BS Dragon Quest

Dragon Warrior is a single-player role-playing video game. Years after its release, its gameplay mechanics have been described as simplistic and spartan. The player controls a young hero who sets out to defeat the Dragonlord. The player starts with a menu to begin a new quest, continue a previous quest, or change the speed in which messages appear on the screen.

In the Japanese version, continuing a quest requires a password. In the North American Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) English version, the quest is saved onto the game cartridge's battery-backup (called an "Adventure Log" in the "Imperial Scrolls of Honor"), with options to delete or duplicate a saved quest. In a new quest, the player may give the hero any name; the game analyzes the name entered to determine the initial ability scores and their statistical growth over the course of the game.

Dragon Warrior's plot is a twist on the classic damsel in distress, in that the player does not even have to meet with or speak with her to complete the game.

Dragon Warrior, its sequel, Dragon Quest II, and its prequel, Dragon Quest III, make up a trilogy with a shared timeline. The story's background begins when the kingdom of Alefgard was shrouded in permanent darkness. The brave warrior Erdrick ("Loto" in the Japanese versions as a well as the English version of the Game Boy Color remake) defeated an evil creature and restored light to the land. In Erdrick's possession was the Ball of Light, which he used to drive away enemies who threatened the kingdom.

When Eidansha Boshu Service Center was founded in 1975 it published tabloid magazines that advertised real estate. In 1982, after failing to establish a chain of stores, the company's founder Yasuhiro Fukushima transformed it into a software company devoted to gaming and created Enix. To find talent for the company, Fukushima held the "Enix Game Hobby Program Contest". The competition was styled after manga competitions, was advertised in computer and manga magazines, and had a ¥1 million prize for the winners.

The winners were Kazuro Morita (森田和郎), Koichi Nakamura, and manga magazine Shōnen Jump writer Yuji Horii, who was the top winner. Horii designed a tennis game, Love Match Tennis, which became Enix's first release. While he did not believe he would win, he was motivated by his editor, who enjoyed the games and published Horii's articles on them. Later, when Enix began creating games for the NES, Fukushima held another contest.

Initial sales of the game were so low that Enix was going to lose money, but several Shonen Jump articles by Horii helped increase its sales substantially. People liked Toriyama's artwork and Sugiyama's music, which the book Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life said "was richer and more exciting than any game music had ever sounded". In Japan, 1.5 million copies of the original version were sold. More than 1 million of those copies were sold within the first six months. It was very successful there and launched a popular series with several spin-off series and stand-alone games.

In Famicom Hisshoubon , the game received generally positive scores with one reviewer complimenting the character design, the background music and how you can buy and sell items. They found the only detractor was that too many weak enemies such as the slime would continuously show up.

The release of Dragon Quest and Dragon Warrior prompted a turning point in video game history. The game has been listed as a genre builder for RPGs. Its popularity in Japan is synonymous with RPGs. Though bearing elements of previous RPGs, Dragon Quest set a comprehensively new template from gameplay to narrative, as the foundation for nearly every subsequent RPG. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, the success of Dragon Quest changed the nature of video game development by making scenario writers far more important.

Many of the development techniques were intended to compensate for Famicom hardware limitations, but contemporary RPG developers continue to use these techniques regardless of technological advances. Dragon Warrior introduced the damsel-in-distress storyline that many RPGs follow, and a fresh plot twist to the "saving the princess" formula, where the game's true objective is not revealed until the princess is rescued. The game introduced an element of romance, where the player character is given a dialogue choice to respond to the princess's question of whether he loves her; romance has since become a commonplace feature in the genre. The game's 2D graphic style was used by most RPGs until the advent of 3D graphics, and is still a staple of the genre.