A look back at: Dragon Quest

This was a long time coming for me to play this thing. What do I get?

Well, color me shocked. You know how I said that Phantasy Star was big into some grinding for money so you can get the equipment you need? You also know how I mentioned early Final Fantasy games as grindy for the experience needed? Well, this game has both of those beat by making it almost necessary to grind for both money and experience. And to make matters, worse, the prices are extremely high right from the get-go and the leveling up in this game is a huge pain in the ass! No really, you are only controlling one character the entire time and you are fighting only one enemy the entire time. If I'm not getting annoyed by strong enemies and their abilities I'm getting incredibly bored.

Seriously though, the Goldman enemy is tough on his own. But even getting 200 gold tops isn't hardly gonna be enough for a lot of the equipment I'm trying to get. And then the elusive Metal Slime is the best as far as experience goes, but 115 isn't gonna cut it for some of these levels. Just so you know, the level cap is 30, and the amount of experience needed tends to shoot up from the hundreds into the ten thousands. Meaning I'm gonna have to get really lucky with metal slime killing and to do it more than one hundred times to get the extremely high levels that believe it or not, I actually need to fight the final boss. When you spend days grinding, that's not a good sign. And I'm not gonna forgive the fact that this is an NES game either, for the record, Final Fantasy III was a grindy NES game and I didn't nearly feel as bored with it then.

There's really no plot to this game whatsoever either. You're the son of a legendary knight, gotta get his armor, gotta slay a dragon to rescue a princess, gotta defeat an evil wizard. Alright, there is a plot, and this is one of the first games to have this incredibly cliche plot. But all that grinding is gonna make me forget there ever was a plot in the first place. And much of the grinding will be done in specific areas too. You can't just sit outside the home castle all the time since the weakest of the weak is there. And then you don't want to go too overboard or you're hitting the ones that can totally wreck you. So yeah, don't pick this game up unless you are one of those guys who doesn't mind spending days on extreme grinding.