Thoughts on Dragon Wars for PC/DOS (and a Kemco Famicom port)

[Victar]

Dragon Wars is a fantasy role-playing game developed by Interplay Productions, and originally released for PC/DOS and a host of other ancient computer systems in 1991. Today, this classic can be purchased for $10 from Steam or Good Old Games.

Kemco released a console port of Dragon Wars... but only for the Famicom (Japan's version of the NES). Kemco's port was never officially released in the US, or in English. This retrospective is drawn from my memories of the English-language PC/DOS version.

The gameplay of Dragon Wars had its roots in pen-and-paper RPGs. Exploration used first-person perspective, and while automapping existed, taking notes or making a map on graph paper was helpful. Combat was turn-based and menu-driven. There was a "stun bar" in addition to a life bar, which existed as a cushion to keep characters from dying too easily... because resurrecting dead characters was almost (not quite) impossible.

In Dragon Wars, the player "rolled up" the statistics of up to four playable characters from scratch. Characters had a limited number of points that could be spent buying ranks in skills (much like Dungeons & Dragons), or in improving their abilities with weapons, raising their parameters, or learning magic.

Skill points were in extremely short supply, unless the player used an in-game cheat involving multiple resets. There was the equivalent of a level cap, limiting how many skill points could be obtained, and no one character could possibly be good at everything. A number of the available skills were utterly useless in combat, but potentially valuable for solving puzzles and progressing the story. Skill points could not be redistributed once they were spent. Dragon Wars was very much a "pay strict attention to your character build" game.

As I remember, character parameters did NOT level up naturally. Gaining levels just gave more skill points to use with extreme care. Searching for quality equipment or powerful spells was of paramount importance.

The player's party started the game with literally nothing, not even clothing on their backs, in the decrepit prison city of Purgatory. Escape from Purgatory was only the beginning. There was a main quest to thwart the cruel ambitions of Namtar, the Beast from the Pit, but Dragon Wars was very much a nonlinear game. The player had the breadth of a dying world to explore, as well as a chaotic, subterranean Underworld. Each area or sidequest had its own underlying backstory.

To aid in storytelling (and copy protection), Dragon Wars came with a physical book of paragraphs. As the player explored, they would be directed to look up specific, numbered paragraphs in the book. A player without the book might not know what was going on. A player that tried to read the book of paragraphs in advance might be fooled by some "fake" or "joke" paragraphs that were never referred to in the game.

I do not know how Kemco handled the paragraphs in their Famicom port. Did they include a physical book of paragraphs? Was it part of the instruction manual? Or did they add in-game text to various scenes?

Dragon Wars had a strong puzzle component, in that the player had to figure out which items, skills, or actions to use to solve certain puzzles in sidequests, or in the main story. Nearly all dilemmas had multiple solutions. Simply getting out of Purgatory had many different options - the party could try to fight their way past the heavily armed gate guards, sell themselves into slavery (kicking off a memorable sidequest to survive/escape as a slave), or search for other ways out.

The graphics and music of Dragon Wars were extremely primitive, and its storytelling was limited (although laced with several "shocking twist" surprises), but its gameplay was truly amazing for its time. Dragon Wars was the epitome of an exploration-focused Western RPG with some story, as opposed to a narrative-focused JRPG with some exploration.

It's hard to recommend Dragon Wars as part of Kemco's legacy, since directly experiencing Kemco's involvement in this game would require knowledge of the Japanese language, as well as potentially expensive hardware. On the other hand, it's easy to recommend the Steam/GOG version of Dragon Wars on its own merits, to anyone who enjoys a solid Western RPG.