Dragon Warrior

The Good
Contrary to a popular belief, Dragon Warrior was not the first Japanese-made RPG. Several companies (such as for example Xtalsoft) had been producing role-playing games on computers for quite a while. It was, however, among the first ones to be released on a console. One thing we can say about it with certainty is that it was the first popular Japanese RPG; probably also the first to be released in the West, where it could be enjoyed by console players who were tired of the complexities of Wizardry or Ultima.

Indeed, the utmost simplicity of Dragon Warrior can seem alluring. It is very easy to pick up and just plunge into action, because the game gives you almost no choices at all. It reduces role-playing to its most basic component: working in order to become stronger. That's a basic challenge; therefore the game's difficulty is actually a plus in my eyes. Otherwise, it utterly dismantles everything Western role-playing had accomplished before. The one thing it spares is a relative openness of the world - something later Japanese RPG gleefully demolished with their artificial exploration-impeding plot devices. Bear in mind, however, that much of the perceived non-linearity of Dragon Warrior is illusionary: try straying from the prescribed path and you'll immediately fall prey to tough monsters you have no chance whatsoever to defeat.

The Bad
When talking about classic genre-defining games, we need to make concessions to their position in history. It's easy to dismiss King's Quest as lacking compared to its successors; but we cannot forget that it was the first adventure with a visually stunning world you could physically explore. You can be bored by Wolfenstein 3D, but no other game of its time had the combination of lightning-fast movement and shooting with textured 3D levels. Playing the first Wizardry is not always fun; but at the time of its release, how many other games allowed you to create your own party of customized adventurers and descend into a deep, dangerous dungeon?

Well, here's the thing: Dragon Warrior is definitely not one of those classic genre-defining games. Even if we view Japanese RPGs as a separate genre, this game certainly didn't define it. It did nothing earlier Japanese computer RPGs hadn't already done: in fact, it mercilessly simplified everything even they did. Forget about party-building, character customization, or any variables in combat besides lethargic one-on-one confrontations that Ultima threw overboard years before. Why worry about choices or tactics if the game lets you fight repetitive random monsters over and over again? Instead of caring for variety or replay value, why not just make a game longer by forcing you to grind your sanity to oblivion?

We keep talking about how dumbed-down games are today, and in many ways we are right. But that doesn't mean every single game of the 1980's was a sophisticated construction full of esoteric wisdom. Dragon Warrior is, in fact, startlingly similar to today's casual games with their primitive mechanics stripped down to the bare bones: if it's an RPG then all you need to do is fight, level up, and know that a sword+1 is way better than just a sword.

There are some Japanese RPGs I like, but rarely for being Japanese RPGs. In fact, the best representatives of the genre managed to break away from the stifling formula in gameplay-related aspects, or at least were artistically and dramatically compelling enough to make us forget their boundaries. Only a year later, Final Fantasy brought back character classes, and Phantasy Star created a lovely world and had you manage a colorful anime party. Dragon Warrior is none of the above: it is a simplistic reproduction of very basic mechanics that does nothing new and nothing particularly well.

The Bottom Line
I have a soft spot for old games. I believe that many of them were better than today's blockbusters, and I do think that some groundbreaking titles of the past became undeservedly forgotten as time went by. What I don't think, however, is that Dragon Warrior was one of such titles. On the contrary: its radical simplifications only affected Japanese RPGs in a negative way, becoming a convenient template for lazy design.