This thing can randomize the entire overworld layout, the locations of towns, what’s in any chests or stores or searchable spots on the ground, what order you learn spells in, what enemies can do (such as weak fire breath, strong fire breath, heal, healmore, stopspell, hurt, and hurtmore), change experience gaining rate… this thing is great and makes the game very fresh.

The cave layouts themselves are not altered, but randomizing chests completely changes the focus of the caves, and can often make that one unnecessary one from the original game become vital.

The Golem enemy is now mixed in with other enemies and may be a random encounter (depending on how much you randomized the encounters, at least). The ‘boss fight’ in front of Gwaelin’s prison may also be changed; I got a Golem there instead of a Green Dragon, for instance. Other enemies may become more common too, like Blue and Red dragons… but if you randomize the attacks, this may result in situations where, say, a Green Dragon knows Heal an strong fire breath, and a Red Dragon just hits you and does nothing else, etc.

The game will very likely be at least a little shorter if you randomize the chests, since you may stumble in the Erdrick equipment very early and have no reason to buy stuff like the Flame Sword or Magic Armor. The Erdrick equipment is the only weapon/armor that appears outside stores in this game, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally downgrading or anything like that.

It’s definitely shorter if you speed up the levelup rate (which has two faster settings, plus the default setting). Given that the original game could be very plodding and meticulous (and even the official remakes double the levelup rate), many players may welcome this change.

One thing that’s kind of strange is that if you randomize the spell learning order, you may gain multiple spells in a single level (in fact, I’ve gotten 5 at once). You may even start with spells at first level this way. It is truly random.

The customize option on the interface allows you to toggle on or off any of the features to make something specific (and of course you can share the seed with others as is common for randomizers).

One important thing is, due to the overworld randomization, the location that had the Token of Erdrick will no longer exist. The man who gave the hint to it’s location has different dialog and just says some vague encouragement, and the token itself will show up in a different random location (I got it in a chest in a cave).

The dialogue is not changed so most NPC hints will now be wrong, or at least semi-wrong, creating a bit of a Simon’s Quest atmosphere, heheh.

A previous review mentioned that there was a risk of Charlock and Tantegel being switched and preventing the game from being completed; I have not encountered this, and I saw the editor mention a “Charlock is obstructed, retrying” error, and it produced a fully playable game when it was done. But I guess anything’s possible. Still, I haven’t seen any unwinnable circumstances in my experimentation so far.

This is an excellent program that brings new life to this game for people like me who are extensively familiar with the original, and hunger for something similar but new. If you ever wished Dragon Warrior/Quest had a “second quest” like Zelda 1, here it is.