Dragon Warrior, Check That Box
I am pleased to announce that, on this Atatürk Memorial and Sports and Youth Day national holiday, I have completed Dragon Warrior IV, thus finishing my run through all four Nintendo-based Dragon Warrior games. My top to bottom preferences run: 4, 1, 3, 2.
4, as I already knew, was complex, huge, and fun. In my eyes the definitive NES RPG.
1 was elegant and groundbreaking. Not so much fun, but when done with love the grinding was fulfilling (especially at 250% speed!).
3 was complicated like 4, but on the wrong vectors. Adding a fairly second rate class system was kind of a letdown. Getting to name and design your own characters was fun, but it hurt the depth of the story (I mean, seriously, you built them in a cafe and hauled them off using a menu screen). But, this was still a seriously good game.
2 was bad in many ways. It lacked the complexity of 3 and 4, and its attempts to repair the non-fun aspects of 1 just killed off the elegance. Two cream-puff allies with draconian combat rules and unbalanced gotcha enemy abilities (like wiping out 20% of your magic in one swipe) made it a chore. Plus, the difficulty curve hockey-sticked at the end and made for a really painful last-minute level grind to get back up to speed.
I followed the FAQ line-by-line to finish 2. I was afraid my progress would be derailed if I didn’t. 1 needed a little FAQ help, but mainly for those don’t-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot things. 3 was really big and got away from me in places. It had a more open-ended plot (again, not a lot of character gears turning) that long breaks between plays kind of screwed up. I didn’t look at anything for 4 except the map and item data that came with the original cartridge. Of course, I’ve also played it a few times, but I was only lost once and found my way just fine.
In the end, this was a fantastic way to reconnect with some of the best material from the early days. I will at some point suck it up and play Final Fantasy I through, since it’s a classic and has always eluded me.
We’re going to play either Secret of Mana or Seiken Densetsu now cooperatively. There may be some FF I going on in the background, as well. I was in a bad mood with work when we played Seiken for the first time, so I’m looking forward to a clean rerun through the game.