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  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • Tyr (Myria), the Goddess of Destruction. All the build-up for how terrible she is, and because of Agni, which reveals her true form, meaning that you must have it to fight her, even if you don't have to use it, she can't even deal damage in the triple digits, and healing is only an occasional necessity.
    • The same goes for Zog and all the other endgame bosses, although at least in Jade's case, he can instantly kill the hero with Shock.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Bleu (Deis) pulling a crystal ball out of nowhere, peering into it, seeing it explode, and saying it's probably nothing to worry about. Nothing about her character ever indicated she even had a crystal ball and it's never brought up again.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Once you get them, the party you'll most likely be using for the rest of the game will usually consist of Ryu (because you Can't Drop the Hero and he is generally a great character to use), Nina (who is The Medic in a game where white magic is broken), Bleu (for being a walking magical nuke), and Karn (for his incredibly powerful final fusion). Bo and Ox start falling off and Gobi and Mogu are generally underwhelming, and the only use you'll really get out of them are field skills or, concerning the first three, to fuse with Karn.
  • Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
  • Low-Tier Letdown:
    • Karn's third fusion spell combines him with Ox and Bo to create Doof. Doof is pretty strong, but his only special ability is pushing large boxes. Too bad for Doof, pushing some of those boxes allows you to immediately get Puka, Karn's fourth and final fusion spell, which is superior to Doof in every way.
    • Gobi and Mogu are generally considered to be poor fighters, with their only real use outside of fusions being swimming around the ocean floor and drilling through the ground, respectively.
  • Once Original, Now Common: This is one of the earliest RPGs to include some form of Super Mode for the main character as a mechanic (Ryu's dragon form) and having an auto-battle mechanic that was near unheard of at the time; possibly the Ur-Example of it for JPRGs. Those things became since staple of JRPGs.
  • Porting Disaster: The GBA-version experienced sound-glitches during battle whenever damage is being added/reducted, as the music would be scrambled for two seconds when you're getting healed, or the "damaged"-soundeffect would get warbled whenever you or the enemy take damage. While this isn't all too great of a bug, it's still very jarring.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: A good way to crank up the game's difficulty is to never use any of Ryu's dragon transformations (until the final battle, which requires using the Agni form for the good ending) or Karn's fusion spells. Can be made even more difficult by never using Nina's healing spells.
  • Slow-Paced Beginning: Not from a story sense, since the story begins with a bang, but the first couple of hours of gameplay are exceedingly dull, since the only character you control is Ryu, who starts out with no skills whatsoever, reducing the total sum of his combat abilities to "twat enemy with sword" and "use item". And you don't even get any interesting items to use except for a single Fire Stone and a single Bolt Stone (which you should save for the Knight at the end of this introductory sequence) so combat literally consists of nothing but "hit enemy and use Herb when health is low".
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The Stone Robot destroys itself by jumping into a volcano so that it will never be used as a weapon of destruction again.
    • Cerl and Alan deaths. Thankfully they get better thanks to Time Key's effects, which turns them back into children, giving both of them a second chance at life, and allowing Cerl to remake happy memories with Alan.
    • In The Dragon Warrior manga adaptation, Jade and Sara's final hopeless stand against Myria counts as well.
  • That One Boss:
    • The Gremlin, a rather early boss faced just before the hero unlocks his first-tier dragon transformations, has a ton of HP and will start spamming a powerful group-hitting attack every turn once his main health bar runs out (at which point his total HP is only halfway gone).
    • Mote (Sigmund), fought at the end of a That One Level, is one of the trickiest bosses in the game. At first, he is completely pixelated, and gradually comes into focus after taking enough hits. However, once he becomes totally un-pixelated, he becomes a brick wall of defensive power. In a bit of Guide Dang It!, you can hit him with an offensive spell to pixelate him again (meanwhile, he's nigh immune to magic while pixelated).
  • That One Level:
    • Most of the surreal dungeons on Mote's dreamworld, the crystal-path maze with the rotating floor being specially loathed.
    • Any part in which one of your characters ends up having to trek long distances on foot. The early game isn't all that bad, but after your first encounter with Cerl, you're forced to walk back to town as Ryu, facing enemy encounters that are designed to be fought with a full party.
  • That One Sidequest: Gobi's market. In Prima and Tunlan, Gobi can set up shop at a stand to buy randomly selected stuff from merchants or he can sell a randomly selected item to them. The market contains nearly every single character's best weapon and armor. But the RNG of getting them is incredibly time consuming. There's actually 3 pre-determined list of items Gobi can buy that changes depending on where you are in the story. Really egregious, the 2nd list which is available between Gobi getting the sphere and restoring Nina's memory has Karn and Gobi's best weapons and will be lost forever after the latter point in the story.

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