Ah, the RPG in its purest form. A dragon is searing my flesh with its fiery roar? No matter! I dost have the perfect stratagem to slay the fell beast!

decimates the local slime population for an hour

What sayest thou now, green dragon? Mine numbers are higher than thine own! Who'm'st've else could have come up with so bold, so daring, so wonderfully thought out of a plan to rend thy scales from thy wretched hide? Wouldst you flee in terror at my superior level? Wouldst you not fight to the bitter end? But thou must!

Seriously though, despite every fight in this game being a one-on-one slugfest, (and, I know I could put the bad guys to sleep but like, when it doesn't work the first time I'm not too inclined to try it again lmao) it's still a fun game! Alefgard is a charming little kingdom, thanks in large part to its inhabitants. The townsfolk might not say anything particularly interesting, but they speak with such charm. I couldn't help but want to see their kingdom saved.

Unfortunately, this was my third go at saving their kingdom, and this game really suffers on repeat playthroughs. The way the game is structured requires that no real story triggers be hit; if you know which items need to be taken where you can just go do it without talking to anybody. And the bonk-or-get-bonked nature of the combat means the only thing stopping you from having full run of the map is that you'll quickly die if you go too far out. So the only thing left for it is to grind until you can successfully Not Die.

Now all of that is fine on a first playthrough, because there isn't much time spent actually grinding. At least, that's how it feels to me when I'm exploring and just happen to be killing every slime I see along the way. It isn't grinding, it's just a fortunate coincidence of my wanderings! Grinding is only grinding when it feels like a grind. And a second or third playthrough of this game definitely feels like a grind.

But it's one of the first JRPGs ever. So, ya know, can't be too hard on it lol

(One last side note: your mileage may vary depending on which version of the game you play. This Switch port that I played gives you more gold and experience compared to the NES original, which speeds things up tremendously. But it does give you a map that shows you exactly where all the towns and caves are, which could cause similar issues to doing a second playthrough. And it's missing a pleasant graphical effect when you build a bridge near the end of the game. There's always gotta be tradeoffs with these things.)

Games like these can be a little hard to rate. Should I rate them based on how fun they are to play now, to a modern audience, or how influential they were? I'm being a coward here by going with "a little bit of both", but I do know that despite how barebones DQ1 was, I had a fun time with it. I might have had a different tune if I'd played the original instead of a version with some quality of life added in, but it was a nice little game to zone out to. Sometimes, all you want in a game is Number Goes Up, and this one was short enough that the grind didn't overstay its welcome. It was also really neat to see what did or didn't eventually become a JRPG staple. If I had to make one big complaint, though, it's that the Switch version looks like a cheap RPGmaker port. When I realized the SNES version had great sprite animations instead of static jpegs I felt extremely cheated. What gives, Squeenix!