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Dragon Warrior! A Special Episode! | Ranking the NES,

Dragon Warrior! A Special Episode! | Ranking the NES, Episode 19-2

#Dragon #Warrior #Special #Episode #Ranking #NES

“The Jeff Gerstmann Show”

Not all games are created equal, and here at the Gaming Institute of Science Institute, we recognize that. So let’s give Dragon Warrior a slightly longer look before getting it onto a brave list of ranked NES games.

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37 Comments

  1. Hey Jeff! You might be interested in checking out the Dragon Quest 1 remake on Gameboy Color for a few minutes in a stream. It fixes a ton of quality of life issues and removes all the flowery dialogue. All the text and menus are much faster. It looks worse in some ways, better in others, also the difficulty curve is adjusted so you're not grinding slimes for an hour. The A button does what you want it to do automatically, etc… It's worth a look.

  2. Jeff, the answer to where your pens went is your kids took them and left them in random places. Kids, babies especially, freaking love playing with pens. I’m surprised there’s not some kind of pen-like toy for kids yet like the ones they make of keys, remotes, etc.

  3. The thing about Dragon Warrior that you don't realize when you first start playing it is that it's not a particularly large world and there aren't but 6-7 different weapons/armor sets in the entire game. 560 for the Hand Axe and 1000 for the Half-Plate seems expensive because it's supposed to be, as those are meant to be mid-game items and, if you were playing the game as intended, you'd naturally earn most of that money through fights and treasures found along the way. I guess the developers thought it was fine to offer them in the second shop the player comes across because nobody would be the sort of psychopath who'd spend hours killing thousands of slimes to buy them before ever setting off on the adventure proper. They thought wrong, because I was exactly that sort of psychopath. Buck naked and armed with the cheap Bamboo Pole, I spent the first few hours grinding it out like the world's hardest working stripper till I could buy those items – only to then make it to Kol, see the Full Plate for 3000, and promptly reload my save to grind another 2 grand so I could skip the Half-Plate. And the thing is, you're practically encouraged to do it by the fact that you get free MP refills at the starting castle; as soon as you're high enough level to cast Hurt, you don't even need a weapon to grind and you can start taking on tougher and tougher enemies, earning more XP which gains you more levels for more HP and MP…

    Dragon Warrior is the game that started me down that sick, twisted path of playing games that way, where I'd never go with better than the cheapest or most minimal gear and just grind it out until I could make a massive tech leap. (And my obsession with completing all the side stuff in open world games before I really dig into the main story is probably an extension of that sickness.)

  4. I first encountered Dragon Warrior at a friend's house. He was a Nintendo Power subscriber, so I assume he got it for free. All I saw him do was walk in circles around the castle and kill monsters. I asked why he didn't go somewhere else, and he explained this was the easiest way to power up. I then told him it looked kinda boring, but he assured me it definitely wasn't. I wouldn't get into RPGs until high school when another friend talked me into trying Secret of Mana by saying it was kinda like Zelda.

    And speaking of Nester: Howard Phillips was very much against bringing this game to the US. NOA rated it poorly internally, but Minoru Arakawa was fixated on trying to replicate the franchise's Japanese success in the US. That fixation led to ordering 1 million cartridges, which in turn led to Nintendo just giving them away when they didn't sell.

  5. My favorite weekly stream returns! It's interesting how you've been having to record at night due to your circumstances. I've been wondering if you might start referring recording at night versus the day. The kind of stuff always has its own pros and cons.

  6. Hot take: Almost all JRPG's are horrendously brain dead games. Literally the worst aspects of gaming that just feed on our mental flaw to need to collect more points. They have almost zero depth despite people thinking the exact opposite because they think menus and items = complexity. 99% of the game is just mindlessly hitting the same command over and over again and then occasionally healing. Once it clicks in your head you just can't unsee it. I'd legitimately rank Dragon Warrior as one of the worst games on the console. Not only does 99% of the game require the skill of a rock it's menu system is dreadful and the "story" is generic as it gets. Would play Dinowars Destruction of Spondylus 10/10 times over Dragon Warrior.

  7. I had to laugh at the part about Legacy of the Wizard because I just watched Jeremy Parish's video on it this morning and it made me wonder if I've been wrong about its quality all these years- I played it when I was a kid and absolutely hated it, but I'm wondering if I just didn't understand it.

  8. it's weird, but watching you grind slimes for like an hour makes me hype to play it again myself.

    well, not THIS version of this game. the fan translation of the super famicom remake.

  9. The first time I played this game, I had a blast drawing maps of the caves and dungeons on graph paper. The sequels improved the experience in countless ways, but there's something beautiful about the open, brutal world of DQ1. Along with the music and enemy designs, it creates a special atmosphere.

  10. Dragon Warrior is always burned in my mind as a game I always tried to play as a kid but couldn't really because I couldn't read. That and Faxanadu. The music and graphics will always live rent free in my head.

  11. Love to see you do a longer video like this for Magic of Scheherazade, it's my favorite RPG on the console. Game has done things games still haven't done since like taking loans from banks that you have to pay back interest or haggling shop keeps and if you insult their prices they'll kick you out of their shops. It also let's you choose between top down Zelda combat or turn based JRPG combat. God damn it's such a good game.

  12. I've fallen behind on Ranking the NES, but as a huge Dragon Quest fan, I had to skip ahead and watch this one now. And I'm gonna come out and say it, Dragon Warrior 1, not a great game, definitely the bottom half of the list. 2, and especially 3, helped elevate the series to where it is today, but that first game is rough. There's just not a lot of game here to chew on, so about 95% of the game is grinding, there's three whole dungeons (and a tunnel), and it's just…a bummer to me. So I'm curious to see if my thoughts are accurate and filled with science, or if they're flaky and filled with emotion.

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