Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest series

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The History of Dragon Quest
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Role playing video games have been around since the advent of the home computer, with the likes of Aklabeth, Ultima, Wizardry, and many others. One of the most important of these is Enix's Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior in America.) Created by Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest combined the overhead movement of Ultima with the first-person, random battles of Wizardy, and effectively created the Japanese RPG subgenre. It took Japan by storm, inspired dozens of clones (including Final Fantasy, its primary competitor), and remains one of the most important video games ever made.

By today's standard, it was a very simplistic game. You're a lone knight, off to retrieve a sacred artifact stolen by an evil warlord. Along the way, you'll fight some monsters (including a dragon or two, naturally), buy new weapons, and save a princess. The quest is pretty straightforward, you never gain any extra party members, and fights are primarily determined how much highly you've leveled your characters, as opposed to having any real strategy. And yet, it earned admiration all across Japan.


The Rise of Dragon Quest

So why, exactly, did Dragon Quest take off the way that it did? For starters, it had immediately accessible appeal due to the artwork supplied by Akira Toriyama, one of the most famous manga artists in Japan, responsible for phenomenons like Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball. Although the in-game graphics were primitive and barely resembled Toriyama's artwork, it provided a lot of character to the otherwise standard designs of western RPGs, which were heavily rooted in Dungeons & Dragons.

It was also one of the most in-depth games seen on the Famicom at the time. Back in 1986, if you wanted a complicated game, you needed an expensive PC. But while Dragon Quest isn't as remotely in-depth as any of those games, it offered significantly more exploration and play time than most other titles, which concentrated on arcade-style action. The soundtrack was also supplied by classically trained musician Koichi Sugiyama, who had previously carved out a living for himself writing background music for commercials. Although the synth of the 8-bit Famicom was simplistic, it supplied a rousing backdrop to the adventure, with a memorable main theme that may as well be Japan's national anthem.

With its success came several sequels. DQII added a longer quest, more items, more spells, and most important, more characters. DQIII added several different character classes (similar to the original Final Fantasy, which had been released a few months earlier in Japan) and DQIV featured multi-chapter adventure that focused on different characters. Each game sold insanely well and established its reputation as one of the most popular franchises in the nation.

Despite the breakout success of Dragon Quest in Japan, it didn't receive nearly the same response in America. Enix didn't have any offices outside of their home country, so the original Dragon Quest was published by Nintendo of America in 1989, three years after the initial release. Nintendo had a breakout hit with The Legend of Zelda a few years earlier, despite fears that it may have been too complicated for young American gamers, so they anticipated a similar success. They even included a mini-strategy guide that detailed the entire game, in order to groom newbies into the world of role playing.

Unfortunately, most of America simply ignored the title. The graphics and sound were too primitive. The interface was unwieldy. And perhaps most importantly, it lacked the action and puzzle solving that earned Zelda its success, instead replaced with slow-paced, turn-based combat, requiring hours of tedious leveling to advance. Nintendo vastly overestimated demand, and ended up giving away unsold copies for free with subscriptions to Nintendo Power. Because of this, it earned quite a lot of recognition from American NES gamers. However, it was quickly eclipsed by Final Fantasy (designed by rival publisher Square and also published in America by Nintendo), which featured far superior graphics and sound, and far deeper gameplay mechanics. The later iterations -- Dragon Warrior II, III and IV -- were also published in America by Enix themselves. They were all much improved over the original, but they kept the same ugly graphical style and clumsy interface, and came out far too late, where they competed against the 16-bit titles on Sega Genesis, NEC TurboGrafx 16 and -- in the case of DWIII and IV -- even the Super NES. As a result, they're some of the most sought after American released NES games (particularly III and IV.)

Dragon Quest continued to proliferate in Japan, with two more sequels released for the Super Famicom, both of which added greater narrative and character customization. In 1997, Final Fantasy VII popularized JRPGs worldwide with its flashy graphics, which became model for a number of subsequent games. On the other hand, Dragon Quest VII, released in Japan three years later, was comparatively meager, using low budget graphics and barely any CG cutscenes at all. It was greeted with multi-million selling status in Japan, and severe indifference in America. Dragon Quest VIII was released in 2005, this time featuring far superior manga-style cel shaded graphics that finally rivaled Final Fantasy's high budget aesthetics. Once again, it took Japan by storm. In America, it sold significantly better than past installments, but nothing compared to the Japanese sales numbers, and certainly not enough to match Final Fantasy.

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