Lmao DQ1 feels so prehistoric now

Not that guy, but certain aspects are primitive even by retro standards. Walking up to an NPC, door, chest or anything and having to use a menu to choose to talk/open/take/etc. instead of simply pressing A as a universal action button quickly made it outmoded even in it’s day, and an insufferable slog through to try and play now.

This. Wizardry, Ultima, Dungeon Master, etc. all existed and had more to them

DQ1 was explictly meant to be simple to ease newcomers into the genre, ala FFMQ.

I played the Game Boy Color version of DQ I and I really enjoyed it

Yes and in doing so they made a bad game.

and yet it occupies a weird space now where people going back to it would find it unintuitive and frustrating
it's a historical curiosity more than anything

DQ1 definitely hasn't aged the best. One person in combat and the weird old english translation really feel archaic now.
That being said, it's still a nice little adventure game, finding the items, talking to NPCs, it's not too challenging and the traveling is neat. It's not offensively bad, it's not the greatest thing since samurai sauce either. I'm saying all this as a massive DQ fanboy, too.

I tried playing FFVI some years ago and had to drop it after a few hours. The random encounters were unbearable. I've been playing games since the SNES and Game Boy, but these days I can't in good conscience have a game "waste my time" like that.

I'd take the NES translations over the god awful pun-ridden abominations that came between 8 and 11, though.

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Yeah it took a lot of my gaming time as a kid. I remember I got my hands on the Nintendo power that had a walk through in it and my life was changed. A really fun game all in all. It is charming like an old flash game from newgrounds

I'm ESL so I'm not too knowledgeable on most of the DQ translations, besides old english 1 and awful accents in 4. French DQ translations have always been rather pun-heavy so I don't mind them.

Play one of the remakes. SNES or GBC

IIRC they both use the more modern "standard" jrpg controls and the sprites all got redone

Yeah definitely. I played the PS4 version since I got it for beating DQ XI and they buffed up the dragon and Dragon Lord in it, so it forced you to grind even more. Also, the Japanese Famicom version of DQ I is even more archaic than the English version.

Not him, and I'm 30. Liking something doesn't make it not archaic. I like the original Final Fantasy, the NES version, and I still say it's archaic.

DQ localizations are pretty awful. I only got into the series after I started studying Japanese, so at least I don't need to suffer through them, but I still wish they were given proper localizations for people who don't have that option.

play the original japanese version where the player sprite doesn't turn at all or you're a casual

DQ1 is honestly trash, it was neat for its time but playing it now is awful.
Majority of the game really is just grinding and there's about 2 sentences worth of story.
I don't know how DQ2 fairs other than having multiple party members which makes the game playable but in regards of story and grinding its probably still just as awful.
DQ3 however seems like a superior version of FF1.

Dragon Quest 2 is worse than Dragon Quest 1 in every single way. 3 is when the games got good.

i like 1 for some reason.

It’s true though. DQ1 on NES is a fucking relic. The GBC/mobile versions improve on it, but it’s still just a super bare bones experience

Play a real game now, fag.

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DQ was my first experience having to pick a direction to talk in. It was weird. Before that, my oldest RPG was Final Fantasy. Well, I've tried Akalabeth, but though I like 80s games, I think Akalabeth is a bit too old, and probably some from the early 80s, but I haven't tried any Ultimas or Wizardries yet.

That makes sense if punny translations were your introduction, yeah. Defenders of the localization say that the original Japanese versions were the exact same, but they weren't, really.

Japanese versions

>A lot of puns for enemy names
>Occasional puns for spell names and important character names
>Dungeon and town names are normal
>Dialogue is normal

English localization

>Monster names are puns like in the original
>Almost all NPC names are puns
>Dungeon names and town names are puns
>Every second or third line of dialogue has a pun or a cheesy joke

It goes from a generally lighthearted and jovial adventure, but one that's still capable of taking it seriously, into a completely obnoxious circus that never relents from firing off one bad joke after another at machine gun speeds. I consider them to be bastardizations.

What I like about 2 is that everyone is still pretty mediocre. The hero has a set of legendary equipment, but his friends just get hand me down shit. Made it feel like you were up against some serious shit with your real life friends. DQ2 is bretty good

based

I liked II more than I, though I played the SFC versions, maybe that made a difference. Still didn't really get into the series until I played DQ III though.

I can't play this because it has Pikachu as a player character. It is too cringe

Older than pokemon tho.

Back then games needed far less to entertain.
The act of playing a game was something new on itself. The simple "mash attack" combat was fun for some reason. You as a kid could imagine the actual combat going on much more easily and get entertained by your own imagination, which unlike today, back then was free of the self-criticism that turned it into a damp, cold place.

Its hard to believe this is a 8-bit era game, it really was ahead of its time, the 3d dungeons, the battle animations, the story, the 3 entire overworlds (planets), the fm chip

Before Dragon Quest what was there? How far back in rpgs can we go? I’m already fucking 30 goddamit it but what did 40 year olds or 50 play? Maybe I’ll stop caring about cidya soon

fpbp

This is the earliest proper jrpg I know of:
youtube.com/watch?v=DJ6uHOhf2AA

The earliest video game RPG I know of is Akalabeth, from 1979, but it might not be the first.

>Maybe I’ll stop caring about cidya soon

Maybe, but times are different, so there's a good chance you'll be playing video games until you finally die.

It looks nothing like pikachu, if anything it resembles Nausicaä's pet fox-squirrel Teto.

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Dragon Quest was the first JRPG, 1986. The first officially published Western RPG was Azkabeth in 1979, and the first known videogame RPGs period (made at colleges for friends to play) came in 1975.

I've been playing through the series recently and I'm able to withstand a lot of the outdated design except for searching the ground that all looks the same for some important item. Using search in every single square on the second floor of the tower was fucking hell.

I played this game in 1990 and it felt prehistoric then, too.

27 minutes actually
youtube.com/watch?v=Bgh30BiWG58

Sure you did zoomie

SNES version has quite a few quality of life features, like not needing to open the menu to open a door or talk to someone. Ultimately the game is pretty simple and holds up well because of it. Most of your time is going to be spent grinding, if you get bored of the grind you can probably just stop, I think its best to experience the feel of DQ1 and not actually complete it.

not only is it ugly tedious and archaic, it's also super fucking shallow
I dunno why anyone can play this shit honestly, the classic wizardry games hold up however

i'm 34 you little shit

The whole Mother series does that, and people love Earthbound and Mother 3

>Release date: 2 days after FF1
I still cant believe this, Phantasy star looks so much modern than Final Fantasy.

2's music is better.

Yeah the first good one is III
Play the fan translated SNES version or the GBC version
Also, the Japanese version of DQ1 looks and plays even worse, it's a fucking JRPG with a goddamn password system, play the American version

Dragon Quest 4 was already out in Japan, so yes, the original DQ was already really dated.

Probably because it's not very good.
I've played through it without fast-forward, it doesn't hold up and anyone who says it does is lying.
Play literally any other NES RPG and you'll have more fun, especially the three other Dragon Quests (yes even 2).
Or play the game that inspired it, Wizardry, which is also better.

If they wanted DQ to succeed in the west they should have skipped the first two games
III would guaranteed have blown people away if it came out before Final Fantasy

Am I the only one who thinks early WRPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, etc aren't fun at all? They could be fun to watch an LP of from someone who knows what they're doing, but playing them is about as fun as water torture.

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Maybe I was being kind of a dick, but I agree 100%. It's sort of to be expected seeing how old it is, and it feels almost painful to play if you aren't on emulator with access to a speedup toggle.

Get ready for a bunch of Smash fans to enter the fanbase saying 1 ~ 3 was shit / DQ was never good.

Oh yeah, the French localizations definitely aren't as bad. Most dungeon/town names are puns too, characters are sometimes puns and jokes of sorts.
Spell names are oddly conservative, though.
the frizz line for instance is just Flamme/Superflamme/Mégaflamme/Gigaflamme, same with Woosh just being called "Tornade", Sap is "Altération", Buff is "Protection" and so on and so forth, they're usually words rather than onomatopeia.

I played the SNES version and it was a fun little game, not very complex but the freedom of going anywhere you want was fun. 3 is where the series really shapes up though.

I don't remember that being an issue anywhere but II. In III you have a spell that'll make any hidden floor items glint, and after that I think it just tapers off in general. Though it's been a while since I've played them and most of the series I've only played once, so I may be forgetting things.

Different user here.
I see that just as a "good game in spite of the archaic menu". I played through the first Earthbound recently and I enjoyed just about everything except for the constant menu stuff. Having to move items around between characters, not knowing what characters can even equip or use until after you've tried it, all that stuff can get very tiresome.

Oh my fucking god I’m dying. They better not make an Atari 2600 mini because who the fuck wants to play that??

Sega was always superior.

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>I played the SNES version
Don't play the SNES version of II if you want to keep your save
Fucking busted-ass fan translation

It doesn't to the degree that he's talking about. Check out DQ1 on youtube or download the rom real quick and you'll see. It's way less intuitive than what you're picturing.

Good.
Smash posers don't deserve to enjoy good games let them stick to their party brawler.

athey are systems driven and not for everyone,a the fun comes from figuring out the game and abusing it
presentation is very basic

The Gameboy Color port of this and DQ2 is much better
>Less grinding needed
>Better visuals
>Prince of Cannock gets more equipment in DQ2

>I've played through it without fast-forward, it doesn't hold up and anyone who says it does is lying.

I was really annoyed that the PS4 version didn't have a turbo feature. It's becoming common in old FF re-releases, and as painful as older DQs are to play without it, I hoped it would as well. I ended up just stopping when I had to grind for the dragon (since they made him stronger, so you have to fucking grind more) and completed the SFC version again in a couple hours.

DQ1 had I think 2 moments where this was important. One in one of the towns, the other in a smaller vine area in the overworld. I spent like 3 hours fucking around not knowing what to do because I assumed if I don't see anything, it's not there. The moment I realized the game could hide stuff like this made me mad as hell.
2 had a bad moment as well in that the destroyed town hides Erdrick's sword. I just used a walkthough at that point. Fuck going through several tough enemies to find the one square with something in it.

I actually already played the SNES version. I found one major bug (a person in a late game city that if you talked to him he would just keep repeating the same dialogue over and over in an endless loop), outside of that the wose thing was the game itself, specifically the excessive grind and the hidden orbs of bullshit. Otherwise it was meh, not as simple good fun as 1, not as actually developed as 3.

kys yourself zoomer. I was 46 in 1982 and fucking loved the Atari.

I've grown to love the original Wizardry from figuring out what I was doing.
Finally getting the hang of things and learning how to not getting your shit kicked in is the fun, along with making your own maps. It takes a certain kind of patience, and I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't like it.
I also fucking love grinding for end game equipment, and original Wizardry has tons of loot the average person will never see.

>2
>Loto's sword
Loto's sword is in Charlock castle in both DQ1 and DQ2. It's Loto's Armor that's in the abandoned town, and only in DQ1. An NPC tells you about armor sitting near a tree, and the tree always has a scripted enemy to fight right before it. It's not terribly cryptic. Getting Loto's seal is worse.

I actually think this a big reason why the NES Dragon Quest games didn't do so well, they were already dated by the time they were released to the U.S.
How could a primitive JRPG released in 86 compete with the crazy mapper-extended games that were coming out in 89?
Would the original Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros be as popular if they came out in 89 or 90? There were already (arguably) vastly superior games by then.

Atari games are shit.
Don't give me that zoomer shit. NES games are much better than the crap Atari shat out.

Dont lie user, we all Murricans dont live that long.

ff1 was released two months before dq 3. there's a clear winner there

In DQ1, the item the princess gives you tells you the location of the latter. It says "go up/down and left/right x number of tiles". I think 2 is the only one with no hints at all for key items.

NES games are still shit.

SNES is like the bare minimum, barring shit like Kirby's Adventure and Super Mario Bros.

I'm starting to forget details and mixing the games together.
>Loto's seal
At least at that point you could use the princess's guiding system to help.

>NES games are still shit.

Goddamn tasteless kids.

Fuck no, the NES has at leas 40 games that are easily better than 90% of the shit released today.

>NES was already the third generation of video games

What the fuck was there before??

Maybe there's a generational gap at play. Atari games seemed amazing if you grew up in the 1940s and the only games you had were Kick the Can, Cowboys and Indians, and Tag.

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God I hate kids.

primitive games such as pong, then atari consoles. Basically stuff before the crash.

I'm not sure if it's in the NES version, but the GBC version of 2 has the Echo Flute, which tells you if an area has one of the seals in it. For the Sun Seal (arguably the hardest to find), an NPC straight up tells you what island it's on. NPC dialogue can take you through the whole game in DQ2, the only part that's bullshit is Rhone.

Yeah, that item does help admittedly. I found the armor easily though my first time, so I assumed it was easy to find for everyone. The dam key in DQ2 is definitely tricky to find, but I stumbled onto it half by mistake and half by a hunch.

>coping hard because they can't accept the fact that NES is garbage worse than the Atari 2600
I'm fucking waiting

Dragon Quest 1 was actually pretty good about telling or hinting to you where hidden shit was or where you needed to search. The game is definitely doable without a walkthrough.
Dragon Quest 2 on the other hand...

Magnavox Odyssey, Atari, and a few others were first gen, and that continued into the second gen (Atari 2600 was second gen)

Tell me about the crash user, what happened

Atari and Intellivision shit, where they would launch new expensive systems atleast once a year and tons of companies were releasing shit, which crashed the market and gave way to the rise of Arcades and then Nintendo saved it all.
The best time to play old school RPGs were when you were 8-10 years old. You didn't care about tedious shit or filler or padding. Now, every single one of those games makes me play with turbo basically flying through the overworld and speeding up the random battles.

A man turning a crank to power video games. Music was done by a live musician in your bedroom.

yea, I feel his way about the phantasy star games on sega too

then again I felt like chrono trigger was too dated at first and while I do think it's overrated was still a great game, so these probably take just getting used to

Shit quality games till nintendo released the seal of approval

I have a lot more fun with FF I or III than FF XV. When I played FF XIII I tried to trick myself into liking the game by playing FF I first, NES version, not using any extra emulations features like turbo or anything, and then returned to FF XIII. I thought that maybe by dealing with some of the annoying, outdatedness of FF I and then going to XIII, I might enjoy it more, but in the end I just had fun with FF I and still hated XIII.

>I found the armor easily though my first time
It's possible I just missed the hint about the tree. A lot of the dialogue in these games just doesn't stick with me for some reason.

I lol'd

I only ever played DQXI, which I'm just about the halfway point. It's good, simple game with a simple story. Bad guy is bad, good guy is good. The animations are really, really well done. Reminds me a bit of FE Shadow of Valentia, a simple but well presented game.

The only thing I can even say against it is that it lacks a bit of edge, but it doesn't want to have any edge, so I can't even hold that against it. I'm thirsty for some new SMT.

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You are a weird person.

Everyone tried getting in on video games, everyone (even Quaker Oats), and there was absolutely no quality control. So it led to a crash in the North American console market (PC gaming and, as I understand it, gaming in other countries just kept on trucking).

>now
You mean for the last 30 years?
Pre-4th gen RPGs have all aged like fucking milk.

If you use words like "aged" or "dated" you are just trying to cope with your shit taste.

>I'm fucking waiting
Not him buttttt:
Adventures of Lolo 1 2 3
Balloon Fight
Bionic Commando
Bubble Bobble
Castlevania
Castlevania 3
Contra
Super C
Cocoron
DuckTales
Felix the Cat
Final Fantasy III
Gargoyle's Quest II
Gimmick!
Gun-Nac
Kickle Cubicle
Kid Dracula
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Zelda 1 2
Mega Man 1 2 3 4 5 6
Earth Bound
Monster Party
The Mysterious Murasame Castle
Ninja Gaiden 1 2 3
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
River City Ransom
StarTropics
Zoda's Revenge
Summer Carnival '92: Recca
Sweet Home
NES Tetris

That's totally fair. Looking back, I wish I had written down hints so they were more easily accessible, instead of sitting there trying to remember what I needed to do. There's a remember spell in GBC DQ3 for that reason, but so far I haven't had to use it

VI is the best DQ

The nes version of ff3 is a seriously underated and innovative game. It holds up suprisingly well.

Quality was so bad, examples like ET, that people simply stopped buying games. Don't know if this is just a theory but arguably one of the reasons Nintendo managed to get such a foothold in America was because they basically ran without any real competition. Their quality was simply miles ahead of anything companies in America were making.

Oh bull. I love MediEvil, but the platforming has certainly aged.

Yeah I really like it. Opinions toward the game used to be more positive, and then the DS remake came out and ever since then, the majority voice has said FF III is shit.

Didn't PC gaming only start until after the crash?

I'm really curious about personal computers, didn't Japan have a bunch of them? Aren't personal computers just another console? What was the difference

>Now, every single one of those games makes me play with turbo basically flying through the overworld and speeding up the random battles.
Perfect description of my current situation. Growing up I only had a handful of Sega titles and a couple of PC stuff. I'm currently going through just about every NES, SNES, Genesis, etc title and just using an emulators turbo to get through the battles or walking in the overworld.
And it's kinda sad since I'm not allowing myself to actually think of what's going on. I won't remember the music, I won't remember some enemies, I won't remember much because it's going by as fast as possible.

The mario trilogy, kirby, the zelda games, castlevania 1 and 3, any capcom platformer (there are like 15 of them), the contra games, gradius and other shoot em ups like it, the lolo games, DQ3, FFs.

Motherfucker you are just ignorant, 3d generation and forward is where games started to shape up, do you really thing games got good with 3d systems like 64? There is a reason why some NES games are some of the biggest sellers of their franchises living even today.

just beat this game last week

It does feel prehistoric, but it also pioneered a lot of RPG mechanics that would be used by every JRPG after it. It just feels limiting due to having one character fighting one monster at a time with no real customization beyond 'get better weapon'.

This got fixed a bit with DQ2 with party members, and refined with DQ3 and the totally customizable parties.

It's prehistoric, yeah, and you don't have to enjoy it, but you should respect it for being the groundwork for countless other RPGs.

PC games have been around since the 70. Well, 60, technically. Nowadays there's not a lot of difference aside from mods and more graphical options and stuff, but back then consoles and PCs felt more different. It was trickier to do certain stuff on PC back then. Like, making a sidescroller like Super Mario Bros that was very seamless was quite a task. John Romero managed it through his magic, but they were rare at the time.

I think it's because so much of the diologue in these games is just filler, and all the characters look the same, that it becomes hard to remember a specific character actually giving a hint.
It's like Simon's Quest. Between knowing who's fucking with you and who's actually giving you a hint, your mind just forgets everything they say.

Simon's Quest's translation was fucking weird. I played it in Japanese and the NPCs were less retarded from what I remember.

Isn't that the black sheep?

Yeah like I'm trying to understand shit like the MSX and ZX Spectrum. Like during the crash personal computers were new and I guess people were taking interest in them which contributed to the crash. What did they have back then that Intellivision/Coleco etc didn't have?

I'm going to go look for a book, no one on Yea Forums ever talks about emulating these games

I feel like the DS version screwed-up the class changing mechanic, which made certain parts of the game frustrating. Also, the DS version doesn't have that "NES charm" to it.
I'd unironically suggest playing the NES version over the DS remake.

it still has a quick interact button that lets you do things contextually. And it's only two things, talk to and check as opposed to the 6 in DQ that include walking up stairs, opening doors, taking items, on and on and on.

Yeah, apparently it was some weird translation issue that pretty much made parts of the game near impossible to complete. The shit about crouching on the cliff has to be one of the stupidest moments I've had in gaming.

youtube.com/watch?v=khXiL3V8Jqw

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I feel you on this. I got back and play FF1 (usually one of the updated versions though) like once a year just because I think it's genuinely entertaining. Like there's not really anything to it, but it manages to be fun

Nah. I'm not even a DQ fan so I'll probably never play this game but there are tons of games from that era that have aged. Just look at the original Metroid for one. Hell, I'd say that even some early games from the fourth generation haven't aged the best as well.x

>Summer of 2009
>Hot as hell outside
>Just fired from job
>Move to sister's apartment
>Bought an NES with a bunch of games for like 80 dollars, one of the games was Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest 1)
>Took about a week to complete
I enjoyed the experience but I've yet to play another JRPG, that was all the grinding I could take from an entire genre in one game.

Don't let the roof hit you on the way out.

>starting a thread with lmao
back you go

JRPGs as a whole are super overrated but there are a few good ones, like Earthbound and the Mario RPGs. I've also always wanted to try the Persona games and SMTIV was actually pretty fun from what I've played. And I'll play through FFVII one day finally.

you don't really have to grind in most jrpgs, granted you aren't braindead and that you don't skip encounters a whole lot
Persona is more about the life simulator stuff. If you're playing for the good combat of smt you're gonna be disappointed

Dragon Quest 1 is still extremely short and if you know what you're doing it's beatable quite quickly. I mean shit the whole map for DQ1 is merely a small part of DQ2 and DQ3's worlds, and their games have more gameplay mechanics and systems in play. Meanwhile having to go back to that one town to buy a FUCKING key to pop locks, that was the biggest mechanical chore in DQ1.

Nope

When you play a game like the famicom DQs or FFs you gotta turn off the internet, turn off your phone, grab pen and paper and pretend you're a snotty japanese kid in the 80's.

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There were earlier video games like dnd and games being passed around at universities.

Sounds comfy. If I was born in 1987, do you think I could have gotten the legit 80s experience and at least made some progress in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest during 1988/1989?

That was mostly just early game design. Balancing wasn't exactly a concept in gaming yet. Most modern JRPG's or western RPG's are balanced so that you don't need grinding to finish the game. At most to get some particular items for extra stuff.

just play it on your smartphone, they fixed all that bullshit.

The music is by far the best part of this game. So relaxing.

Well, Persona 1 and 2 are more SMTish. Persona 1 and 2, and 3-5 are so different that they're basically different series. 1 and 2 are your typical dark dungeon crawlers (with a greater focus on story in 2), no social elements at all.

Where the 80's that great? Is Stranger Things accurate?

How do you feel about the song Twisted Love Triangle?

feel the same way
youtube.com/watch?v=STahp4WPCKE

DQI, and DQII to a lesser degree, are more important today for historical purposes. Just like Super Mario Bros it feels basic and primitive today but their importance on their respective genre can not be understated. While few ever left Japan the Famciom, and consoles and computers in general, were flooded with imitators once DQ released. Every jrpg you have ever played, in some way, took influence from the series.

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>that slick ass monitor
Every time I look at my dinky ass ctr I feel bad.

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But it still feels so damn good.

not to the same degree

in Earthbound / M3 you can still just press A to talk to people or open things, you don't have to walk up, press start and then select a command from the menu just to do anything

I don't know, I just finished playing DQ1 in the mobile like it was recommended here, and it was actually pretty fun, started playing 2 now and holy shit, just seeing the differences between the maps already tells me that this game is gonna be way longer than DQ1.

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PC gaming wasn't really affected by the crash, but it was very niche compared to arcade and home consoles. Heck, PC was arguably niche all the way up until Doom and Myst

>I enjoyed the experience but I've yet to play another JRPG, that was all the grinding I could take from an entire genre in one game.
I know exactly how you feel. FFIVDS made me never touch another JRPG

The GBC version is a massive improvement over the NES game. Better visuals, better music, better UI, new features and quality of life improvements, controls that are actually somewhat responsive, etc. It almost feels like a different game compared to the original.

Haven't played the mobile version, but good luck my dude. DQ2 is the hardest and most cryptic entry in the series.

>DQ2 is the hardest and most cryptic entry in the series.
I didn't know you were a casual

It was my first console and honestly I have to generally agree. There were some bangers but by and large more dated than your mother. Genesis held up better.

Even worse

PLATO mainframe games for western RPGs, with Akalabeth being the first commercial cRPG if I'm not mistaken.

For JRPGs, you have stuff like Dragon Slayer that predates Dragon Quest.

>DQ2 is the hardest and most cryptic entry in the series.
Is that so? Looks a lot like DQ1 and I didn't have that many problems with 1 besides finding that fucking Token in the middle of nowhere and one of the dungeons because I didn't know about the hidden rooms. But I enjoy this part of DQ, being fucking lost and not knowing where to go is the kind of thing I don't feel anymore in any modern games.

Played it on an NES, no save-states or speed-up. It was hell. It started off really well then the game went to shit after I got the ship.
All of Rhone can go fuck itself.

Maybe you should have gotten a girlfriend instead

I love DQ1. I play randomized roms of it all the time.