Though it's as archaic to go back to as going back to hieroglyphics or the horse-drawn buggy (not even compared to today, but compared to games as soon as ten years later), hey, people write in emojis and pay for carriage rides for a reason - sometimes the classic ways are just charming and lovely and iconic. This is pure, boiled-down, stripped down JRPG 101, and man is it still easy to sink into a playthrough of it to this day. Not that I'm not glad the genre didn't grow since, of course!

Pretty fun for what it is, which isn't that much. There's a "find a town"/"get a hint where to go next" cycle which is pretty pleasant, and a surprisingly big, interesting world (at least for a blocky NES game). The simple combat gets boring after a while.

Very simplistic and doesn't hold up as well as, say, Final Fantasy. The graphics are too simple. The sound is far too grating and screechy. The world is much clunkier to get around.

It was never the hit outside of Japan that it was in its home country, but given that this was the first RPG I actually finished, I can certainly see how it settled nicely into its role as the standard RPG over there. It distills the main elements of games like Ultima and Wizardry into an eminently straightforward and approachable form, and provided a framework for countless variations and iterations over the years.