Warrior was published by ASCII Corporation in 1983 for the PC in Japan which was known as the MSX at the time. It is a dungeon crawling role-playing game which involves the player exploring a vast dungeon. The ultimate goal of the game is to increase your attributes while exploring the dungeon and find and slay the dragon located deep within the complex.
You do not get to name your starting character or purchase equipment but you do start with five attributes and a money category. The five attributes are strength, experience, armor class, hit points, and attack points. Each of these five attributes begin at 0 and over the course of the game you’re going to want to raise each of them to 99 or as close to 99 as you can get. You raise strength, armor class, hit points, and attack points by finding treasure boxes scattered throughout the dungeon. These are represented by a question mark.
When you move your character over the question mark (treasure box) it will cause one of the four attributes to increase or decrease. Therein lies the problem with these treasure boxes – not all of them are beneficial. The treasure boxes are not randomly generated; they are fixed items that always provide the same results with each new game. The responsibility thus falls upon the player to memorize or make notations upon a map whether treasure boxes in certain locations have beneficial or harmful affects. There are many treasure boxes scattered all over this vast dungeon – but not so many that you can just arbitrarily collect them all and hope that there are more beneficial treasure boxes than harmful ones. So it becomes necessary to make notations in order to avoid the harmful treasure box locations.
When you encounter a creature then combat ensues and it is automatically generated. Your statistics are matched against the creature’s and then a win or loss is automatically generated. In the beginning of the game, when your statistics are very low, the odds of you slaying a creature are very small. Sometimes your character does win the contest; but you’re simply running your opponent off of the screen for a victory. When you win in this fashion, you do not lose any strength points. If you lose the battle and your opponent defeats you; the result is that you lose a couple of strength points. Once you’ve raised your attributes a significant amount, greater than 50, then in the ensuing encounters you sometimes slay the creature outright. When this happens your experience points increase. You really want to try and avoid getting into too many of these encounters because they are ultimately a drain on your strength. I found myself fleeing many of the encounters because I wanted to keep my strength rating as high as I could before encountering the dragon.
When I say the dungeon complex is vast; I DO mean vast. The maze that you have to traverse is huge. It’s so huge and the corridors are so long and twisting that it makes mapping the complex almost impossible. It is the dungeon map itself that is your biggest adversary. Remember your ultimate goal is to find the dragon and defeat the dragon. Easier said than done because the path to the dragon is convoluted and difficult. The background of your surroundings changes in color and pattern which is the only clue that you are entering or leaving a new section of the dungeon.
The immensity of the dungeon took me by surprise. I played Warrior on an MSX emulator and the game took me roughly 6 hours to complete. It is a bit of a grind to increase your attributes and random encounters with dungeon denizens can happen quite often. There are no special text descriptions in the dungeon nor even any rooms within the complex. The dungeon is one giant maze.
You’ll know you’re getting closer to the dragon when the background in the dungeon switches to skulls. This part of the dungeon is very difficult to find but once you do you know you’re on the right track.
Once you enter the dragons lair the combat is automatic. You can see by my attributes depicted above that I did a lot of grinding to raise the scores all the way up from zero.
If your attributes are not high when you encounter this dreaded foe he will smite you. My attributes were high enough that by the time I found his lair I was able to defeat the dragon.
In one of the oddest things I’ve seen in some time; once you defeat the dragon you are rewarded with the following screen:
In today’s day and age there are a subgenre of Japanese RPGs which are known as Hentai games. These Japanese games of manga and anime are characterized by overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit images. It is a bit of a business model – putting a little – or a lot – of skin out there to titillate the audience in order to make a buck. You’re seeing a foreshadowing of things to come here – an end screen – where your reward is a provocative pose from a shapely female thanking you for defeating the dragon. I admit to being a bit stunned when this flashed across my screen – so much so – that I almost missed the chance to do a screen capture of it for you.
I did enjoy Warrior. It is an obscure title that I really haven’t seen covered by anyone. If you’re not a fan of dungeon crawls or elaborate mazes though there is very little for you here. There is a lot of grinding that has to take place before you can face the dragon and the battles are automatic so it sports a number of issues that gaming fans find themselves divided on.
Next up on the docket is The Warlock’s Treasure.
Until next time…