Dragon Warrior I (Game Boy) Playthrough
195A playthrough of Enix's 2000 role-playing game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Dragon Warrior I.
Shortly after reestablishing their North American offices, Enix released Dragon Warrior I & II, a compilation cart that featured remakes of the first two games in the long-running Dragon Warrior series of JRPGs.
Though it was sold as a Game Boy Color game, Dragon Warrior I & II was backwards compatible with older Game Boy hardware and had three distinct ways to play. On the GBC, it ran in full color. On the Super Game Boy, the game featured fancy custom borders but the game's window was locked to a green/black color palette. Finally, on the original Game Boy, it looked like... well, it looked like a Game Boy game.
There's plenty of footage on YouTube of the game running on the GBC, but its compatibility modes don't seem to get much attention. That's why I chose to record this in Game Boy mode. It seemed like a perfect fit for a game as cozy and as nostalgic as the original Dragon Warrior.
This remake stays pretty faithful to its NES roots (https://youtu.be/J392i9NKvvo), but it adopts several quality-of-life improvements from the Super Famicom remake to give it a more modern feel.
The difficulty has been rebalanced to minimize grinding and the battles have been sped up, so the game takes less than half the time to complete than its NES counterpart. The translation is brand new, the battle backgrounds have been redrawn, the music has been improved, and the controls and menus have been streamlined. The only real drawbacks here are that the low screen resolution severely limits the visibility of your surroundings and that the new translation does away with the quaint faux-Shakespearean language that was so endearing in the NES version.
I really liked this update, all things considered. I can't say that I'd call it a definitive replacement for the NES game, but it is an excellent handheld version of a genre-defining classic.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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