Version de SNES.

Cortita y al pié.

Acostumbrado a los juegos posteriores de la saga que no suelen bajar de las 80h esperaba que este, pese a ser el primero, durase al menos 20h, pero con el (bendito) fastforward se ha hecho todo el grindeo y la exploración muy suave y rápido.
Trama muy primitiva, salvar a la princesa y matar al malo, no tiene mucho más, un poco de lore en los objetos y NPCs pero nada exagerado.
Sprites y banda sonora muy chulos para la época, además del característico diseño de los enemigos.

This game isn't, by any reasonable measure, actually good, I think in general JRPGs didn't really find their stride until the SNES. But I find it useful to return to from time to time as a reminder of what the Default JRPG Experience is. Pokemon, Final Fantasy, SMT/Persona, all of it has its roots in the time that a visual novel writer and the Dragon Ball guy decided to adapt the role-playing game for a home console.
You spend 90% of the game mindlessly grinding, the combat has almost no room for strategy thanks to a single party member, the game's writing has been totally neutered in translation by getting rid of all the humor and heart for some bizarre Old English thing Nintendo of America was going for.
But all of this is on some level useful, it makes it the Default JRPG Experience, every interesting thing a JRPG does can be judged in reference to the formula this laid down, which makes this I think worth playing (with heavy use of emulator speed-up) for people who have Thoughts on the genre.

While western players are mostly unaware of the importance of the Dragon Quest series, it's as important for role-playing games as Super Mario Bros. was for platforming games. Unlike Super Mario Bros. however the original game is hard to go back to. It is a chore to do really anything in the original game that future ports and remakes rectified. It's also not a very long game outside of having to grind for a while. I'd only recommend playing the original release if you really want to experience what kickstarted this legendary series. Otherwise play any other version along with Dragon Quest 2.

The fascinating thing about visiting Dragon Quest, one of the seminal JRPGs from this era, is that for all the predictable garbage that comes with it--the two most obvious being the laser focus on grind and the lack of consideration that went into its save system--I was surprised to find a lot to like in its design. Maybe it's just that the years have worn on me and, while I still love to be swept up into a long and engrossing game, my preferences over the years have generally leaned towards shorter experiences. But it's not just that Dragon Quest is short, it's also that its map feels manageable and curated so that there isn't really a lot of wasted space.

Now, of course that goes out the window the second you have to deal with any sort of experience check, and my god it's never been worse to me than it is here with the final boss. I didn't time the walk from the starting castle to the final lair, but as "small" as the world is when it feels good to explore and discover, it gets gigantic when all you're doing is making your way back to where you were when you died. I still can't believe the trek you have to make just to retry the final boss of this game; as someone who loves to play games "as intended" and tries to avoid the major conveniences of emulation like save states, I can't fathom playing the final stretch of Dragon Quest without those conveniences. That is, in fact, the moment I decided to start using them, so I could simply retry the boss immediately. The expectation, I guess, is that you'll just grind and grind some more, and I think there can be something satisfying about grinding even when the combat isn't super involved, but it's not that satisfying when it's a set-in-stone requirement.

And yet I still have surprisingly positive things to say after reaching the conclusion. It's often fun to work out what you need to do next, where items are hidden in the world, and so on. Those little moments of hearing information and jotting it down for later can make the world feel rewarding in ways that too few games understand. And there's enough personality in the enemy set, as limited as it is on the NES, that you can see the charm that would ultimately capture decades of attention.

As important as Dragon Quest 1 is, I didn't have a lot of fun playing it. Combat is turn-based, but there are no party members and you only ever fight one enemy at a time, so the strategy is minimal. There's not much story but it still has a lot of heart to it; the really basic setting is surprisingly compelling. The music is great and so are the enemy designs, and the key system is cool too. The game is also mercifully short which is good, otherwise I would've ended up too bored and quit.

If you're not someone who's really into experiencing old games for history's sake, you're not missing much by just playing a more refined later game in the series, or better yet, just playing Chrono Trigger. I think 8-bit action games aged much better than 8-bit RPGs, because while the former have an immediacy to their gameplay which still translates well in sheer fun factor, the latter simply couldn't reach much potential on this old hardware and needed more refinement to amount to much of an interesting experience. Granted, I played the Super Famicom version of Dragon Quest I, but it is still fundamentally an NES game in construction and feel. (And that is the version you want to play, if only for the more forgiving level scaling.)

+.5 star for being the granddaddy of jrpgs

80% of the game is just running in circles in an area to be strong enough to access the next area. That said its simplicity was enjoyable and it wasn't particularly frustrating, I like how it doesn't overtly punish death and the process of finding and talking to npcs to figure out what to do next.

Sadly, the game just doesn't hold up unlike some nes games I've played.

Turn-based combat is without a doubt Dragon Quest's worst asset. Besides an understandable archaic simplicity, it values dumb luck just as much as it values its minimal strategy, resulting in a mindless grind for exp that feels more like an obstacle to the enjoyment of the best part of the game: the journey. Players are left to freely venture through the world, meeting its inhabitants and thus piecing together its legends and rumors: clues to figure out the way forward, as the world itself becomes a very enjoyable and rewarding little puzzle.

I got this game free with my subscription to Nintendo Power and immediately was hooked. I can’t even say how many play throughs this got in the first ten years it was in my collection.
But it’s format is obsolete anymore.
It’s evolved. And that’s a good thing.
I still love this game, but it’s not what it used to be.
If you do se use to give it a try, opt for the Gameboy Color Dragon Warrior 1&2.
Not the SNES game with the fan translation.
It’s weird, but the GBC version is superior.
Thanks for the memories, Enix. Sorry you were gutted and eaten by Square. Rest in peace, old friend.

It took me a long time to muster the courage to tackle on Dragon Warrior. At the end, it was one of the most fun adventures I had with a game. Do not expect complicated plots and twists, this is as simple as it gets. Much of the narrative is environmental, like a cave with items left by a past hero or a town destroyed by monsters. Due to technical limitations of the hardware, and probably the lack of experience from the devs, not even a classic RPG party is here, just a single, super versatile, hero, capable of using melee, magic and healing spells. The fun in Dragon Warrior boils down to whether you have high tolerance to simple old school game mechanics and considerable high patient/attention span or not. Most people would probably not enjoy this game nowadays, I'm glad I'm not one of them.

Immensely influential and groundbreaking for its time, along with Final Fantasy, it really set the standards going forward for console JRPGs, establishing systems and ideas we still see in the genre today. Combines a basic turn-based combat system with open world exploration alongside quaint Shakespearean-esque writing and Akira Toriyama's iconic and delightful artwork.

As important as the game is, it is difficult to recommend to a modern player, at least this ancient version of it, as the gameplay boils down to simply grinding levels to surpass the next obstacle ad nauseam. An interesting piece of gaming history, for sure.