Acetarium

Before diving into NetHack, I’m revisiting my childhood by playing Dragon Quest I. It is as awesome as I remembered.

The game is simple. I’m supposed to rescue the princess and beat the dragon. I don’t even get to have company like most of the other RPGs do. My face doesn’t turn to the direction I’m walking to either; whichever direction I’m moving to, my face is always pointing towards the player (me). Every time I want to save my game, I have to go back to the castle and ask the king to give me a spell. The spell is a random collection of about 20 hiraganas, which seems to act as a pointer to the game status (level, HP, MP etc).

However, there are some things that bother me, now that I am 20 years older than when I first played the game. For example, why doesn’t the king let me sleep in his castle to gain my HP/MP back for free or give me some funding to buy better swords and armors? Also, every time I die, I wake up in the castle and the king yells at me for dying. That’s mean. AND half of my money is gone when I wake up from the death! The king seems to be really stingy.

Nevertheless, I’m really enjoying DQ1. One thing that I like to do now but not when I was little is that I like to save a lot of money and go on a shopping spree. In order to save money faster, I go back to the first town every time I get tired because the inn is so much cheaper there than any other towns. If the king didn’t steal my money when I died, I could have bought a better sword by now. Does he really want his princess back?

I love it.

(He and his wife were living on a Greek island called Spetses. One day, they decide to go to a movie theater to watch a Bruce Lee movie. Here’s part of the conversation he had with the theater owner. Ojisan is a term used to describe a middle-age man)

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“Where did you guy come from?” said the “it’s alright” ojisan.
“i-masute apo tin yaponia (we came from Japan)” I said exactly as written in the example sentence on page 22 of the Hakusensya’s Express Modern Greek by Araki Hideyo.
Then, with no facial expressions, the ojisan stated “Yokohama Muroran Sendai Kobe” and stared at me as if to say ‘now what comes next.’
I managed to respond by saying “hahaha, you know very well.” In general, many of the things Greek people know about Japan are just the names of ports and companies. Therefore, if I were to continue with the ojisan’s poem, it should go “Sony and Casio, Yamaha Seiko Datsun.”

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