Dragon Warrior
The first video game I ever finished to completion was Dragon Warrior for the NES. An incredibly time-consuming RPG, it was also rather difficult in that a certain set of tasks needed to be completed to prepare your hero to be able to reach, and then defeat the Dragonlord at the end of the game.
This video was the television commercial that aired for this game. It was available for free with the purchase of a Nintendo Power magazine subscription, and a detailed guide was included with one of the magazine releases. Dragon Warrior was originally called Dragon Quest in Japan, but to avoid trademark infringement was renamed to Dragon Warrior. Also, due to potential religious issues aspects of the game were altered. Most likely this was as a result of the misguided belief that RPGs converted the young into devil worshipers.
In this game you begin by naming your Hero - and the name chosen does affect the hero's development during the course of the game. Your hero in Dragon Warrior is believed to be a descendant of Erdrick, who had come to the lands of Alefgard in older times to defeat an ancient evil. Now that evil times have befallen Alefgard once more, it is up to you to defeat the Dragonlord and his hordes of monsters, rescue the kidnapped Princess Gwaelin and retrieve the stolen Ball of Light.
Game combat is turn based, where the hero is given a choice of actions when facing a monster and then the monster reacts (or dies) based on the result of the player's choice. Due to my lack of hand-eye-coordination I found this game better within my scope because it demanded that I retain a working knowledge of every monster experienced within the game, and to follow the proper course of action when facing such monsters again.
Some monsters can use magic to devastating affect (ie: the Sleep spell) against the hero, so a useful counter would be the "Stopspell" spell, which prevents the affected target from using any magic. Some other odd quirks with this game were the need to select Stairs from the interface menu to navigate up and down stairs (this was removed in later versions of the game and in re-releases), all closed doors were locked and required a "magic key" to open them, which would vanish when used, and you would automatically sell your current equipment to the weapon/armor seller if you purchased an item that was more powerful.
I am also unfamiliar with any other game that would base statistics on the character's name. For example, I found that naming the Hero Erdrick (after the original hero this character was descended from) would result in better statistics, and increased luck in finding money or treasure.
The issue with the keys was particularly frustrating early on in the game, because it effectively prevented you from being able to access parts of the game until you became powerful enough to travel to the one city in the game that had a key seller (Rimuldar) without needing to have a key to find the seller. The original starting castle (Tantegal) and one other city (Cantlin) have key sellers, but they are located behind locked doors. To add to the torture, you are given a key at the beginning of the game, but you must use it to leave the King's throne room, so it effectively does you very little good except to help you get started.
Dragon Warrior is one of those comfort games I never quite forgot and periodically play again for nostalgia purposes - I recently found a translated version for the Super Nintendo that features improved graphics, and better gold/experience rewards for killing monsters, which effectively gets rid of the worst part of the original game - the grind.
In the original game, to progress to certain points it was necessary to play for several hours, killing monsters over and over again until you either had enough money to purchase better equipment, or gained enough levels to learn the magic you needed to survive a confrontation with one of the more powerful monsters in the game.
Also of note - the artist for the Nintendo Power guide was Katsuya Terada, who also did the concept art for a number of different video games over the years, and other artwork for the Nintendo Power magazine. I personally love his mix of watercolors and ink, and they give a certain authentic feel to the characters in the guide - helping to inspire the player's imagination.
