Patreon button  Steam curated reviews  Discord button  Facebook button  Twitter button 
3DS | PC | PS4 | PS5 | SWITCH | VITA | XB1 | XSX | All

Dragon Warrior (NES) artwork

Dragon Warrior (NES) review


"Step outside the castle and you might make it fifteen or twenty steps. Or you might make it one step. Or two, or three. Suddenly, that village a half-screen away can seem almost out of reach. This is compounded by another problem: the hero is a wimp for the majority of the game."

You don’t always have to know much about your enemy to hate him. Sometimes, just a simple label will inspire the lowly peasants to hiss every time someone utters your name. An excellent example of this is ‘Dragonlord,’ the fearsome monster you must slay if you play Dragon Warrior. There are no cut scenes, no moments in the game where you stare at the screen and wonder how a monster could be so wicked. Still, the villagers all pretty much decided he’s bad news a long time ago. They hate him a lot, and so you must slay him.

Your quest to put an end to this unspeakable evil begins in a castle’s throne room. By the end of the game, this Spartan setting will extend to include a patch of desert to the southwest, strips of forestation nestled at the base of periwinkle mountains, and wide prairies that border festering swampland. If this sounds just a little bit too typical of the genre for your tastes, you won’t like Dragon Warrior. And even if you do like your role-playing as generic as possible, problems remain.

Said problems make themselves evident almost immediately, before you even access those prairies and mountains I mentioned. After chatting it up with the king, you’ll begin your quest by checking a bunch of treasure chests. You do this by first accessing a menu, then selecting the ‘take’ command. Six button presses where one would have done the job just as well. When you’re done helping yourself to the goodies those chests contain, you next head over to a staircase. Rather than trudging down the steps automatically, your warrior will stand there doing nothing until you access the menu and actually choose the ‘stairs’ option. It’s the same story later on when you want to open certain doors, or when you want to talk to someone. When something as simple as menu navigation is a mild chore, you know the game has issues.

But let’s assume you’re willing to forgive clunky menu navigation. After all, gamers have certainly endured worse in other role-playing titles. Almost the minute you’re past that roadblock, another presents itself: random battles.

Before you say anything, you should know I’m generally in favor of a little random chaos. Such battles can make the journey to that elusive mountain village harrowing, even exciting. Modern games don’t rely on them so much, but there was a time when they existed in the bulk of anything worth playing. With that said, there’s no excuse for the frequency with which they occur here. Step outside the castle and you might make it fifteen or twenty steps. Or you might make it one step. Or two, or three. Suddenly, that village a half-screen away can seem almost out of reach. This is compounded by another problem: the hero is a wimp for the majority of the game.

Consider the statistics and the reason for this should be immediately apparent. For one thing, you can’t carry more than eight item types. Part of that inventory is tied up with keys, while most of the rest of it is used for ‘event items’ that you can’t afford to discard. Throw in a few torches and you aren’t exactly the hulking warrior you might like. This worked well enough in Dragon Warrior II, where there were three separate party members, but here’s the kicker: the first game in the series forces you to go it alone.

So there you are, walking across a grassy prairie when suddenly a blob known only as ‘slime’ attacks. A somewhat lively battle tune pipes out of the speakers as the view switches to a vaguely first-person window and you see your opponent, rendered in 8-bit glory. He’s a motionless mass of blue with two dots for eyes. You now have a grand total of four battle options. You can fight, run, cast a spell, or use something from your mostly useless inventory.

These commands are all self-explanatory. The problem is that none of them are particularly exciting. Trying to escape a battle is an exercise in futility. For reasons unknown, your hero is so sloth-like that even a lump of jelly can easily overtake him three times out of four. Knowing this, you would do better to use one of your other three options. However, there are only eight magic spells in the whole game, and these are spread out over the 30 levels your hero can attain. Early on, your options will consist entirely of the fearsome-sounding ‘hurt’ spell (fear me miscreant, or I will hurt you with my powerful magic!) and a healing spell. Later, you’ll gain non-battle skills that allow you to exit dungeons quickly, before a return to power with ‘hurtmore’ and ‘healmore.’

Now, lest you think this isn’t as bad as it sounds, let me assure you of one thing: it is. It really is. You see, the hero doesn’t really gain mastery of his spells as his levels rise. Early on, the ‘hurt’ spell might do 6 damage to a lowly slime, just barely enough to kill the fiend. At the game’s conclusion, it has precisely the same impact. The only attack you have that grows stronger at all is your ‘Fight’ command, which improves as you find the few better weapons that exist in the game. Magic ends up assuming a secondary role: fight, fight, fight, heal, fight, fight, fight, heal, fight, fight. And just for the sake of variety and to avoid all those infuriating battles, sometimes you might cast a ‘Return’ spell. Assuming you’ve played the game long enough to learn one.

And if you’ve played the game that long, you’ve had the opportunity to see more of those flaws I keep mentioning. Though I’m aware that some palette swaps were necessary back in the 8-bit glory days, Dragon Warrior takes this to an extreme. Remember the slime I mentioned? You’ll see him again, in metal form (he’s gray). Also, enemies are fond of learning spells. A drake becomes a magidrake, a wyvern a magiwyvern. They taunt you. Watch in envy as they cast all manner of cool spells while all you can do is ‘hurt’ them or put them to sleep. Writhe in agony as a dragon toasts you like a marshmallow, then respond by gobbling an herb and thinking that the monster wasn’t quite so tough when he was on the other side of the bridge you just crossed and wasn’t pink.

Speaking of that, the game makes exploring its map quite the chore. The structure here is so rigid it could almost be considered level-based. Journey west from the castle where you start and you’ll come to a bridge. Cross it too soon and just like that, you’ll be staring at the ‘Game Over’ screen because some vicious beast spanked you soundly. Bridges are something monsters apparently can’t cross, and in this game they serve as the natural boundaries that indicate when you’re about to find an increase in challenge. Or, in simpler turns, the bridges let you know when the monsters are about to get cheap. Since you don’t have other party members to revive you in the event of such a blunder, exploration becomes a matter of trial and error.

So does finding those event items I mentioned near the start of the review. Some of the puzzles you must solve if you want to complete the game are downright asinine. For example, in one area you must find a magical flute by searching just the right patch of soil within one of the villages (five button presses per attempt can make such a project more tedious than you might suppose). You will only know this if you are reading a guide, or if you’ve been talking to villagers repeatedly and keeping note of what they all say. One guy might say something useless, but another might give a vital clue or directions to the next town. You never know, and so you must talk to them all. Just to be safe. Just to avoid traveling over the map any more than absolutely necessary.

And so it goes with the whole game, until suddenly you’re heading for that next dungeon, gritting your teeth and hoping no monsters attack so you can wander about for awhile. It’s at such moments that you wonder why you’re even bothering with Dragon Warrior. For many, the answer is simple: this game was one of the first. The role-playing titles we love now mostly evolved from this archaic mess. For that, I am grateful. Doesn’t mean I have to play the damn thing.


If you enjoy Jason Venter's work, please consider showing your appreciation by sharing and/or with a tip via PayPal, Ko-Fi, or Patreon. Your support would mean a lot to them!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com
PayPal

honestgamer's avatar
Staff review by Jason Venter (January 08, 2005)

Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.

More Reviews by Jason Venter [+]
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 4: Bush Rescue Returns (Switch) artwork
Pokémon Scarlet (Switch) artwork
Pokémon Scarlet (Switch)

An imperfect Pokémon game can still be a (somewhat) beautiful thing...
South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! (Xbox 360) artwork
South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play! (Xbox 360)

There have been some truly awful South Park games over the years. This isn't one of them, but it's still no triumph.

Feedback

If you enjoyed this Dragon Warrior review, you're encouraged to discuss it with the author and with other members of the site's community. If you don't already have an HonestGamers account, you can sign up for one in a snap. Thank you for reading!

board icon
Almighty posted September 12, 2016:

This person must be clueless. This review is the same as saying Pong is the worst game that was ever created. The time the game was released has to be taken into account, and that is where this complete fool falls out of the "Stupid Tree" and hits every branch on the way down only to land into the grass of ignorance. By his account he would also say that his favourite games he played when he first started playing games would also be the crappiest.
board icon
honestgamer posted September 12, 2016:

Thanks for your post. My wounds are still smarting from when I fell out of the Stupid Tree. But even as I lie here, bruised and battered in the grass of ignorance, I'd like to state for the record that I actually do like the Dragon Quest series. A lot.

The NES played host to a variety of great RPGs, including the original Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior II (one of my personal favorites, and the first game to make me finally fall in love with the JRPG), and Ultima: Quest of the Avatar. Those games and others like them are good enough that I still return to them to this day. I don't often replay the original Dragon Warrior, though, because it is tedious even compared to the better among its contemporaries. It came before those other games I mentioned, but not by much.

My reviews are intended primarily to let modern gamers know which games from yesteryear have held up and which ones have not fared as well, and to spark conversations with other gamers my age who like to talk about the good old days. My opinion is that Dragon Warrior is best avoided unless you're desperate to see where the series began and you have an unusually high tolerance for clunky gameplay that even the very first sequel in the series quickly left on the figurative trash heap. Based on your comments, you feel differently.
board icon
Almighty posted September 13, 2016:

Well, Your comments certainly shed light on the review and confirmed my suspicions about the perspective. There are not many "Modern" gamers who would appreciate a grass roots game like this, and I don't think that "Pong" has held up any better than the original Dragon Warrior for NES. That being said, Though my 7 year old daughter plays Final Fantasy and prefers it for many reasons, I want her to understand Dragon Warrior 1 and its simplicity before playing 2,3 or 4. There was a lot of fast change in games back then, and many lessons were learned from Dragon Warrior that some could say shaped some of the future RPGs, so it's importance is immense.

As for Final Fantasy, the first time I played it and thought I was far along in the story I decided that I would start over because I didn't want the game to end. I found out the next time around when I played through it that there was much more to come.

Thank you for your response and clarification. Hope those wounds heal quickly;)
board icon
honestgamer posted September 14, 2016:

If your daughter is playing through old RPGs and the goal is for her to have a proper understanding of the medium's beginnings and development into the monster it has become today, then it's definitely worth spending some serious time with the first Dragon Quest, despite that game's faults. It's cool that you're encouraging her to get that sort of education. I hope to do the same for my own kids, if I ever get around to having any.

Many players aren't trying to get a proper historical perspective, though, when they give 8-bit and even 16-bit RPGs a shot for the very first time. A lot of them who might try retro stuff are really just hoping to experience the greatest hits of those eras that came before them, at least initially, without wading through the stuff that hasn't aged well. And from that perspective, Dragon Warrior is (in my opinion) best skipped in favor of its sequels, which I prefer to the first Final Fantasy. Maybe when the time comes, your daughter will feel similarly. Maybe she won't. This is all subjective, anyway!

You must be signed into an HonestGamers user account to leave feedback on this review.

User Help | Contact | Ethics | Sponsor Guide | Links

eXTReMe Tracker
© 1998 - 2024 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Dragon Warrior is a registered trademark of its copyright holder. This site makes no claim to Dragon Warrior, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. Staff and freelance reviews are typically written based on time spent with a retail review copy or review key for the game that is provided by its publisher.