Post by wafflerevolution on Sept 10, 2013 18:10:57 GMT
By Mamba219
On May 27, 1986, a little known Japanese game publisher called Enix released a game called "Dragon Quest" for the Japanese Famicom. This was the start of what would become a multi-million dollar and critically acclaimed franchise spanning a currently released total of eight main series games, as well as numerous spin offs such as the popular Dragon Quest Monsters series, but, before all of that, there was a hero, a villain, and a legend. And before even all of that, there was a man with a dream.
In the early 1980's, a man named Yuji Horii entered a game-designing contest, sponsored by Enix. At the time, video game production in Japan was a very, very niche affair, something only done for home computers. Enix had had modest success with games such as "Door Door", but nothing that really allowed them to break out from what was quickly becoming a burgeoning market. Yuji Horii's entry, a simple tennis game, caught the company's eye and he was hired as a programmer. In 1983, Horii and a small group of others won a contest with which they were allowed to attend AppleFest '83 in San Francisco, where Horii would have his first contact with American computer role-playing games such as Wizardry and Ultima, which would prove to have a major impact on Dragon Quest.
Two of the other people who accompanied Horii on his trip to America also released a game, called "The Portopia Serial Murder Case". An already well-known Japanese composer named Koichi Sugiyama played this game, and wrote a fan letter of appreciation for it. Enix, shocked at receiving such a letter from someone of Sugiyama's stature, invited Sugiyama to compose for their video games. The first such video game would turn out to be Dragon Quest, but that was still a little ways off.
Yuji Horii, pressured to develop a game, began early development of what would become Dragon Quest. Sugiyama was brought on board as the composer for the work, and Horii's old friend from the days when he would write to shonen magazines, Akira Toriyama, was commissioned for monster design. Toriyama was already famous nationally for his work on the extremely popular Dr. Slump manga, as well as his then-current project, Dragon Ball. His artwork grew to become a major component of the series' charm and one of the primary reasons for its initial success.
Horii envisioned a game similar to Wizardry and Ultima, but ultimately different and for the newly popularized Famicom console system. Role-playing games, until those times solely confined to America and having only once been created for a console (Dragonstomper in 1982, for the Atari 2600), were in the process of being introduced to the Japanese people for the first time. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely, as overnight Horii, Sugiyama, Toriyama, and Enix as a whole became nationally well known, akin to our modern perceptions of such superstars as, say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, as well as spawning dozens upon hundreds of similar games in the Japanese market. To this day, by far the three most popular genres of games in Japan are the text-based adventures, the dating sims, and the RPG. Dragon Quest became so important to the Japanese that RPGs are actually fondly referred to as "draques" due to the synonominity the series enjoys with the genre. The infamous Dragon Quest team is at least as famous within Japan as the internationally well-known Shigeru Miyamoto is to us here in America.
What made the game such a shocking success? No one really knows, and perhaps it is impossible for Americans such as us to attempt to approximate the effect of Japanese culture. The game itself is quite excellent, but even today it seems quite difficult to imagine a single game making celebrities out of its primary creators. These names may be well known in video gamer circles, sure, but national celebrities? For answers, we can only look to the game itself.
The concept and story of the original Dragon Quest is quite simple by today's standards. Essentially, it is the cIssic tale of a brave knight, a horrible dragon, a beautiful princess, and a legend. The gameplay is similarly basic. A press of the A button brings up the command menu, where it is possible to select from a number of basic commands such as Talk, Search, Status, Spell, and Item. There was even a command to go up and down stairs! Many such early innovations were deemed unnecessary by both the series and the genre, and things such as separate commands for taking and searching for items, torches for lighting dungeons, and eventually even the command menu itself were mostly done away with.
Among the aspects remained of Dragon Quest's legacy was the combat system, which has remained mostly untouched even to this day. Turn based combat was introduced to console role players for the first time, and to this day there exist a sizable number of turn based role-playing games. Another major innovation was the concept of character identity. Later RPGs such as Final Fantasy II or Phantasy Star would bring this to the next level, but Dragon Quest was the first role-playing game that gave your main character some sort of background information. You, the hero, are a descendant of a legendary hero named Loto (known as Erdrick in the Americanized version). Your task is to defeat the Dragonlord, rescue the princess Gwaelin, and bring peace back to the land. Earlier games such as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda had similar stories, but neither Mario nor Link had such a backstory. Dragon Quest was the bridge that took the largely up-to-the-player approach the vast majority of computer role-playing games take to the largely character driven approach console role-playing games use. Despite this, Dragon Quest has, over the years, maintained that, despite varying background information, that the heroes portrayed in its games are avatars of you, despite having predetermined skills and so forth.
Dragon Quest was lauded upon its release for the unbelievably large world and numerous locations it presented. In this day and age, its five dungeons and five towns are rather laughable, but back in its day, this was a barnburner. Not only was it praised for its locales but also for the variety of weapons, armor, and items that were obtainable, and the overall length of the quest itself. By modern standards everything about it seems paltry (10 hour play length, something like 7 different items of each ****, but back then, there was nothing like it short of Zelda. It was also one of the first games to feature a proper ending, with more than just a congratulatory message.
The American version of Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior due to copyright issues) introduced several changes, the majority of them for the better. Since it was released three years later overseas, numerous aesthetic improvements were made graphically. For example, in Dragon Quest, the hero's sprite is constantly faced toward the screen and cannot actually move in four directions. The American version rectified this. The American version also added a save feature, which was missing in the original Dragon Quest but added in the already released in Japan games, Dragon Quest II and Dragon Quest III (in Dragon Quest, an awkward password feature was used to save data, much like in many of the games of the time). Mechanics aside, the American translation is interesting as it takes a very unique, Shakespearean approach to the translation, frequently firing off outdated words such as 'thy' and 'thou' in order to give it a more Medieval feel. While this author personally enjoyed these little touches, the majority of people must have not, as Dragon Warrior II has the majority of this removed and by Dragon Warrior III, it is gone entirely.
Despite its initial release in America being hyped by a Nintendo Power subscription giveaway, Dragon Warrior games struggled to gain attention in America. This unfortunate situation has lead to the increasing rarity of the later NES Dragon Warrior games, such as Dragon Warrior IV, and the eventual shutdown of the Enix of America corporation, a shutdown that has denied American gamers legitimate English copies of both Dragon Quest V and Dragon Quest VI entirely, as well as the majority of the franchise's spinoffs. Hopefully, we will be the recipients of the recently released in Japan DS remake of Dragon Quests IV through VI, which will simultaneously allow us to play the fifth and six games legally as well as play the fourth without paying an arm and a leg for a beat up old copy of the NES original.
Despite being a 22-year-old game, Dragon Quest holds up fairly well even today. While many of its features are plain archaic, the gameplay is satisfying enough to play through again and again. It has been remade three times, two of them alongside its sequel, Dragon Quest II (subject, perhaps, to a later spotlight of its own), and one as a standalone title for Japanese cell phones. Only one of its remakes, the Game Boy Color version, was released in America.
Collector's Focus:
Dragon Warrior (NES) may be found on Amazon.com for as little as 0.99 used, or up to $100 new.
Dragon Warrior I & II (GBC) may be found on Amazon.com for $17.
As of January 28, 2008, 2,969 Gamespot users have a copy of Dragon Warrior in their collection.
On May 27, 1986, a little known Japanese game publisher called Enix released a game called "Dragon Quest" for the Japanese Famicom. This was the start of what would become a multi-million dollar and critically acclaimed franchise spanning a currently released total of eight main series games, as well as numerous spin offs such as the popular Dragon Quest Monsters series, but, before all of that, there was a hero, a villain, and a legend. And before even all of that, there was a man with a dream.
In the early 1980's, a man named Yuji Horii entered a game-designing contest, sponsored by Enix. At the time, video game production in Japan was a very, very niche affair, something only done for home computers. Enix had had modest success with games such as "Door Door", but nothing that really allowed them to break out from what was quickly becoming a burgeoning market. Yuji Horii's entry, a simple tennis game, caught the company's eye and he was hired as a programmer. In 1983, Horii and a small group of others won a contest with which they were allowed to attend AppleFest '83 in San Francisco, where Horii would have his first contact with American computer role-playing games such as Wizardry and Ultima, which would prove to have a major impact on Dragon Quest.
Two of the other people who accompanied Horii on his trip to America also released a game, called "The Portopia Serial Murder Case". An already well-known Japanese composer named Koichi Sugiyama played this game, and wrote a fan letter of appreciation for it. Enix, shocked at receiving such a letter from someone of Sugiyama's stature, invited Sugiyama to compose for their video games. The first such video game would turn out to be Dragon Quest, but that was still a little ways off.
Yuji Horii, pressured to develop a game, began early development of what would become Dragon Quest. Sugiyama was brought on board as the composer for the work, and Horii's old friend from the days when he would write to shonen magazines, Akira Toriyama, was commissioned for monster design. Toriyama was already famous nationally for his work on the extremely popular Dr. Slump manga, as well as his then-current project, Dragon Ball. His artwork grew to become a major component of the series' charm and one of the primary reasons for its initial success.
Horii envisioned a game similar to Wizardry and Ultima, but ultimately different and for the newly popularized Famicom console system. Role-playing games, until those times solely confined to America and having only once been created for a console (Dragonstomper in 1982, for the Atari 2600), were in the process of being introduced to the Japanese people for the first time. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely, as overnight Horii, Sugiyama, Toriyama, and Enix as a whole became nationally well known, akin to our modern perceptions of such superstars as, say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, as well as spawning dozens upon hundreds of similar games in the Japanese market. To this day, by far the three most popular genres of games in Japan are the text-based adventures, the dating sims, and the RPG. Dragon Quest became so important to the Japanese that RPGs are actually fondly referred to as "draques" due to the synonominity the series enjoys with the genre. The infamous Dragon Quest team is at least as famous within Japan as the internationally well-known Shigeru Miyamoto is to us here in America.
What made the game such a shocking success? No one really knows, and perhaps it is impossible for Americans such as us to attempt to approximate the effect of Japanese culture. The game itself is quite excellent, but even today it seems quite difficult to imagine a single game making celebrities out of its primary creators. These names may be well known in video gamer circles, sure, but national celebrities? For answers, we can only look to the game itself.
The concept and story of the original Dragon Quest is quite simple by today's standards. Essentially, it is the cIssic tale of a brave knight, a horrible dragon, a beautiful princess, and a legend. The gameplay is similarly basic. A press of the A button brings up the command menu, where it is possible to select from a number of basic commands such as Talk, Search, Status, Spell, and Item. There was even a command to go up and down stairs! Many such early innovations were deemed unnecessary by both the series and the genre, and things such as separate commands for taking and searching for items, torches for lighting dungeons, and eventually even the command menu itself were mostly done away with.
Among the aspects remained of Dragon Quest's legacy was the combat system, which has remained mostly untouched even to this day. Turn based combat was introduced to console role players for the first time, and to this day there exist a sizable number of turn based role-playing games. Another major innovation was the concept of character identity. Later RPGs such as Final Fantasy II or Phantasy Star would bring this to the next level, but Dragon Quest was the first role-playing game that gave your main character some sort of background information. You, the hero, are a descendant of a legendary hero named Loto (known as Erdrick in the Americanized version). Your task is to defeat the Dragonlord, rescue the princess Gwaelin, and bring peace back to the land. Earlier games such as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda had similar stories, but neither Mario nor Link had such a backstory. Dragon Quest was the bridge that took the largely up-to-the-player approach the vast majority of computer role-playing games take to the largely character driven approach console role-playing games use. Despite this, Dragon Quest has, over the years, maintained that, despite varying background information, that the heroes portrayed in its games are avatars of you, despite having predetermined skills and so forth.
Dragon Quest was lauded upon its release for the unbelievably large world and numerous locations it presented. In this day and age, its five dungeons and five towns are rather laughable, but back in its day, this was a barnburner. Not only was it praised for its locales but also for the variety of weapons, armor, and items that were obtainable, and the overall length of the quest itself. By modern standards everything about it seems paltry (10 hour play length, something like 7 different items of each ****, but back then, there was nothing like it short of Zelda. It was also one of the first games to feature a proper ending, with more than just a congratulatory message.
The American version of Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior due to copyright issues) introduced several changes, the majority of them for the better. Since it was released three years later overseas, numerous aesthetic improvements were made graphically. For example, in Dragon Quest, the hero's sprite is constantly faced toward the screen and cannot actually move in four directions. The American version rectified this. The American version also added a save feature, which was missing in the original Dragon Quest but added in the already released in Japan games, Dragon Quest II and Dragon Quest III (in Dragon Quest, an awkward password feature was used to save data, much like in many of the games of the time). Mechanics aside, the American translation is interesting as it takes a very unique, Shakespearean approach to the translation, frequently firing off outdated words such as 'thy' and 'thou' in order to give it a more Medieval feel. While this author personally enjoyed these little touches, the majority of people must have not, as Dragon Warrior II has the majority of this removed and by Dragon Warrior III, it is gone entirely.
Despite its initial release in America being hyped by a Nintendo Power subscription giveaway, Dragon Warrior games struggled to gain attention in America. This unfortunate situation has lead to the increasing rarity of the later NES Dragon Warrior games, such as Dragon Warrior IV, and the eventual shutdown of the Enix of America corporation, a shutdown that has denied American gamers legitimate English copies of both Dragon Quest V and Dragon Quest VI entirely, as well as the majority of the franchise's spinoffs. Hopefully, we will be the recipients of the recently released in Japan DS remake of Dragon Quests IV through VI, which will simultaneously allow us to play the fifth and six games legally as well as play the fourth without paying an arm and a leg for a beat up old copy of the NES original.
Despite being a 22-year-old game, Dragon Quest holds up fairly well even today. While many of its features are plain archaic, the gameplay is satisfying enough to play through again and again. It has been remade three times, two of them alongside its sequel, Dragon Quest II (subject, perhaps, to a later spotlight of its own), and one as a standalone title for Japanese cell phones. Only one of its remakes, the Game Boy Color version, was released in America.
Collector's Focus:
Dragon Warrior (NES) may be found on Amazon.com for as little as 0.99 used, or up to $100 new.
Dragon Warrior I & II (GBC) may be found on Amazon.com for $17.
As of January 28, 2008, 2,969 Gamespot users have a copy of Dragon Warrior in their collection.