Dragon Warrior was the original Role Playing Game with a built in battery for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  The game follows the story of a descendant of a famous warrior who is now tasked to defeat the new darkness in the continent.  The Dragonlord is your named enemy and you fight monsters, level up, improve your stats, and buy new weapons and gain information through various towns and cities, all in the name of the defeat of this terrible scourge.

The game is good for the time.  It doesn't age well and it's very one dimensional after you get the idea.  The story telling is basic but good enough to pass muster and the RPG side of things don't make you go fetch this that and the other.  Later RPGs, notably Dragon Warrior III, fall into a trap of "Get this for this particular person."  Dragon Warrior I stays true to home where every item you seek drives your own development, not that of random characters you don't see again.

GRAPHICS: The designs of monsters are good for the time.  They flipped the orientation and color to make three types of monster per image and it plays well because different monsters have different skills.  I remember being floored by the overworld map and how huge it was.  It also lets different cities have different themes and feelings.  There's a town surrounded by walls, there's a town destroyed long ago, and so on.  Each continent has different enemies and fun towns to investigate.  The graphics of the towns are respectable and the terrain makes sense. 

SOUND: Magic and battle sounds start to blend together and the music is repetitive.  There's nothing special here except it was the first of its kind.

ADDICTIVENESS: Personally, I hate the word addictiveness the same way I hate the word 'obsessed."  This game is not addictive only because it is fairly straight forward without much change.  You can explore, see new things, but the general game play is 1. Fight bad guys for a while, 2.  Level up and get more P, 3.  Buy new weapons,  4.  Go to next area to fight new bad guys.  Most of the game is spent grinding out levels so you can go fight the ultimate bad guy and go win.  I find I can beat the game at Level 21, so I don't need to do all sorts of leveling and spend that much time grinding down the road.  The linear set up is a great story and it's fun to play but once you beat this guy, you'll be good for ten years until you go back and play for nostalgia's sake.

STORY: The story is good.  It's creative and there's a princess to save from a dragon and some extremely minor side stories based on the various towns and cities you go to.  Characters have things happen to them and the villagers are mildly realistic in their mini comments.  I like the way the story plays out because it is simple enough to follow but the pieces you need to find to create the rainbow bridge make it interesting enough you don't get lost in game play.  

DEPTH: See "ADDICTIVENESS."  The depth is decent because there are different weapons, different bad guys with different attack strategies and the final dungeon is a mess of false doors, repeating stairwells, and nasty enemies that can mess you up.  There isn't much in the way of side quests so you can focus on the task at hand.  You also aren't distracted much but a lot of little missions to complete the main mission.  It's straight forward enough to keep you on the ball.

DIFFICULTY: When I played this as a kid, I got so frustrated because I didn't understand grinding.  The late 80s were a time when RPGs didn't exist and we had no idea why we couldn't beat the next step.  It came eventually but this was the first of its kind and it killed me.  I took my time this last play through and it was easy, if not time consuming.

Dragon Warrior won't capture anyone's attention if you didn't grow up with it.  It's a simple story that requires too much time to really engage anyone under 30.  It's worth a play for nostalgia but I recommend anyone trying NES RPGs to find something else to cut their teeth.  It's a good game, but only as a repeat.

What?! The music was one of the best parts of this series!

Great review...although I wish you embellished a bit more so more people would go and try this game.

then again, it was before many improvements (or upgrades i call them) to the rpg series for music, it started with noises like these to more of what is in modern jrpg's, rpgs, and mmos