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.