a delightful time playing this game!
Overall I found it to be excellently paced, with only a couple of moments that required me to grind for levels and gold, but even this was satisfying. There’s something undeniably exciting about saving up gold for a new, powerful sword! Whenever I crossed a bridge into an area for which I was under-levelled, it was never too long before I was able to return, more powerful and better equipped, for a second shot and prove myself against those more powerful monsters.
In the end, the game took me about fifteen hours to beat, and what a precious fifteen hours they were. The first week or so of parenthood can be quite a terrifying and lonely thing! During those late, late nights where I found myself holding and rocking a fragile newborn who would not sleep, having Dragon Warrior to play through in one hand was a lifeline. In those most desperate, sleep-deprived moments, when my baby wouldn’t stop grunting and squirming hour after restless hour, those cheerful slimes were always there, delighted to meet my sword.
Pudgeon 