Final Fantasy vs Dragon Warrior pt 1: A deep dive into JRPGs for the NES

A while back I tried to write an article about whether I aligned with Team Final Fantasy or Team Dragon Warrior. I say I tried because the article ended up being much more than just an opinion. I fell down a whole rabbit hole about the two franchises, how they got their start, and how they kicked off a multi-generational tradition of excellent and standard-setting RPGs on American game consoles.

For my own part, I’m all in on Dragon Warrior and don’t enjoy Final Fantasy all that much at all. I have a lot of opinions on the topic and envisioned my little post pitting the two RPG giants against each other from an objective point of view. You know, which has better gameplay, monsters, story, etc. I wanted to separate the subjective parts of the comparison and wrap up the article like: Even though Final Fantasy has “more stuff”, Dragon Warrior has greater nostalgia and is more accessible to JRPG noobs.

As you’ve guessed, the article didn’t go that way. Instead, I uncovered a whole history and pretty interesting deep dive into the topic. But first, let me do the obligatory SEO Big Text header and ask the search-friendly question:

Which is better: Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior?

It’s the ultimate match-up. And a question that’s been burning in the minds of classic gamers for a human generation. (Or like, four console generations.) Who did it better? Enix with Dragon Warrior (1986, Japan; 1989 USA) or Squaresoft with Final Fantasy (1987, Japan; 1990 USA)? (Read this in my announcer voice:) That’s right! It’s Dragon Warrior vs. Final Fantasy in an 8-bit JRPG battle royale! It’s an 8-bit JRPG Thunderdome! Two games enter, and one game leaves. Who will be the last game standing let’s get ready to do stuuuuffff!

However, since I wanted this to be a comprehensive analysis and consider all aspects of these games, including their times and places in gaming history, I thought it was important to offer some deeper context, background, and cultural observations for their release. As a reasonably dedicated thoughtful researcher, that was my natural inclination. But once I started digging, this article exploded.

Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy are two chapters in the same story. And it’s a story every bit as epic as Erdrick’s descendant questing alone to free Alefgard from the Dragonlord’s clutches. And every bit as epic as… I don’t know, whatever the hell Final Fantasy’s convoluted and meandering story is supposed to be. (Burn!)

Both of these games were the product of Japan’s contribution the RPG genre. And that’s a story that has repercussions even today.

The quest begins

Play this track while you read the rest of the article.

Entire books have been written about the early days of RPGs and actually, that would be a pretty satisfying book to write. But I’ve got stuff to do, you know? So I won’t get too much into the nitty-gritty of the genre’s emergence. 

For this piece, it should be sufficient to know that both classic tabletop RPGs (D&D), as well as video-game (Ultima, pictured below) RPGs were already very well established by the time Dragon Warrior hit the scene. There were even some attempts made to bring role-playing to other consoles like the Atari 2600 (Dragonstomper. Check out THAT golden oldie…) with varying degrees of success. But in the mid-80s in North America, the NES was the major, ubiquitous gaming system in just about every household. As such, any company that could develop a major hit RPG for the NES would find guaranteed success and a huge advantage in the market.

In the US, Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, were both released in December 1988 (many months before Dragon Warrior) and both introduced a number of RPG elements into the action/adventure/platforming genre. 

At the same time, technological developments within NES cartridges (more efficient graphics, larger memory modules), and clever developers led to bigger and more epic games.

Games like Metroid (1987) and Metal Gear (1988) hinted how much players wanted epic experiences tailored to home consoles, instead of just adrenaline-pumping quarter-gobbling arcade-style games. As it happened, there were plenty of enterprising NES game developers that were happy to provide.

Enter Yugi Horii. Well, don’t enter him. That’s gross.

Dragon Quest (as Dragon Warrior is called in Japan. Oh, you knew that already? Of course.) was created by Yugi Horii. From what I can glean with Wikipedia, RPGs were relatively unpopular in Japan at the time. There was some success with the Dragon Slayer (Xanadu) series, but the vast majority of the Japanese console audience was simply not into it.

Horii wanted to create a game that would bridge the gap, and bring the western genre of RPGs like Ultima and Wizardry to those Japanese console gamers. He wanted to package the RPG gameplay into a game that was fun to look at and easy to understand.

In his previous work, Horii had created visual novels and adventure games, including his The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a console adventure in the style of Deja-Vu that included with a dungeon-crawling sequence. Portopia heavily influenced Horii in his creation of Dragon Quest. And as a visual novelist, he felt that a compelling story was essential to any good game. 

He teamed up with Akira Toriyama, a Manga artist and creator of Dragon Ball, to produce artwork for the new game. The goal was to take those complex PC RPG experiences and put them into simple sprites with easy interfaces and streamlined sequences that novice players could easily get into.

It worked. Like, really well.

Dragon Quest was released in Japan on May 27, 1986 and would eventually sell 1.5 million copies. Dragon Quest II and III would later surpass that number, with Dragon Quest 3 selling nearly 4 million copies! It is the 12th highest-grossing came for the Famicom, surpassing Mario Bros, Metroid, Punch Out!!, and other legendary games. The Japanese console market was gobbling it up. Yugi Horii and Dragon Quest had succeeded beyond anything they’d dreamed.

Coming to America (but leaving the boobs behind)

Despite this unbelievable success, Dragon Quest didn’t make its way across the ocean to the US until 1989, just months before the release of Dragon Quest IV in Japan. For the US version, the name was changed to Dragon Warrior to avoid confusion with the American tabletop RPG, DragonQuest by Simulations Publications Inc. (later absorbed by TSR).

The name wasn’t the only change when the game came to the west. Akira Toriyama’s great artwork was Americanized for the instruction manual to more closely resemble western-style RPG aesthetics. The game’s graphics were revamped, and the battery-backed save system was utilized. The Famicom version used a password system.

Names and dialogue were changed to reflect Elizabethan-ish English-type Medieval fantasy tropes (thou art dead). And ah—oh, hey this is interesting! Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

…in the Japanese version, in the town where the hero first buys keys, a woman offers to sell puff-puff – a Japanese onomatopoeia for a woman rubbing her breasts in someone’s face, or juggling her own breasts. In the North American version, the same woman sells tomatoes. Whether she appreciates the change is never addressed. She probably made good money in Japan. But some might say there’s more dignity in an agricultural career. We’ll never know.

Enix shipped roughly two gazillion copies of Dragon Warrior to the US, in anticipation of the wildfire that was about to consume the American gaming population. Enix leadership was out buying new pants with bigger pockets to hold all the cold cash they were about to make. And this isn’t true, but: The owner of the company had a real-life money vault installed on his mansion like Uncle Scrooge in anticipation of the dump trucks of money he was about to receive.

Just one problem…

America wasn’t buying it.

Make no mistake. The hype for Dragon Warrior was real. Gaming magazines anticipated Dragon Warrior to be the breakaway hit of 1989, based on the Japanese sales of the series, particularly DQ3. But despite Dragon Warrior’s generally favorable reviews, American gamers just didn’t seem interested. Dragon Warrior was a massive flopper, unlike the puff-puff lady who was rumored to be rather firm. I digress.

Let’s take a moment to reflect here.

Dragon Quest began when its creator, Yugi Horii was so impressed by Western PC RPGs that he wanted to introduce the genre to Japanese console gamers. And Japanese console gamers were so impressed with Dragon Quest that Enix wanted to introduce Japanese console RPGs back to western console gamers.

The very concept of video-game RPGs had made its own epic journey across the Pacific and back again. The US gave Japan American RPGs and Japan gave American RPGs a (much-needed, imo) Japanese makeover in order to be playable on console systems. And it just didn’t work.

Until…

Nintendo Power to the Rescue

In the late 80s, Nintendo Power was THE source for news and strategies straight from the pros. They held the ultimate authority over which games were destined to become popular, and which ones were doomed to languish. If you follow me on Twitter, you certainly know I’m a huge Nintendo Power fan. And I think this topic alone is worthy of a deep-dive article like this one to explore the history of Nintendo Power, but for now, we’ll just talk about how it relates to this story.

Yes, Dragon Warrior belly flopped in the US. And the subsequent legend goes a bit like this: Distributors, having ordered a gizaillion too many copies of Dragon Warrior, were understandably upset. They had been expecting the game to fly off the shelves. Instead, they were sitting on unmovable cases of Dragon Warrior games. So what to do with all the extra cartridges? Bury them in the desert? Or perhaps bury them in dessert? A delicious guess, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, Enix and Nintendo Power struck a deal. Nintendo Power bought up the remaining stock of Dragon Warrior games for pennies on the dollar. And then Nintendo Power began to do what they did best: They made us love Nintendo games.

By Christmas of 1990, Nintendo was literally giving away copies of Dragon Warrior. The promotion was one for the ages! When you bought a subscription to Nintendo Power, you got Dragon Warrior for free, along with Nintendo Power’s brilliant propaganda strategy guide pack. Guess what was under my Christmas tree that year?

In this context, with this kind of brainwashing marketing, Dragon Warrior was a smash hit. Both Nintendo Power and Dragon Warrior became ubiquitous within the market. How many kids got their subscription that year? If your first issue featured Mega Man III on the cover, you’re part of the Dragon Warrior club. So am I.

I had played Dragon Warrior when it first came to the US. My cousin had it. I loved the artwork so I tried it. I didn’t like it very much at first though. I assume that’s how it went for most Americans at the time. We didn’t really understand it. After a few minutes trying it out, I took out my cousin’s Dragon Warrior cart and put in Ikari Warriors 2 instead. (My cousin had everything.) 

Of course, he was very much into PC games, RPG video games, and tabletop RPGs. He was in it. I was much younger and didn’t quite understand.

Fast forward to that Christmas when Dragon Warrior was under my Christmas tree.

Having just tried that game and not liking it, I was a bit disappointed. But we were ghetto, even back then (especially back then), and Nintendo Power’s promotion must have seemed like a godsend to my parents. Look! A Nintendo magazine subscription! And a free game! With a dragon on it!

My favorite cib is probably Dragon Warrior, with all the incredible #Nintendo Power promo stuff. Countless hours with these Maps, charts, book, poster, and dat NP subscription!

Not my favorite game, but I love this on my shelf: The first (non-Mario) #NES game I ever owned. pic.twitter.com/wtgyH4ABD3

— The Gelatinous Gamer (@longie_long) June 2, 2019

Even though I was disappointed at first, I soon changed my mind. With the strategy guide provided by Nintendo Power, I could finally “get” Dragon Warrior. With the walkthrough guide, it made sense. I could follow step-by-step to learn how an RPG worked, how to level up, how to progress and improve my inventory. I was about to turn 7, I could read well enough to follow the game and the guide, and I had never seen anything like it.

“Sales” of Dragon Warrior boomed. Nintendo Power worked their magic. And soon, an entire generation of American gamers were believers. The “Japanese” RPG was born.

Thou hast opened the door

Yugi Horii opened the gateway for JRPGs in the US. He was the pusher that got us addicted to leveling up and upgrading our equipment. How many millions of hours of productivity has that man cost the US economy? I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

Anyway, once the crew at Squaresoft witnessed the unstoppable force of Dragon Warrior’s popularity, they decided to piggyback on Enix’s success and bring Final Fantasy to the US also . Final Fantasy arrived at the right moment and became a phenomenon in its own right. It singlehandedly saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy (you didn’t think King’s Knight was going to do that?). But that’s a story for another blog post.

The point is, Dragon Warrior is more than just the most vanilla JRPG ever. It’s a piece of history, and it’s the first (certainly not the last) RPG I ever loved.

So then, did Final Fantasy improve on the formula? Is it a better game? Which RPG would really win in a Thunderdome scenario? Hell, I don’t know. That’s what comments sections are for! Let’s have your opinions, but keep ’em civil, okay?

Thanks for reading!

Your pal,
~Steve~

Get ’em right here