Dragon Warrior Playthrough, Part 7: Head (Barely) Above Water

The Wolf spots me. I am still a good hundred yards from his position, but there is no cover on the sandy bridge. While the Wolf is not a clever creature in general, it knows well enough when it has the advantage over me.

It holds its position.

I reach down to make sure my boot laces are secure - it's all or nothing this time. I fix my eyes on the Wolf and break into a full charge. Axe raised high in the air, I howl at the top of my lungs as if to challenge my feral opponent. The Wolf breaks into a sinister smile at the sight of my reckless tilt. It bears its claws and spreads its arms wide, ready to offer a deadly embrace.

Forty yards, thirty, twenty... at about ten yards distant, I see the Wolf shift its weight to prepare for an impact. At this moment, I veer sharply to the left. The Wolf stumbles over itself trying to react to this unexpected change, and by the time it does I'm a good 10 paces past. It makes an awkward attempt to give chase, but is too slow to make up for my head start. By the time I reach the limits of Rimuldar, I am down to a steady jog.

Rimuldar Shmimuldar

Admittedly, running in full armor with a Wolf on my tail was not the first impression I had hoped to make with the townsfolk here, but what can you do? The outer limits of the town are surrounded by a moat and I have to cross a small bridge to enter.

The Rimuldarians are an odd sort. As I wander around chatting with the locals, one fellow thinks I am Erdrick and says he met me a long time ago, while another mocks me for wearing the fighter's ring (he thinks it's a wedding ring). The women are no better; one threatens to call her friends on me while another is absolutely insistent that she has no tomatoes.

I swear, I never asked for tomatoes.

Still, I do learn some useful tidbits, including the location of the Stones of Sunlight (whatever they are) and directions to follow in Erdrick's footsteps. Apparently, I need to make a rainbow bridge on the Western part of this island. I don't know how that is done, but at least now I know where to go. I'm also told of a temple in the south, but villagers warn me that the monsters are brutal, so I'm surely not ready for that yet.

The weapons and armor shop has some nice offerings, including a Broad Sword (1500 gold), Full Plate Armor (3000), and even Magic Armor (7700). I might be able to afford the latter... someday, if a wealthy relative were to die.

While browsing the shops, I notice a figure on the distant edge of town, beyond the moat. I try to shout to them to warn them about the Wolf that chased me into town, but they don't seem to hear me. A heroic sort like myself cannot leave an innocent in peril, particularly if it was my cowardice that caused the peril.

Returning to the bridge at the town entrance, I cross to the other side of the moat and start a circle around the edge of the town, hugging the moat. It turns out the figure I saw in the distance is a fellow named Orwick who is waiting to meet his girlfriend. Perhaps this is a Romeo and Juliet scenario where they can't be seen in town together... I don't know, but he refuses my entreaties to return to town. I hope his girlfriend isn't Wolf chow.

Thinking I might be able to locate her, I continue my circle around the moat. When I get to the northwest corner of town, I notice another bridge across the moat, this one leading to a small hovel. I nod roughly at a merchant who mans the entrance, and they greet me with an enthusiastic welcome. It seems odd to me that an out-of-the-way curio shop would employ a dedicated greeter, but perhaps there is more to this shop than it seems.

The interior is filled with scattered equipment, perhaps for potion work or alchemical experiments. The shopkeep, if he can be called that, is staring intently at the pictures in an old manuscript. When I approach the counter, he looks up at me with curiosity. An old man of at least 70, he gestures to a jar on the far end of the counter.

"These keys will open any door,"^{[Note A]} he says.

Nice. Very nice.

A new beginning

I do end up finding Orwick's girlfriend on the opposite edge of town (I guess this is the first time they've done this), but my mind is now preoccupied with these keys. I've passed so many doors since my initial escape from the king's throne room that I'm practically drooling at the thought of the places I could explore. But there is a problem.

While I do have enough money to buy a handful of keys, they wouldn't last long before I would have to make my way back to Rimuldar to buy more. Considering how badly things went on my first trip here, I'm not eager to re-live that experience.

Basically, I'm stuck here until I can improve myself. Just like when I first ventured out of Tantegel Castle, I am a scrub who can barely stand up against the monsters that surround me. Every trip into the countryside is an adventure unto itself, where it's not certain I will survive.^{[Note B]}

The cost of the Inn at Rimuldar is 55 gold, which only takes about two battles to recoup. That means I can do this any number of times, but it will take a while. Here goes nothing...

There's one among the local fauna I never encountered on my hike into Rimuldar, the Metal Scorpion. Presumably they're the cousins of the Scorpion, except coated in sheet metal (how?). Fortunately, they're not as tough as you might think. My axe has little trouble finding openings in their outer casing.

All of the enemies in this area can inflict a lot of pain with every strike, so I find myself making heavy use of Sleep magic. The Wolf monsters are the worst of all - their claws cut deep.

It takes me a good five days and nights into the wilderness and back before my skill really begins to improve. After all this time in Rimuldar, I sense the locals getting more comfortable around me, and before long I'm on a first name basis with the Innkeeper.

Along with my increased skill comes knowledge of a mysterious spell called Radiant, and enough gold to upgrade to Half Plate Armor. There is even enough gold left over to purchase some keys from the curio shop owner.

I sense it's time to return to Tantegel.

Before I go, I have one piece of business in town. In my many trips to the Inn, I noticed a locked back room that I was never allowed to enter. When the Innkeeper isn't looking, I use one of my newly bought keys to sneak in.

Inside the room is a ragged old man surrounded by maps and hordes of junk he has apparently collected over years. My entrance doesn't phase him, and he looks at me with a sense of curiosity. I tell him the purpose of my wanderings and he brightens up.

"Four steps south of the bath in Kol," he says. After that he is silent, perhaps feeling nothing more need be said. Indeed, perhaps it doesn't.^{[Note C]}

---

Commentary

A. World-opening moments

While most wouldn't consider Dragon Warrior an open world game, all of the games in the series have inflection points where multiple parts of the world open up that were previously inaccessible. In traditional gaming terms, these inflection points are gates that enable limited nonlinear gameplay. I'm going to call them "world-opening moments" because that's what they feel like to me.

Most commonly, world-opening moments happen in RPGs when you gain a new form of transportation (like a boat or an airship). However, the first Dragon Warrior game is entirely on foot, so that doesn't apply here. Instead, Dragon Warrior opens up the world with keys. As soon as you can buy keys, not only does it open up locations in the world you have yet to visit, but it also opens up new areas in previously visited locations. This latter fact is what makes the moment fun, because it allows you to backtrack into a treasure hunt.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't completely open up in a moment because keys requires money to buy. Each key costs 53 gold (at Rimuldar), and that's a non-trivial expense at this stage in the game. But still, it's up to me where I use those keys.

B. The meaning of the grind

Early RPGs like Dragon Warrior have a reputation for requiring a lot of grinding for experience. What this means, basically, is that you have to spend a lot of time fighting battles just for the purpose of acquiring gold and experience; that is, just to build your level and improve your equipment.

But if you think about it, battles are really the core gameplay of most RPGs. What "too much grinding" really means is not "too many battles", but "too little game content". Players are typically okay with spending a lot of time on battles if the progress they make from those battles is something more than improving a statistic.

For example, it took me three trips to complete the Mystery Cave. I probably could have finished it in one trip instead of three if I had started it at a higher level, so is the extra time I spent on it "griding"? I would say no, because it felt like I was moving forward in the game by exploring more of the cave.

By contrast, in my current situation, the only unexplored areas I have access to contain monsters that I can only barely manage. Any attempt to explore a new area would have to be quickly aborted to refresh my magic and hit points. At this point, I am forced to fight battles only to build my level and equipment - it's a pure grind.

C. The notebook

It's generally a good idea to keep some kind of notes in Dragon Warrior games. I'm usually pretty good at making a mental note of the most important tidbits, but in that rare case I miss something, it's a major pain to walk around the world trying to find the one hint from the one character that solves the one puzzle I'm currently interested in.

Most dialog can be dismissed out of hand as useless (e.g., tomatoes, casual threats, vacuous greetings), and the useful stuff is usually pretty obvious (e.g., directions to landmarks, locations of items). Sometimes the NPCs will be cryptic - when this happens, I write it down, because it usually means they're dropping hints of some kind. When in doubt, write it down. It will save you time down the road.