Dragon Warrior Randomizer Tutorial

While Dragon Warrior Randomizer is difficult to master, it's surprisingly easy to attain a basic level of competence in it after playing it a few times, particularly if you're familiar with the original Dragon Warrior. If not, though, it's cool, read on.

First off, if you've never played Dragon Warrior before, take a look at the maps at http://www.realmofdarkness.net/dq/games/nes/dw/maps/dungeon--I'll be referring to some locations on these maps.

Before we even start the game, let's talk names. If you're not playing with Speedhacks on, you want a one-character name. The text in Dragon Warrior normally draws out letter-by-letter, and you get into quite a few battles over the course of the Randomizer, so the time you save with a short name is actually kind of significant.

Additionally, what you name your character determines your starting stats. Go to http://www.woodus.com/den/games/web/dwsim/calc.htm and play around with various names to see this. For the Randomizer, though, you'll want one of two builds (Which one basically comes down to preference; I'm a Str/HP guy myself): Long-Term Str/HP with a Short-Term Modifier of 3, or Long-Term Str/Agi with a Short-Term Modifier of 3. Examples of the former build are J, Z, !, and d, while L, f, and v are examples of the latter build.

The goal of Dragon Warrior is to kill the Dragonlord and return to the King at Tantegel Castle (Where you start the game). To do this, you will need to acquire three items--the Stones of Sunlight, the Staff of Rain, and Erdrick's Token. Then you'll need to find the cave we in the community call "The Jerk Cave", to trade the Stones and Staff for the Rainbow Drop ("The Jerk Cave" is the Southern Shrine/Magic Temple on the Maps page linked above). The Rainbow Drop will give you access to Charlock Castle, the lair of The Dragonlord.

In addition to these required items, there are two additional items that, while not technically required, are needed if you want to beat the Randomizer in anything resembling a reasonably quick time. These are Erdrick's Sword and Erdrick's Armor. Erdrick's Sword is hidden in a chest somewhere, while Erdrick's Armor may be in one of three locations:
-The Fairy Flute location (4 steps south of the fountain in Kol)
-Its normal location in the town of Hauksness (You'll need to beat a miniboss before acquiring the Armor. That miniboss can be an Axe Knight, Armored Knight, Golem, Stoneman, Blue Dragon, or Red Dragon)
-Or somewhere in the Overworld

The Fairy Flute can also be in one of these three locations.
Erdrick's Token can be in one of those locations, OR in a chest somewhere.

So how do you know where in the world is Carmen Sandiego....err, the item? Well, there's a man in the town of Cantlin hiding behind a locked door and some damaging barriers. Talking to him will give the location of the overworld item relative to Tantegel Castle (He'll tell you something like "From Tantegel Castle, travel X steps North/South and Y steps East/West"). If he doesn't give you a set of coordinates, that's helpful information too--this means that the Token is in a chest, and the Fairy Flute and Erdrick's Armor are either in their "normal" respective locations, or swapped with each other relative to where they'd "normally" be.

Most DWR players will Return to Tantegel and manually keep track of where they are on the overworld after that to get the overworld item. If you don't feel like doing that, you can rescue Princess Gwaelin from the Swamp Cave. To do so, you'll need a key, plus you'll have to beat a miniboss (The potential set of minibosses is the same as in Hauksness). Return her to Tantegel to receive Gwaelin's Love, which you can use to find out your distance from Tantegel. But be careful, because Gwaelin's Love gives TANTEGEL'S coordinates relative to YOU, not the other way around.

At the start of the game, you'll open three chests, one of which will always be a Magic Key. You're hoping for one of three things here:
-That you get a second Magic Key,
-That you get Wings,
-Or that you check your spells and find you have RETURN (And the MP to cast it).

Any of these scenarios will allow you to open another door in Tantegel in addition to (Or instead of, in the latter two scenarios) the initial door that blocks your way. If I'm fortunate enough to encounter one of these scenarios, I'll typically exit the castle, go back to the king (Getting out of the throne room clears its contents, including the locked door, even if you never actually opened the door), save, and try each of the two doors to see which one is the more advantageous to open. In the Tantegel treasury, you should check if there are any chests containing between 500 and 755 gold; these will allow you to perform "The Gold Glitch."

The Gold Glitch is more accurately a Chest glitch. The short version is this:
-Except for the chests at the start of the game, treasure chests in Dragon Warrior respawn.
-The game can only keep track of 8 opened treasure chests at a time.
-The three chests at the start of the game count as three chests.
-The memory that keeps track of opened chests is cleared when you exit or OUTSIDE of an area. It does NOT, however, get cleared out when you die.

What this means is that you can set up the Chest Glitch in caves with multiple chests. The two places you're likely to do this are the Mountain Cave and Garin's Grave (Grave of Garinham). As long as you grab at least two chests in one of those areas before you die, you'll be able to fill up the open chest memory, and the "ninth" (Or anything after nine) chest will never actually despawn, allowing you to collect its contents over and over. This is most useful for quickly accumulating gold, which you'll probably use to buy a Silver Shield (And depending on your situation, possibly a decent weapon and armor too).

A note about the Chest Glitch: For whatever reason, it causes the text to go wacky if the chest you're opening with the glitch contains an item instead of gold (I've gotten a "Sword Magidrak" out of one chest, which turned out to be the Staff of Rain). For that reason, if you Chest Glitch a chest that contains an item, you should check your inventory/status to see if that Axe Ghost was actually a key item.

Deciding when you want to kill the Dragonlord is more of an art than a science. That said, the following are some good guidelines.
First, you'll almost certainly want a minimum of 97 HP, as this will let you survive two consecutive max-damage breaths from the second Dragonlord (In turn guaranteeing at least one attack between Healmores).
Depending on your MP, you'll also probably want about 130 Attack Power. This will let you do an average of about 11 damage per hit to Dragonlord 2 (The damage range at 130 attack power is 7-15 per hit).
With enough Healmores, you can get away with these stats being a tiny bit lower, particularly if you feel like gambling on a kind Dragonlord. But these are a good starting point.