Dragon Warrior (NES)
Dragon Warrior | ||||||||
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- For other games in the series, see Dragon Quest.
Dragon Warrior AKA Dragon Quest is one of the first role-playing games to make it to the NES. You play a knight, one of the last descendents of a legendary hero known as Erdrick. It is your job to seek out and defeat the Dragonlord, and return the stolen the ball of light to King Lorick. The game uses the now-standard top-down view where the player can see the surrounding terrain as they walks across the land of Alefgard.
During your quest you will battle monsters from lowly slimes to powerful dragons. Battle is relatively simple. You fight only one enemy at a time, and your commands are limited to fight, spell, item, and run. There are a couple puzzles as you explore the world, allowing you to gain more powerful equipment and unique items.
While the game was certainly a step forward, giving the NES a badly needed RPG, it's not without its faults. Most of the game is spent grinding, fighting the same monsters over and over again, in order to gain enough gold to buy the next best equipment, and enough experience to level up. This tediously slow progression rate dampens the enjoyment of the game.
Screenshots
Music
Dragon Warrior's soundtrack has been cited as the source of all JRPG music to follow. It was the first video game to get its soundtrack to be performed live by an orchestra. For this reason alone, this soundtrack should be looked at as a classic, setting the stage for VGM. What's more is that the music was written by famed composer and orchestrator Koichi Sugiyama, who had previously written music for television and film. Sugiyama would continue to write for a majority of the games in the series, and even the games that he didn't work either feature arrangements of his songs, or are influenced by his works at the very least.
According to Masumi Takimoto, the game's sound driver was created by Takenori Yamamori. Koichi Sugiyama would send his music to Enix, in which the sound programmers converted it by hand into their sound engine. While Masumi didn't work on Dragon Warrior, he designed the sound driver for the fourth game with Tadashi Fukuzawa, the sound driver designer of Dragon Warriors II and III.
Recording
Credits
- Ripper: Minachun
- Recorder: TheAlmightyGuru
- Game Credits:
- Music Composed By: Koichi Sugiyama
- Programmer: Takenori Yamamori
(Source)
The game's credits can be seen by beating the game. Though there is no sound programming credit, we reached out to Masumi Takimoto before his unfortunate passing and he confirmed that Yamamori was the sound programmer for the first Dragon Warrior; both as the sound driver programmer and music arrangements.
We're still missing a screenshot for the programmer.
Source verification is needed. |
Albums
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Game Rip
Ripping NES music is a very arduous process that is beyond the scope of this site.
Releases
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Links
- mobygames.com/game/nes/dragon-warrior - MobyGames.
- gamefaqs.com/nes/563408-dragon-warrior - GameFAQs.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Warrior - Wikipedia.
- w.atwiki.jp/gamemusicbest100/pages/616.html - Atwiki.jp (Japanese).
- Games Released In 1986
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