Later instalments in the series made a point of adding to the Dragon Quest experience, with Dragon Quest II improving everything from character and spell counts to longer quests. Series such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger took great inspiration from Dragon Quest. Like most popular game series, their success would be endlessly emulated, and in some cases improved upon in the years to come.
With Dragon Quest, Enix and Chunsoft had a unique offering: an accessible RPG that could run on an affordable home console. From here can choose from standard attacks, magic abilities, items and in some cases various special powers depending on which title is being played.
However, the series has always kept its core mechanics, switching from an overworld viewpoint to an intimate battle area, you still have an overlaid menu confirming enemy and player stats. Over the decades, battles in Dragon Quest have evolved from first person dungeon crawls to more cinematic encounters thanks to 3D characters and environments. Dragon Quest never punishes players too harshly when they fall in combat, letting them keep their experience points and items intact, though they will lose a sum of money. The key here is tension building and keeping players immersed. Horii’s gambling habits have obviously leaked into the series mechanics too with challenging areas never being a guaranteed success. Inns and churches usually provide healing and revival, with save points allowing players to pick up their progress. Some of Dragon Quest’s core gameplay mechanics strike a nice balance between being challenging and forgiving. Cure Slimes can be seen swimming in bodies of water while monsters such as Killer Tigers, Cyclops, and other familiar creatures also make an appearance. His character and monster designs are still used in the Dragon Quest franchise today, with his shonen art style linking his work here to the ever popular Dragon Ball series, and some overlap between his two works. Simplifying a western RPG seemed counter-intuitive for the fan base at the time, with Dungeons & Dragons fans craving complex progression and storytelling systems, but Horii settled on a levelling system that was controlled by experience points gained after every battle, opting for a storyline that didn’t require players to follow the usual damsel in distress arc. With the help of legendary manga artist and writer, Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball Z), it was then combined with vibrant artwork to appeal to its audience.Īkira Toriyama is heralded as a figurehead and game-changer in the manga world. The initial Nintendo Entertainment System release of Dragon Quest in May 1986 (titled Dragon Warrior in North America) combined the top-down presentation of groundbreaking RPG, Ultima, with the random battle encounters of Wizardry, and while the roleplaying genre existed before Dragon Quest, this influential series would create the blueprint for countless JRPGs throughout the decades.ĭragon Quest franchise creator, Yuji Horii, set out to create an accessible RPG that didn’t require you to buy one of the expensive PCs that were available in Japan at the time. Not only did it define the sub-genre 35 years ago, Dragon Quest also brought western tabletop RPG themes to Japan. Dragon Quest is a name that’s synonymous with Japanese role-playing games.