Other History Lessons posts can be found here. For some context, you may wish to read the post about Final Fantasy first. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
Well, this is getting ridiculous. When I wrote my History Lessons post about Final Fantasy, I outlined an ambitious plan to give the same treatment to the rest of that series (or at least the older entries). Now, nearly two years later, instead of finally tackling the second Final Fantasy game, I decided I really should go through the Dragon Quest series (known as Dragon Warrior in the United States until 2005) too. Maybe I’ll be finished with all of these in a decade or two.
But there is some method to my madness. Dragon Quest was released before Final Fantasy (1986 to Final Fantasy’s 1987, although the games didn’t come to the United States until 1989 and 1990, respectively), and is widely regarded as the game that set the mold for the entire genre of Japanese-style role-playing games. It could be cited as a direct inspiration for Final Fantasy, and it spawned its own long-running series (eleven main games plus a bunch of spin-offs) to rival the behemoth that is the Final Fantasy franchise. While I played some of the original Dragon Quest — which had to change its name to Dragon Warrior in the United States to avoid infringing on the trademark of the tabletop game DragonQuest — I never got far, and I’m less familiar with the series as a whole than I am with Final Fantasy. Playing Final Fantasy for its History Lessons post sparked my interest in the evolution of the Dragon Quest series as well.