In Dragon Warrior

Is that they used the menu waaaaay too often. You had to use the menu to talk, open doors, etc, etc. I could never put any time into the first two on NES (never played the third and fourth); it was only when Dragon Warrior I & II came out on the Gameboy Color that I was able to beat the games. DWI&II (very intelligently) eliminated the over-use of the menu; just tapping a button allowed you to talk to people, open doors, etc, like in every other game.


DW is a great series, just too tedious to play on NES, in my opinion.

Well, I never had a problem with the menus before I played the Gameboy versions... now I can't stand the menus. Too much of a good thing spoils ya.

I found the most annoying menu feature of Dragon Warrior was using it to go up stairs. It's pretty obvious if you stand on a stairs tile you intend to use them! Thankfully they got rid of that in later games.

Yeah, that's always been a pet peeve of mine with Dragon Warrior. That's definitely the worst implementation of menus that was made during an RPG. The only thing that really comes close to that for me is Ultima: Exodus. It looks like you have all of your menu options right there, but actually you have to press Select (I think that's the proper button) to see the rest of the menu items. If you don't have the booklet, this makes things really bad, as you don't even know how to divvy up some of your gear.

But like Jake said, just tapping a button should've been enough to perform these actions. It seems like the route they took was actually extra programming. Instead of:

Check tile -> treasure chest -> check chest already open -> 'A' button opens

They did something like:

Check Menu Open -> Check Menu selection -> check tile -> stairs -> load new screen

I'm sure this may not have been the exact approach, but it seems to make sense as what they may have done. Just sounds like extra work.

It's a shame because the game underneath all that menu is pretty fooking fantastic.

That was a big problem for me on Ultima: Exodus, too. I believe they hid the "Pray" and "Bribe" commands in that special menu as well, and it stalled the game for me for awhile because I didn't even know they were there.