Retronexus - Dragon Warrior

A slime draws near! These famous words where what greeted many for there first foray into the world of Dragon Warrior. Now known was Dragon Quest. This is also one of the great grand-daddies of RPGs and helped lay the foundation for the now famous series, along with many other renowned franchises.

Now that is a classic monster.

The plot of the game consists of you, a descendant of the hero Erdrick (renamed Loto in re-releases), learning from King Lorik that the Dragonlord has stolen the Ball of Light. It's your duty to reclaim the Ball of Light and restore peace to the land. Oh and the Princess Gwaelin has been kidnapped as well. Rather straight forward stuff eh? The story itself is minimalistic in nature, but will show itself now and again throughout the game. It will always be there, lying in wait for you to find.

Just where will you go?

Now if you have no clue how the Dragon Warrior/Quest series works then...what the hell? You don't know about the classic turn based battle system where it's a one-on-one duel between a monster and you? Where you can attack or use a spell, or even defend! You can flee even from the monster, but if you even think about fleeing from a slime you deserve to get smacked. Yes, Dragon Warrior gave us perfection when it came to turn based battles, making it just you and a blue blob, giving you a thousand yard stare and maybe a smile. It worked perfectly for the era making each battle its own. It was just you and the monster, nothing more, nothing less. But that's not all. Your non-battle menu had the usual talk, search, open, etc. commands, but it included something new! It included a stair command! That's right! You had to select this if you wanted to go up or down stairs, simply walking over them was not enough. Though looking back this is really annoying and one of the only flaws in the game. Something that was corrected in subsequent releases.

The legend that is Dragon Warrior is truly amazing. It laid the foundation for what all other RPG games would come to use, at least on the console side of things. And there is no doubt about it everything about it screams classic.

- Ryan P.