But here is how Dragon Warrior ends. After you defeat the Dragonlord, you're told peace returns to the land. You could just teleport back to Tantagel Castle but if you walk it, you'll notice all the monster encounters stop. That's a neat touch.
When you return to the castle, the king and the princess are waiting to greet you. The king offers you the kingdom as a reward, and you say no, that you want to go off and start your own.
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| Always making things difficult... |
Then the princess (who we rescued about halfway through the game) offers to join you as your companion. If you say yes, you scoop her up, and get a nice little musical salute, and a very old-school text-only end screen.
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| If you say no, it turns out she just insists until you say yes. |
I found the asking thing neat. I didn't try saying no to her, though when you first encounter the
Dragonlord, he asks you to join him and split the kingdom. If you say yes, he says "Really?!" And if you say yes again, the game ends the "bad" way.
But if you say no, you fight him and see the ending I've shown here.
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| The end... Until the sequel. |
Before moving on to the next game, I wanted to note a couple of things that stood out to me about this game.
1. It's a full on sandbox game. There are no real walls stopping you from going wherever you want - only tougher monsters to encounter. It's a "soft" barrier. This came out in 1986 - that style was typical of PC RPGs, but not of many console games for decades.
2. There's also no set order you have to go about your quests. You talk to people in towns, and they give you clues of items you might need and places you need to go. You can tackle them in any order, though some are easier to get based on your level.
3. When you first start the game, you can see the final castle you have to enter to fight the big bad boss. You just can't get there yet. Some of those quests require getting some magic items to make a magical rainbow bridge to the island it sits on. But it's very neat to have that goal right in your face from the start. A much more modern game that did this well was Half-life 2, where you can see the Combine tower in the distance and each level it gets closer and closer until you fight the last boss inside it.
4. There are very few "dungeon" environments. There's Erdrick's cave (which has no monsters), swamp cave, Garin's Grave, and Charlock Castle. Most of the game is traveling all over the overland map. But when you do go in caves and such, you need either torches, or to be high level enough to cast RADIANT. I actually got stuck at one point in Garin's grave with no magic left, no light, and at too high a level for monsters to kill me. I had to restore from an emulator save because I couldn't find my way out of the maze.
5. It's pretty hardcore for a console RPG. You can't replenish your health unless you go to an inn (until you can cast healing spells). You can't restore magic points at all without visiting an inn (or that one old guy in Tantagel who blesses you). A lot of the game is staying alive and making sure you can rest up somewhere nearby.
6. You can't permanently die - you can talk to the king and he'll write your name on the scrolls of legend (aka save your game) and if you die, you start back there with half your gold. They deliberately wanted to make a more casual RPG for console gamers that had to ever played one on PC. But even this lack of a "game over" situation is still tough.
Because they designed it well enough that later in the game, you need a LOT of money to buy the better gear. And to get the money reasonably fast, you have to fight the tougher monsters. And therefore, there's always a risk of dying and getting set back on those monetary goals.
The saving grace is that you keep your experience points and level. So the monsters keep getting easier over time.
7. On those simplifications the designers made to pare down the PC experiences like Ultima and Wizardry they were trying to imitate, the one that stuck out was handling your gear. There is no inventory of items to equip. The game equips your best stuff as you get it, and the shopkeepers buy back your old stuff automatically. That's a very console-y streamline.
8. The user interface is very reminiscent of the PC games that inspired it. To a level that is almost unnecessary. Like, do I really need a STAIRS command? Later games like Final Fantasy leave that behind and only have a combat selection menu, and have all over world actions happen either on contact or with a single action button.
9. Another oddity was the SEARCH command, which lets you search the square you are standing on. This literally has an affect only three places in the whole game. Once to find Erdrick's Armor in the ruined town of Hauksness. Once to find Erdrick's token in the southern swamp. And once to find the secret dungeon entrance in Charlock castle. That would have been a cool thing to have been given a more productive use. Like if you could find useful items like herbs and things sporadically. Maybe they wanted to implement that and couldn't.
10. Though crude compared to now, the game shows deep polish and balance as well as design that gets you to fully explore the world they built. It also recruited Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragonball and DBZ) to draw all the character art and enemies, and also hired a famed TV composer to pen the music. Those things definitely stand out and are very memorable parts of the play experience.
11. While a lot of this stuff is impressive looking at it as a product of its time, and considering how vastly influential it was in starting a sub-genre all by itself, I'm not sure if I would recommend revisiting it to anyone who doesn't have nostalgia for it. I'll be putting in some time on the most modern remake of it released for iOS to see if UI updates and modern touches make up for the old idiosyncrasies.
12. If you do play it, play it on an emulator that you set a fast forward key on. Walking around at default speed is agonizing. Later remakes of these older games sped up that part and for good reason. If I had to play this whole thing at default speed, I might have quit before finishing it out.
13. The design of this game was basically genre-creating as mentioned above. It spawned many sequels, and even a rival series in Square's Final Fantasy. That series owes everything to the market created by this design. And they bit a lot of it (which was admittedly adapted from PC games that came before). But the overland/town/dungeon/combat breakdown created here still serves as the standard for console RPGs to this day. And for good reason: it's fun and simple and it works.
That's a good stopping point for now. Next is Dragon Warrior 2 - which features the continuing adventures of the ancestors of our hero and his princess, set in the kingdom they founded.
Until then! :)
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