Dragon Warrior

From a set of comments on the CRPG Addict blog. Footnotes are later additions.

Here's more. The map of the first Dragon Warrior is the second most thoughtful one I know of its size and format, the most thoughtful being Ultima IV's. A list of some of its thoughtful touches:

• Southwest of the start is a strip of land belonging to higher-difficulty monsters. This is intentional: if you look at the area across the mountains, that zone is of a much lower difficulty than the others by it. It's a little grinding spot near the start, discoverable by chance.
  
• The Rimuldar tunnel cannot be seen from the edge of the swamp you must cross to reach it. As a child, I did not know the tunnel existed until I explored the eastern coast, and saw it across the mountains.
  
• Throughout the map, zones four or more steps higher (in monster difficulty) are visible from across mountain ranges or water tiles. Often there are intriguing features visible, like the Mountain Cave (west of the start) or the canyon maze.
  
• As a child, the canyon maze dismayed me in its pointlessness. Now, I know its purpose. Cantlin (the final, fortress town) has two approaches. The hard one goes through the canyon maze, teasing you with a maze that loops around Cantlin. The easy one starts at the far southwest region of the map. However, the hard one is also the natural one to attempt first. Thus, the easy path is a reward for those who explore for the sake of exploration, rather than trying to beeline to the next place.
  
• Both deserts have oases. The ruins of Hauksness were built over one (as revealed in a later game), and a later game cutely posits that the northeastern desert's oasis shelters a small bandit town.
  
• The resemblance to Britannia is a deliberate homage. Horii names the Wizardry and Ultima series as the first game's biggest influences, strange though that may appear given Dragon Warrior's simplicity.
  
• The starting areas provide you with curving grassland paths between the first few cities. These tiles have the lowest encounter rate. Indeed, patches of another grassland path extend to Hauksness. This is an elegant way to suggest roads, without investing in the large number of tiles needed for those to look decent on an overworld map.
  
• The concealed, wooded northern canyon, a simple and obvious trick to an adult, delighted me as a child.
  
• The settings characterize the towns before you even enter them. Garinham (northwest) is a mercantile port town, Kol (northeast) a woodland haven, Rimuldar (southeast) a nigh-Arthurian magical city on the lake, Cantlin (southwest) a fortress concealed deep in the mountains.
  
• Your first look at the overland map shows you its three most important locations.
  
• The exploration and advancement is terribly paced for a player of any sophistication, but it is perfect for a newcomer to RPGs. It was my first RPG (remember, too poor for anything better), and I maxed my level before reaching the Dragonlord's castle. If you do so, the king tells you, "Shouldn't you have defeated the Dragonlord by now?"
  

In my book, Dragon Warrior is the single most elegant RPG there is (though nowhere near the best), because my idea of "elegance" measures how much you can do within tight constraints [4]. That's why I put myself through the ordeal of a speedrun.

This elegance carries to the Japanese (not English) text. Later, Horii also showed himself adept at characterization using minimal text. The game design is also elegant, though tedious to an experienced player. Level 2 can barely be reached before your first inn visit, Level 3 before your second, Level 4 before your third.

...Before you chide me again for putting lots of effort into comments, I'm saving them for use in a later essay. :P

I certainly wouldn't chide someone for putting a lot of effort into a comment when I put a lot of effort into the original reviews. I mean, we could both chide ourselves for spending so much mental energy on ephemera, but it would be hypocritical to do it to each other.

I appreciate the way that you regard the game. I just suspect that if you held up any game world to this level of analysis, you would find an equal number of impressive items. I'm happy that there are such dedicated fans for just about every game, no matter how I feel about those games, because they offer comments like yours and highlight things I might have missed or under-emphasized in my single run.

I have held up many game worlds to close analysis. Off the top of my head, only Ultimas III and IV and Pool of Radiance approach this level of thoughtfulness, in this era of gaming. [1] Of course, they have much richer and denser maps, because their engines allowed for many more options. Wizardry is great, but its level design is often thoughtless and haphazard. Final Fantasy is grand, but the care is unevenly distributed. (For instance, it has a legendary variety of bugs that could have been easily discovered with systematic testing, but nobody dared to question Nasir.)

All the above examples are less elegant, because their constraints are looser (though still very tight by later standards). If you know much about programming and game design, you'll be amazed by how constrained and, frankly, behind the times the NES was. For instance, it had an 8-bit processor, when at the time of Dragon Warrior IV personal computing was transitioning to 32 bits. Dragon Warrior is even more constrained than most NES games: its cart uses the literal minimum amount of ROM that can be supplied in an NES cart. Dragon Warrior IV, meanwhile, has the largest ROM ever seen on the NES in the United States, an astounding two hundred and fifty six kilobytes! [2] When I studied Dragon Warrior's systems for my speedrun I was impressed by the programming talent they displayed. It used optimization techniques from the minicomputer era that had already become unnecessary by the eighties. Ultimately, Dragon Warrior's elegance is the reason why speedrunners have managed to push its world record down to 25 minutes. A thirty-minute Dragon Warrior run was demonstrated live at AGDQ (a speedrunning charity marathon) a few years ago.

I guess I'm allowed to brag. My speedrun is on Speed Demos Archive. The record stood for about two years. Technically it's still the no-RNG-manipulation world record, but no-one plays segmented speedruns anymore, so the comparison to single-segment ones is misleading.

The Dragon Quest series rarely receives its due in the US because critics here are largely unequipped to analyze shonen games, which is to say, games designed for teenagers. [3] Most US game critics won't even give children's games their due, must less those meant for adolescents. Meanwhile, Dragon Warrior has the double sin of being a shonen game aimed at newcomers to RPGs. In its time, its target demographic (teenagers new to RPGs) was every poor kid in the US, since we sure as hell wouldn't have a computer. So overt was this targeting that the game was given away for free with a Nintendo Power magazine subscription.

The first Dragon Warrior is one of the cheapest NES carts to find nowadays, Dragon Warrior IV one of the most expensive. This year, despite my lack of income, I gave myself permission to buy myself a lovely gift: Dragon Warrior IV, costing around $130. I had dreamed of owning it as a child, but could only afford to rent it through Blockbuster, and until this year I have been too mature to spend the money. ;)

Right now my mental health is too poor for physics, so I'm devoting intellectual effort to literary criticism instead, mainly games but also books and comics. This has been a lovely opportunity to add new raw material to the essay I'm compiling. :)

[1] Rather than era, I should have said level of technology. The NES' capabilities are on par with the Apple II, but the console arrived half a decade later.
[2] Both claims are incorrect. The smallest western ROMs include Donkey Kong at 16kB, and the largest is Kirby's Adventure at 512kB. Dragon Warrior weighs in at 32 kB, Dragon Warrior IV at 256 kB.
[3] This definition of shonen is all sorts of inadequate. To start, shonen is a gendered category, with the female equivalent being shojo. Still, the categories in Japan are far better than the US, with its excessively broad "young adult fiction" category.
[4] I now give this title to Roadwarden.