TASaturday #22 – Dragon Warrior (NES)

For the TASaturday #22, we picked up the first entry in a series that quickly became one of the most successful and popular in Japan: Dragon Quest (originally known as Dragon Warrior outside Japan). As you probably already know, the game first came out on the NES back in 1986, which is why it’s not really the most impressive game we’ve featured. We picked it up in order to celebrate the announcement of Dragon Quest XI, on Tuesday.

Just like in any other RPG, this Tool Assisted Speedrun features quite a lot of luck manipulation… in fact, all unnecessary random encouters are avoided using this “method”. One way to save time in a RPG is to keep fighting to a minimum, which is why every single battle taking place in this run has a purpose (let it be getting some XP, dying in order to save time, etc.).

This may seem surprising to those who haven’t watched many speedruns (Tool Assisted Speedrun), but death is frequently used as a way to save time. Quite obviously, it’s exactly what the TASer did in this run of Dragon Quest! They also avoided entering the commands as soon as possible at some points, in order to manipulate luck and get a critical hit. In a RPG, you can’t really use impressive moves in order to skip large portions of the game, so every little trick is good to save as much time as possible.

Here’s the TAS of Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) by Acmlm:

For more information about this TAS, please click here!

We hope you enjoyed this TASaturday #22. See you next week!