I made a video a while ago basically telling people not to play the original Dragon Quest if it was their first time attempting to play the series. My criticisms were that its design was incredibly archaic by today’s standards, which could potentially turn off newcomers. I recommended the Game Boy Color version for anyone really wanting to see what all the fuss was about, but also mentioned the mobile port as an option, even though I had not played it at the time. I have since played said mobile port (which is the same as the Switch port, minus touch controls) and I want to dive into the game in a bit more detail. I’m still not confident this would be a great starting point for someone totally new to the series, but with a few caveats I think it could be manageable.
So let’s start with some background, and why I thought the game was too outdated for modern players. Dragon Quest is the original JRPG, and with that comes the fact that it was doing basically everything for the first time. The epic, dozens of hours long stories we’ve come to expect from the genre just didn’t exist yet. Instead, the story of Dragon Quest is simply this: you are the descendant of a great hero, and it’s up to you to defeat the Dragonlord, who is terrorizing the world. Go for it. From the start, it isn’t even clear exactly what it is you’re supposed to do to accomplish that goal. So you start visiting towns and points of interest on your map, and eventually you might start to put together the path forward. Might.
Dragon Quest is ostensibly an open world game, where you can go anywhere in the overworld you want, as long as you can survive the random monster encounters. But very rarely do you know where you should go next. This problem persists through nearly the entire game. The occasional clue pops up in dialogue with townsfolk, but more often than not you’ll find yourself stumbling into the next right thing simply because you just went to the another town on your map. It’s manageable once you understand that this is just the game, but at first it’s hard to not feel like you missed something important.
This goes hand in hand with the structure of the game. You might start it up expecting to tackle dungeons and bosses like in any other RPG, but Dragon Quest really only has two required areas like that. One more is completely optional, and another ends up being little more than a couple of hallways. So you take on the first dungeon and discover there’s no boss waiting at the end, you just get the key item and leave, and then you finish and expect to get some kind of clue about where to go next, but instead you get nothing and you’re just left to explore. It can be pretty demoralizing, just when you think you’re on a roll you discover you still don’t know what you’re doing.
All this might sound like some modern gamer whining, and yea, on some level it is. These are the pain points that a first timer is going to encounter when revisiting this game. The latest version cleans up some of the dialogue to make progression clearer, but the fundamental structure of the game still feels like a hurdle to get over rather than an experience to relish.
The weird thing though is that despite all of that, the game ends up being a great time. Once you accept that you will be lost for a while, you’re able to enjoy the exploration. After you explore for a bit, you’ll realize that the world isn’t as large as you first thought, and it actually doesn’t take that long to get from one side to another. On the one hand, an optional item that immensely helps with getting a required item can be easily missed, but on the other hand, if you took on that particular quest and have the optional item you feel like a genius when you need it. Every time I want to really complain about the game, I find myself shrugging and going “well it’s not so bad.”
A big part of this is the fact that the iOS version has a quick save option. Previously, the only way to save was to talk to the King, meaning that if you were on the other side of the map and wanted to save, you either had to use an item to teleport back, or walk. Even worse, it meant that every time you wanted to start the game you would be in the same place, potentially very far from where you wanted to be. Quick save lets you save anywhere, so now it’s possible to play in much shorter bursts, allowing yourself breaks if you do get overwhelmed with the lack of direction. Grinding becomes much easier because you can stay in a higher leveled area longer with quick saving, rather than returning to the castle and then back to the high leveled area.
The simplicity of the game design does help in some ways. You only ever have one party member, so you don’t have to worry about managing the abilities of multiple characters. The tiniest amount of strategy comes into play when fighting some of the tougher monsters, but if you wanted to you could just idling tap your way to victory. And yes, I do mean tap, because this game works very well on a touch screen. The original NES version required you to use your menu for everything, including opening doors, talking to NPCs, and even going down stairs. This version (and the GBC version) adds a more modern general action button and lets you just walk over stairs to use them. The artwork has also been cleaned up immensely to more closely resemble later entries in the series. It’s a beautiful pixel art world that looks great on a phone.
If you can’t stand to play on a phone, the Switch version of Dragon Quest is the same game with different scaling. I think the design is better suited toward mobile phones but that choice is a personal one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to dive right in to Dragon Quest II.