Games I Grew Up On: Dragon Warrior

As I've alluded to before, Dragon Warrior is the game I attribute much of my education for saving money.  My parents making me keep a balanced account of my savings helped, too, of course, but Dragon Warrior helped teach me that sometimes it's smarter to save your money for the higher quality things in life.  The general flow of the game is: find a town, see equipment better than yours, fight monsters to get gold, use gold to buy equipment, be strong enough to go to next town.  At some point I realized it was faster to just save enough money to buy the most expensive item at each town rather than buy my way up the equipment ladder as it were.

This game is also where I've gotten the fantasy name I use for my main character, Erdrick - the original Dragon Warrior.  Yeah, basically it's just my name with a slight fantasy spelling to it, but I've never been good at naming.  Most of my Pokemon are named after the first attribute I see in them or what animal they resemble.  This is especially since that's pretty much their name anyway (e.g. Zubat = Batty).

There are enough game design issues with the game, that I don't think I could play through it again nowadays (I would not look forward to spending hours walking up and down those three squares fighting werewolves to try to kill a metal slime before it runs away).  However, there are designers out there that still have the right touch, as evidenced by the time I sunk 100 hours into Dragon Quest IX without realizing it (you get an accolade for playing the game that long and I was utterly surprised when I got it).