Pop quiz, assholes!

Do you remember playing “Dragon Warrior” on your NES? You know, that game they gave away for free with subscriptions to Nintendo Power?

Hmmm…

Now, do you remember “Final Fantasy”? No, not the one with the spiky-haired blonde guy with the giant sword. I mean the one on NES where you picked four classes at the start of the game, realized you screwed up halfway through, then had to start all over again!

M’kay…

Now, what do you think would happen if you took both of those games, mashed ’em together, and added a bit of modern game design to them?

WRONG! You get “Dragon Fantasy: Book 1”!

Now, if you answered “Yes” to the above questions, “Dragon Fantasy” will give you all of the warm and fuzzy nostalgic feelings of playing an old school JRPG, without all of the annoying design limitations those games suffered from back in the prehistoric days of gaming. If no, you’re probably a snot-nosed punk in need of some discipline and history lessons.

Good news! In this game, you don’t have to go into a menu and select “Talk” if you want to chat it up with a that mysterious drunken bar NPC or select “Look” if you want to investigate something. It’s all one button! You also get things like options, and easy to navigate menus, and auto-saves! Cowabunga!

There are even four selectable chapters to pick from and they can be played in any order you want! Though you’ll want to play them in order so the story makes sense. Don’t try and take this back to the video store and exchange it with “Goldeneye” because you don’t know what’s going on. Play. Them. In. ORDER!

Take my advice and start with Ogden, a retired, balding, middle-aged hero who is forced to go off on adventures again because evil needs an ass-kicking.

Later on in the game, you’ll get to play as Prince Anders and his merry band of mercenaries as they hunt down a relic. Then, you’ll get to play as a thief named Jerald and his ninja niece as they hunt down priceless artifacts to trade for cold, hard cash. Last, in a surprise twist, you can take a group of your heroes to the world of “Minecraft”, where you can capture monsters, collect materials, and craft equipment. It’s like four games in one! That’s called value, kids.

Now, in the most recent version of DF:B1, you can choose between two graphical styles, 8-bit or 16-bit. You can also choose between two musical styles, 8-bit or 16-bit (Once ver. 1.10 comes out). Do you know how many combinations that is?! That’s like a limitless number of combinations! Infinite value! Editor’s note: it’s actually 4.

Explore dungeons, fight lots of random battles, heal, use spells, fight more random battles, buy equipment, heal, random battles, read, heal, some more random battles, find Inspector Spacetime, win. You can do all that and more in “Dragon Fantasy: Book 1”.