Gwaelin is Optional

After watching a 27-minute speedrun of Dragon Warrior during AGDQ 2018, I was filled with a mix of nostalgia and jealousy.

After all, I did spend about 3 months playing that game on the original NES console. Not just 3 months of calendar time even. 3 months like if you measured it with a chess clock. I spent an unfathomable amount of time invested in that game and that was including the extensive notes and maps that came inside a valuable-beyond-measure explorer's handbook that was given to me by the person who lent me the game. When I learned that the stock game itself did not include these guides and maps and that a player was expected to just explore the world and figure these things out on their own I was shocked.

I was probably 10.

How in the hell are you supposed to find Garinham? People tell you you need to go to Garinham, but the forever-pacing townsfolk are very frugal with their directions and it's not like this kingdom has ever heard of roads or road signs. They just post people at the front of the town to welcome visitors and tell them where they are like some kind of fantasy world version of Lot. Often with a comparable amount of capering.

In college when game emulators started becoming prevalent I found "NESticle", an unfortunately-named NES emulator and, somewhere I don't recall anymore, a ROM of Dragon Warrior. It remains my one go-to NES game that I always keep around for reliving the glory days of my 8-bit childhood. I fostered a constant urge to trawl the in-game continents taking screenshots every few steps and somehow compositing them together into an enormous world map graphic I could reference for... for what? I don't know. Maybe to protect the nonexistent unwary who didn't have the luxury of a guidebook like I did.

I'd largely forgotten about the seemingly endless amount of time I put into Dragon Warrior until seeing the speedrun, a complex masterpiece of careful planning and timing to control the game's builtin random encounter mechanism to avoid nearly all enemies except metal slimes and to kill those slimes in the first hit.

If your blood is starting to boil by learning this, you remember as well as I do.

Technology is a wonderful thing. If I'd put immeasurable hours into the game back when you couldn't scumsave before every dungeon crawl, imagine what's possible when you can checkpoint with a keystroke. I upgraded to FCEUX as my emulator of choice. It's free, it's stable under WINE, and it allows you to hex edit the game. With these points in mind, the fastest way I've found to complete the game is as follows:

Start a new quest. Enter your name and choose "Fast" as your dialogue speed.

After King Lorik gives you your quest, open the hex editor and make the following edits:

0xBB: FF ; set XP   to 65,280
0xBC: 06 ; set gold to 6
0xBE: FF ; best weapon, armor, and shield
0xBF: 01 ; 1 Magic Key (game "limit" == 6)
0xC1: 0E ; equip Rainbow Drop

Leave Tantagel Castle and find a slime. Entering the combat screen will automatically recalculate your level to 29 based on your XP. Fight or run from the slime. Walk to Brecconary. Spend the night at the inn for 6 gold to fully replenish HP and MP.

Cast REPEL to save time while traveling, walk to Charlock Castle and use Rainbow Drop at the strait.

Navigate to the Dragonlord using the dungeon pattern you memorized when you were 11. You can complete this within the duration of one RADIANT spell. Cast HEALMORE before speaking to him. Reject his offer. After defeating the Dragonlord, cast RETURN and enter Tantagel Castle. Speak to King Lorik.

There are plenty of hacking guides that give more detail if you want to learn more about how the game works internally. I find this endlessly fascinating, and not just because a random number generator entertained and perplexed me for months on end. Twiddling five bytes breaks the game and makes winning trivial.

Take that, childhood.

P.S. The only thing that really makes me angry about any of this is that I never played without a fighter's ring, unknowing that the fighter's ring literally doesn't do anything to your stats and it takes up an otherwise-valuable equipment slot.