The birthplace of the JRPG
Dragon Quest is not the first RPG to be made in Japan. That honor arguably belongs to Sword & Sorcery (1983), The Dragon & Princess (1982), or Dragonstomper (1982). However, it is the the first RPG in Japan to truly popularize the genre, with sales in the millions, and would have its style and characteristics copied and expanded upon to the point where it would give rise to a specific subgenre of RPGs: The JRPG.
Now, pedants will be quick to note that technically any RPG made in Japan is a JRPG. Even more pedantic people will claim that 'technically' Super Mario is an RPG, because you are playing the role of Mario. This obsession over semantics ignores that popular terms for categorization are not a sum of their words, but are rather umbrella terms for a set of characteristics in a genre. Art nouveau (French: new art) hasn't been new for nearly a hundred years, and comic books haven't been primarily humor based in at least ninety years.
So what made this game so popular, and can it still be enjoyed today?
It seems that one of the aspects that made the game so popular was its zen like simplification of RPG mechanics found it games like Wizardry, a known influence in the development of Dragon Quest. The game was non-linear. There was no permanent death. Compared the arcade games of the time, there was no pressure of losing lives or time limits.
Players took their avatar out into the game world, explored, fought, leveled up, and died. When they died, they simply entered the password from the last time they talked to a local leader in-game. (Saves were added to the North American release.) Like modern smart phone or puzzle games, the enjoyment seemed to be in the slow steady growth of strength, while the light management and simplified battles gave you something to do without being too demanding. If battles got too hard, you simply grinded until you were stronger.
The story was cute, but nothing complex. There's a hero, a prophecy, a princess, and a BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) who desires to rule or destroy the world. To put it bluntly, the original Dragon Quest was an excellent time waster, but one with a sense of progress that was somewhat independent of the player's personal skill.
So, how does it hold up today? Honestly, this is not a game you want to play unless your are curious about the roots of the genre, or can approach the game in a different perspective from where the genre has evolved to.
Battles are simple. It's just the player and a singular enemy. Over time you get access to spells, but they're secondary to just bashing things really hard. When you progress to a new area of random encounters, you'll often find a spike in enemy difficulty. The choice then becomes to grind easy low level enemies for a long time so that you can begin to face these new enemies, or throw yourself against these new enemies, healing constantly, and hope you survive long enough to level up quickly and get on parity. This becomes progressively worse as the game goes on. There's a bit of luck in beating the final boss, but nothing that can't be overcome with yet more grinding or giving the final battle a few good tries.
If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that I've mentioned grinding several times. That's the main gating mechanic in this game, one to give it a sense of length. All told, there is anywhere from 30 to 70 minutes of grinding between areas, expanding as the game progresses. There are some light puzzle elements in regards to finding items to progress the plot and keys to access new areas, but nothing egregious. (That honor would belong to this game's sequel, Dragon Quest II.) To enjoy this game is to enjoy the idea of grinding as a relaxing way to pass time.
Grinding has become one of the most controversial aspects of the JRPG genre, but it wasn't always seen as a negative. The point was the journey and not the destination. With the advent of better stories starting with Final Fantasy II, Dragon Quest IV, and Final Fantasy IV, the focus of the genre started to shift towards the enjoyment of the complex, epic story. The original Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest III, and Final Fantasy III expanded the idea that party formation and character class development as other areas of enjoyment for the genre, though an epic story often became the big selling point. Still, the idea of slowly growing your characters as the game progressed to overcome or completely outclass enemies and obstacles never truly left the genre, and those that have attempted to remove those mechanics often faced difficulty in simulating the experience, even if many players found themselves wishing it was simpler so they could progress the story or their character skill choices.
The other well known mechanic of JRPGs, besides turn based battles, is their insistence on menus. Menus in menus, hidden in more menus. I'm sorry to say that this game is rife with menus. If you look at where Dragon Quest drew its inspiration from, this shouldn't be surprising. In attempting to simplify RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima for a console, they had to find a way to make menu based choices work on a controller with two buttons. However, that is not to say that their attempt at simplification necessarily worked. Selling items in your inventory requires pushing the menu button in front an item shop, selecting the talk option, scrolling through dialogue, selecting the sell option, scrolling through your items, confirming the sale, then being kicked back out the main item shop menu. It's a chore, and sadly one that the Dragon Quest series did not choose to improve for a long time. To even open a locked door or to open a chest requires opening the main menu. It's a wonder that Enix didn't look toward the simplification off all things menu into a simple 'A button = action (check, talk, etc.)' as they did in the original Final Fantasy, but by then they were already two games deep into the series and probably felt it was part of the charm of the games. After all, by the time Final Fantasy came out, they had already sold 3.9 million copies of the first two games in this series in Japan alone.
It's those incredible sales, with this game accounting for 1.5 million of those sales, that gave birth to a genre that started out a simple exercise in (for the time) stress free gameplay and sense of progress and eventually grew into a complex world of materia, fusions, summons, class systems, S-links, party selections, and hundreds of stories of small groups of adventurers saving the world. And it all started here, with a hero going to rescue a princess and grinding until he fought a big bad guy trying to end the world. A simpler game for a simpler time.
