Shades of Resonance: Disappointment and Regret - Memory Log #33

Dragon Warrior

It's true what they say: First impressions forever influence how you feel about a person or a thing. That's why I developed an eternal aversion to RPGs after I played Dragon Warrior for an hour or so and fruitlessly attempted to endure the horror of its earliest segments.

What I experienced in that span of time pretty much traumatized me.

But before I provide you the grisly details of my horrific first session with Dragon Warrior, I should back up a bit and tell you about how the game and I were brought together.

It was a familiar scene: I was hanging out in my den one afternoon and engaging in my usual activities (writing stories, drawing monsters and watching cartoons) when suddenly my brother, James, emerged from the basement with a rectangular box in hand. It belonged to another of those strange-sounding NES games that he was always digging out of bargain bins at local electronic stores.

He explained to me what the game was and told me about how its core concepts derived from the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, which he was heavy into at the time. (At the time, his interest in it seemed odd to me because playing it was considered a socially unacceptable activity and something that was only done by nerds and rejects, yet, for whatever reason, it was popular with him, who was known as Mr. Popularity and not just a cool kid but more so the leader of the cool kids.)

All of this was new to me. I'd never before heard of an "RPG," and I had no idea what the genre entailed. Though, that didn't stop me from harshly prejudging Dragon Warrior. I was quick to determine that if it was anything like Dungeons & Dragons, which I found to be supremely uninteresting in the moments when I was watching James and his friends play it, then it probably wasn't worth my time.

Quite simply, I saw no reason to waste my energy on some boring, plodding dungeon-crawler when I could instead have a great time playing fun, fast-paced action games like Mega Man 2, Solomon's Key and Trojan!

The only problem was that I wouldn't be able to play my NES favorites anytime soon because at the time, we were in one of those periods in which the console was temporarily residing on the coffee table in the basement--in my brother and his friends' perpetual hangout (occasionally, I'd let James borrow the NES for about a week or two, and I'd play Commodore 64 games in the meantime). So if I grew bored of failing to make progress in arcane computer games like Zorro and Impossible Mission and desired to return to the NES' safer, more comprehensible games, I'd be out of luck. There would be no NES on which to play them.

My only good option, then, would be to head down to the basement and watch my brother play his NES favorites.

At that point in time, doing so meant having to watch him play through the newly purchased Dragon Warrior, and I wasn't eager to do that because it just didn't sound very interesting to me. I was bored by even the idea of watching him play it.

And seeing the game in action didn't do much to convince me that I was misjudging it. My perception was that its pace was dreadfully slow and plodding and its gameplay was nothing more than a tedious exercise in repetitiously cycling through mundanely presented text menus, dialogue boxes, and screens-worth of intimidating-looking statistical listings. And I simply couldn't understand how anyone could consider a game of this type to be any fun.

And after about ten minutes or so, I got bored of what I was seeing and decided to leave. I headed back to the den and looked for other ways to keep myself entertained.

I mean, sure--I couldn't deny that certain elements of Dragon Warrior had managed to capture my attention and entrance me (I liked all of the cool monsters and the charming overworld and combat-scene visuals, which at the time didn't seem as crude to me as current gaming retrospectives suggest they were), but their power wasn't enough to blind me to the fact that the game was otherwise packed with gameplay elements that I didn't care for. And it certainly wasn't enough to convince me that a "role-playing game" was something that I needed to experience.

At the same time, though, I was cognizant of the fact that I'd made some faulty judgments in the past. I remembered how I was quick to dismiss some of James' other pickups--some of the other unusual- and unconventional-looking NES games to which he'd introduced me--because I was ignorant and ill-informed, and I remembered, also, how much I regretted doing that.

So I decided that it wouldn't hurt to give Dragon Warrior a fair chance and, at the least, mess around with it for a few minutes. As soon as James returned my NES to me, I did just that.

On that day, I spent a fair amount of time with Dragon Warrior, but as much as I tried, I simply couldn't get into it. I was hugely deterred by its tortuously slow pacing and numerous complex, confusing systems.

Though, it wasn't an entirely negative experience. During that session, I took a liking to a few of the game's elements. First there was the music, which I found to be completely enrapturing. I was taken with it because it functioned in such a unique and interesting way: It was outwardly lively- and upbeat-sounding, but its positive energy was, you'd inevitably come to realize, merely a hopeful cover that was meant to tactfully inform you the kingdom's sad, tragic reality and the people's silent, despairing desire to escape from it. Each tune represented the withering remembrance of a happier time in history and the people's desire to return to that moment.

The overworld theme did a particularly great job of helping me to form that understanding. It was powerfully melancholic yet desperately hopeful, and thus it told me everything that I needed to know about the world's current state and people's current attitude. It was a special piece. I enjoyed listening to it and absorbing its message.

I liked, also, the game's array of creepy monsters, all of which were distinctly rendered and fun to look at. They were able to incite fear with their menacing poses and bleak expressions (and also their threatening musical accompaniment), and their having that quality made them stand out to me. It's what helped them to become some of my favorite video-game monsters.

So if anything, Dragon Warrior had a wondrous setting and one in which I was willing to happily to immerse myself.

But I just didn't find the game, itself, to be any fun.

In particular, I hated random encounters. It was so frustrating to have my progress interrupted every five seconds, and it was especially frustrating in those moments when all I was trying to do was shift over a couple of tiles so that I could get a better view of my surroundings. "Stop it!" I'd shout at the TV screen every time a battle would trigger. "Leave me the hell alone for a few seconds!"

Also, I couldn't stand having to retreat back to the first town's inn after almost every encounter. I couldn't understand why the hero was always too weak to deal with what was being thrown at him, and I saw his perpetual inadequacy as a major design flaw. And I thought that it sucked that you lost half of your gold when you died; because of that dumb rule, I could never make any headway toward obtaining the amount of gold that I needed to buy weapons, armor and potions!

And I had absolutely no inclination to accept the game's solution to those problems, which was to walk in circles for hours and hours and repetitiously fight the same handful of enemies over and over and over again and thus grind levels at a painfully slow rate and do so only for the sake of reaching a new area in which I'd immediately have to start doing the aforementioned all over again!

"No thank you!" I said in a highly disdaining manner. "I'm not ever doing any of that!"

That particular brand of monotony, above all, was what drove me away from Dragon Warrior. I didn't want any part of it. Walking in circles for hours and battling the same slimes and skeletons hundreds of times sounded boring as hell, and I couldn't see myself every wanting or needing to play through a game that required me to do such things.

RPGs, I determined, just weren't for me.

"It's James' game, anyway," I thought to myself, "so it's best that I leave the playing of it in his hands."

So that's what I did. I let him play it, and occasionally I checked in to see how he was doing.

In fact, one of my lasting memories of Dragon Warrior is the time I watched James traverse his way through the final castle and battle the Dragon Lord. I remember, specifically, how the final battle reaffirmed my belief that the game was a total slog. It dragged on endlessly and required him to use the monotonous, wearisome tactic of alternating between the Hurtmore and Healmore spells. Also, it put him at the mercy of a random-number generator and thus in a position in which he could be slain at any time regardless of how well he was performing.

And after I watched him slowly and painfully trek his way back to the castle multiple times and struggle mightily to outlast the Dragon Lord, I thought to myself, "The hell with this game! I can never imagine a time in which I'd ever want to attempt to play through it and endure its abuse!"

In truth, though, I returned to Dragon Warrior a couple of times in the years that followed, and each time I did, I attempted to gain a better understanding of its systems and figure out how to progress through its world. But I was never able to fully commit to the effort. In every attempt, I'd quickly grow agitated by the random encounters, and I'd avoid crossing over bridges because I feared that I'd immediately be attacked by an overpowered enemy and promptly destroyed. So I'd never make it beyond the opening area. I'd be too afraid to try.

Consequently I never truly connected with Dragon Warrior. There were always too many barriers between us.

But even then, I was able to find a way to extract some real enjoyment from the game. I took a strong liking to the Dragon Warrior promotional mini-guide that was included in Nintendo Power Volume 9 (I owned two copies of this guide because my original back-order issue of Volume 9 was damaged, and Nintendo sent me a new issue after I complained), and I had a lot of fun reading through its detailed enemy listing and learning about the monsters that I never encountered.

Also, I liked that the guide's listing featured large sprite-rips of the game's monsters--of its multiple magician, skeleton, werewolf, wyvern and scorpion types (most of which were mere palette-swaps but still just as fun to look at and examine)--because its doing so made it easier for me to trace the monsters onto the 4-inch notepad papers that I used in the creation of my many monster-based card series!

That guide was one of my all-time-favorite Nintendo Power extras. I returned to it quite often. (I regret that I didn't take better care of either copy. One is tattered and torn, and the other is missing.)

But I was never able to derive the same type of enjoyment from the actual game. I just couldn't stand to play it. Its action was tedious and punishing and would invariably become mentally and emotionally fatiguing. And eventually I decided that the best thing to do was avoid the game entirely. "That'll be better for my mental health," I thought.

And in the end, my terrible experiences in Alefgard did more than just scar me and drive me away from Dragon Warrior, itself. They served, also, to sour me on the genre and taint my opinion of the majority of RPGs I sampled in the following years--particularly the proximately released Final Fantasy, which I really wanted to like but simply couldn't. I loved how creatively and artistically ambitious it was, but, sadly, I was repelled by it because its gameplay systems were very similar to Dragon Warrior's, and thus they evoked too many painful memories--too many torturous recollections of tedious grinding, constant backtracking, and ridiculous random-encounter rates. So I quickly abandoned it.

In the current day, I still feel the same way about RPGs. I'm not a fan of them. I struggle to get into them. I still get fatigued by even the thought of playing one of them. They simply bore me.

Outside of Final Fantasy IV and the Mario RPG titles, there aren't many RPGs that I like, and the genre, on the whole, remains somewhere near the bottom of my list. I'm repelled by even the term "RPG." Whenever I see it, my mind becomes filled with fatiguing images of walking in circles for hours on end, fighting the same annoying enemy sets hundreds of times in succession, and struggling to obtain helpful gear because all of the shop items are so goddamn expensive that you can never hope to afford any of them. And then I immediately run for the hills.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that RPGs have no appeal to me. They certainly do. I'm always impressed by the vast, wondrous worlds that they create and enormous scopes of the stories they tell. It's just that I'm not a fan of how they play. Laborious level- and stat-grinding and insanely repetitious enemy encounters just aren't for me.

As for my future with Dragon Warrior: I'm certain that I'll continue to be around it in on way or another. I'll surely be seeing a lot more of it in retrospectives, Twitch streams, and videos produced by my favorite YouTube personalities. And I'll definitely enjoy experiencing it in those forms.

The only thing I won't be doing, you can bet, is actually trying to play through it and beat it.

"But thou must!" you insist in an impelling manner.

Don't even start.