For the fifth anniversary of this blog, I am reviewing an oldie but a goodie: Dragon Warrior! My lifelong love of RPGs began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior sent to new subscribers to Nintendo Power. It's not often one gets a video game for free (I guess it didn't sell as well as Nintendo had hoped). Before Dragon Warrior, the RPG genre was not popular in the U.S., unlike Japan. I suspect this promotion helped kickstart it. Today RPGs are one of the most popular genres of video games worldwide. The series finally broke through in the U.S. with Dragon Quest XI in 2018, which became the best-selling game in the storied series. Thanks largely to that success, the original trilogy has been remade in the acclaimed 2D-HD art style, with a fully modernized remake of Dragon Quest VII coming soon. The original Dragon Warrior/Quest is primitive even by NES standards . It pales in comparison to its three NES sequels because it is short, grindy AF, and, worst of all, has a single charac...