Classics Brought Back to Life – Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake Review
Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake is the latest remake in the Dragon Quest series. It’s the most convenient way to play Dragon Quest 1 and 2 on modern platforms. The largest changes are a new script featuring many changes that are more in line with the Dragon Quest series, full English and Japanese voice acting, and many quality of life gameplay improvements.
It was a bit of a strange decision for the developers to make and release Dragon Quest 3 HD last year. The third game is a prequel to the first two games, but I’ve personally always been the kind of individual to play games in release order. In this rare case it’s actually best to play the third game before the first two games because this remake trilogy has a completely changed script and story to accommodate for this change. Without providing spoilers, there is a new post-game for Dragon Quest 2 HD that gives a definitive ending to the trilogy so you’ll definitely want to play 3 before playing 1 and then 2.
The story flows better in this remake and this trilogy of games is called the “Erdrick Trilogy”. The Dragon Quest series is generally divided into distinct trilogies so it doesn’t matter narrative wise whether or not you played other games in the series.
You’ll have an easier time with gameplay if you played any of the other Dragon Quest games but it’s not necessary. Your first Dragon Quest might be a bit tricky because the series does have its own nomenclature for its skills and spells (similar to how Shin Megami Tensei and Persona has its own naming scheme too) but once you get the hang of it it’s pretty accommodating even to the newest players. These HD remakes also have new difficulty options as well which are essentially an easy, normal, and hard mode. The Draconian (hard) mode in Dragon Quest 1 definitely gave me a run for my money even after all these years of playing JRPGs.
The original Dragon Quest can be called the grandfather of JRPGs. It wasn’t the first JRPG by any means but it was the first breakout hit in Japan that ended up shaping the JRPG genre as a whole for decades to come. Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii got inspiration from RPGs such as Wizardry and Ultima. In Dragon Quest you get the mainstays of any JRPG such as character levels and attributes (stats) such as hitpoints (HP), magic points (MP), physical attack (Strength) & magical attack (Wisdom), defense (Resilience), agility and more. Although the game does have its own terms for stats that I put in parenthesis they’re pretty easy to understand.
Your characters have levels and as you gain experience you level up and your stats increase. Depending on the character’s job different stats raise at different rates, such as a physical attacker would get more Strength and a mage would get more Wisdom. There’s also collectible seeds hidden all across the world that raise a stat and there’s surprisingly a lot of them compared to other JRPGs. By the end of the second game I had about a dozen seeds for each stat, so you can make a certain character stronger or just boost all your characters evenly. It’s best to play into each character’s strengths, meaning you wouldn’t want to give Strength Seeds to a mage for instance.
The only big difference between Dragon Quest and modern JRPGs is that the characters’ agility stat affects the turn order which was commonplace in older games. You select all of your party members’ turns at once before the round of combat, but when the round of combat actually occurs your party members as well as the enemies will take turns in different orders. If your characters are all slow then the enemy might act first and then your party members will take their turns after the enemy. If you let a party member’s HP get low and try to heal them with a slow mage the enemy might act first and knock out that party member and the healing now goes to waste.
Different classes will have different distributions of stats but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. The turn order is slightly random but you can still affect it with higher or lower agility and you can get higher agility by just grinding levels too. There’s also other fun JRPG gameplay mechanics in battle such as buffing, debuffing, instant death spells, and status ailments. There are different kinds of magic spells and physical skills and enemies might be resistant or weak to certain types of spells or physical moves such as a dragon being weak to a dragon slaying move (Dragon Slash). Some enemies might be weak to Explosion so you’d want a mage to cast Kaboom to deal extra damage.
At the same time, if you don’t want to engage with the game’s mechanics you can just grind infinitely from fighting enemies over and over to steamroll through everything. Your party members in the games can also act on their own but in general you’d probably just want them to follow your commands. You can set it to autobattle if you want to grind past boring encounters easily.
There’s no punishment for dying, not even a game over. You’ll always respawn and get your gold cut in half which is a mainstay of the Dragon Quest series, but you can also just reload a save or even just immediately retry the fight you lost to without penalty which is a very welcome change.
One big difference between Dragon Quest 1 & 2 is that you can’t choose your party members’ classes anymore (unlike Dragon Quest 3). They’re all fixed party members who have fixed classes and story scenes. Dragon Quest 1 has only one protagonist who is the Hero, and Dragon Quest 2 has 4 party members.
I really enjoyed how there’s a fixed story in Dragon Quest 2 for all the party members. The character arcs are a really great addition alongside its new voice acting. The voiced banter between your party members adds a lot to the game. You can name your characters but they’ll always have a fixed story. Dragon Quest 2 also has a new 4th party member in the cast that fits in seamlessly but I won’t list her name to be spoiler-free. Apparently she was meant to be a playable character in the original Dragon Quest 2 release as well. I believe this because she fits into the story perfectly unlike how other companies such as Atlus just shovs a random new character into the definitive versions of their games. I’m looking at you Rin, Kasumi, Alex, Marie and Yoko.
Dragon Quest 3 had a character arc with only the protagonist since all the other characters in your party were generic characters you made yourself. In this regard, Dragon Quest 2’s story and characterization is substantially better than that of Dragon Quest 3’s. On the other hand, Dragon Quest 3’s ability to let you change character jobs at anytime makes the gameplay a lot more fun than Dragon Quest 2’s. In the end you’ll likely play them all so it doesn’t matter but it’s certainly worth noting because each game has its own nuances. Dragon Quest 3 is the odd one out since Dragon Quest 4 and onward have fixed party members with the exception of Dragon Quest 9. I would’ve liked for Dragon Quest 2 to offer subclasses or some other ways to customize my party members’ skills/spells but I understand the developers don’t want to make too many changes to the original game.
Within either game the gameplay is really fun and addicting especially if you’re craving some retro JRPG gameplay. It’s fun to experiment with all the different skills and magic, and the cast of party members in Dragon Quest 2 have been adjusted to have better combat balance compared to the original games. Each character will learn new skills as they level up. It’s not perfect of course and each party member has their own nuance but it’s significantly better than the originals where the Prince of Cannock for instance was a jack-of-all-trades but master of none, which was bad in a game where specialized characters were more powerful.
One great new addition to these games are scrolls, which can be used to teach a character a new skill or magic ability. If you still don’t like your party members you can use these scrolls to make adjustments to their build but they are limited and the scrolls themselves make exploring all the optional content worth it. I really like the addition of scrolls but deep down I still wish there was more substance, such as characters having multiple advanced classes that would branch out or being able to choose from different multiple skills/magic to learn upon leveling up.
Another change is the addition of quest markers everywhere but you can turn it off which I do recommend for the first game. One of the charms of the original Dragon Quest was being able to explore almost anywhere at anytime though you’ll have to find the key items necessary to access the final dungeon to beat the game. Like how kids used to talk in the playground to trade Pokémon this was true for Dragon Quest as well because the original game was surprisingly cryptic in a time with no internet and only Shōnen Jump for hints. It’s still true in this remake, you really can explore to your heart’s content and figure out where to find key items yourself by talking to NPCs like the old days. You might get defeated by strong enemies if you venture out too far or if you can handle strong enemies you can get a lot of gold and experience easily too. It’s fun barely being able to reach a new town and being able to outfit my party with a more powerful tier of equipment. You do still have to find the key items to access the final dungeon so if you really don’t want to explore every nook or cranny you can just turn on the quest markers.
I was surprised by one big gameplay change from Dragon Quest 1, namely that you can get attacked by multiple enemies or mini-bosses at once. In this particular game you only control 1 protagonist who I colloquially refer to as the Hero. Draconian (the hard difficulty) is really brutal in this game because multiple enemies can spam status ailments and stunlock you with no way out or the enemies can even instant death spells such as Whack. People laugh about comparing games to Dark Souls but Dragon Quest 1 is unforgiving like a Shin Megami Tensei game!
The Hero is still pretty powerful otherwise with plenty of busted moves to use on bosses. The team composition you’re given in Dragon Quest 2 is great and I found the difficulty curve of that game to be far fairer even on the harder difficulty. I found no problems with the gameplay in Dragon Quest 2, even the post-game. I still prefer the gameplay of Dragon Quest 3 to be my personal favorite since you can build your team and their jobs however you’d like but Dragon Quest 2 is still the next best game.
There’s many other small gameplay changes that make the games more in line with modern JRPGs such as the game now autosaving. The autosave actually did help me because of a power outage. I remember in some of the old games you’d have to speak to a single NPC (the king) in order to save but with all Dragon Quest games nowadays you can just save in the church in any city.
I remember in the original games having to use a menu command to use stairs instead of just moving my character on them. There’s a spell you can get early on called Zoom that lets you warp easily to any dungeon or town you visited before but now you can even use it indoors. I remember in old games your head would hit the ceiling if you did that!
The keys are key items you find in the game instead of being consumables in the old games. There are three tiers of chests with different designs in these games and you find 3 tiers of keys (Thief, Magic, Ultimate) that are able to open these chests which makes re-exploring old regions fun when you find a new kind of key. Collectible medals which were introduced in Dragon Quest 4 were retroactively added to this trilogy of games as well, which are scattered in fixed locations (such as drawers or barrels) throughout the world and you cash them in for unique rewards. There’s innumerable changes like these that make these HD games much more fun to play than the originals.
I really like the new script and voice acting. I played the old games which had very different localization right down to the title screen back then (Dragon Warrior). I remember the towns and characters having inconsistent names between the games. The lore and the story in this HD trilogy is far better than the old games which also had a very minimal plot. I just really like the consistency in these games more and it’s going to be the canon story if it’s ever mentioned in any future Dragon Quest games.
The premise of the game is pretty simple. In the first game you play as a descendant of the legendary hero Erdrick (the Dragon Quest 3 protagonist). In the sequel you play as the Prince of Midenhall as well as his cousins who are royals from other countries (essentially the descendants of Dragon Quest 1’s protagonist).
The story is pretty much the Hero wanting to defeat monsters as well as the leader of the monsters. There’s a lot more plot especially in the second game but I really don’t want to spoil the plot since you recruit more party members as the story progresses. The plot of the first game is admittedly very simple (it was released almost 40 years ago in Japan after all) but I can tell the developers wanted to stay true to the plot.
There’s definitely many new scenes though, such as the king’s knights being suspicious of a hero randomly coming to their country until he proves himself by defeating monsters and saving townsfolk. I remember in Dragon Warrior how as soon as you booted the game you were best buddies with the king already, being able to open all the treasure chests there. The story flows a lot more naturally in these remakes.
The second game has a full party dynamic and a much more grand story and explores themes such as not all the monsters being bad. The group of mini-bosses in the second game are especially good and there’s more backstory to the villain in the completely new post-game as well as a definitive ending to the trilogy. It’s worth to play the second game for the new scenes alone!
The soundtrack is phenomenal and I really liked the themes that played in the towns and in battle. I found that the dungeon themes got on my nerves unfortunately. These games have a high encounter rate, which in itself is annoying but the bigger problem is after an encounter it resets the dungeon theme, meaning you’ll hear the first ten seconds of the dungeon theme hundreds of times instead of the full track. There’s still plenty of bangers and I really enjoyed the new theme used for the important story bosses in Dragon Quest 2.
I know that dungeon crawling is a big part of the Dragon Quest experience but I wish that there were fewer encounters that instead gave out more experience per battle. In other words I’d prefer a more generous experience curve. Dragon Quest can be grindy and sometimes you’ll hit a roadblock where you’ll need raw numbers to overcome a boss, especially in the first game where you have only one protagonist.
Even just exploring the encounter rate is pretty high and sadly it’s random encounter style in these games. I really would’ve liked if there was a way to have on-screen symbol encounters (meaning being able to see the enemy on the map before you fought them).
I ended up using holy water vials, which are sold in stores even early on in the game for remarkably cheap prices. These consumable items let you remove enemy encounters as long as you’re a higher level than the encounter and thankfully in this HD remake you can assign consumable items to a shortcut hotkey on your controller.
I personally just can’t focus on dungeon exploration while having random encounters because I feel like they interrupt the flow. My technique was to always grind at the start of the dungeon to see all the enemies and get adequately leveled, save and heal, then actually explore the dungeon using my holy waters to avoid encounters, but that’s just me. I understand that resource management such as managing your party’s HP and MP is an integral part of dungeon exploration but I just found the encounters too excessive in this remake trilogy. In other games such as Etrian Odyssey there is brilliant dungeon design where you can unlock shortcuts to access higher/lower levels of the dungeons far more easily.
In terms of dungeon designs, they’re pretty bland unfortunately with a lot of bland cave tunnels. It is fun to grab treasure chests which have unique and powerful items. The original games had bad items in the chests due to chests respawning back then so actually getting decent rewards in the chests makes exploring the dungeons thoroughly worth it. There’s an option to just be able to turn on treasure chest locations on the map as well if you don’t want to search each tunnel in a dungeon too.
I really enjoyed the use of verticality in the level designs. The floors would often have multiple stairs and you’d have to find the right stairs to be able to get to the end. Sometimes you’d have to work your way backwards to find the correct stairs to get forwards. The map is very handy in these two games because you can just flip through the floors to see which stairs correspond with each other. I feel that not many games that are non-dungeon crawlers do verticality in dungeons correctly and it feels great to reach the top of the tower. Otherwise though the dungeons aren’t really fun to explore and I found the overworld to be more fun to explore. There are newly added secret zones on the overworld with more collectibles.
I really didn’t like the recycled assets between the games. You’ll likely be playing the three games back to back and some dungeons are reused too often. For instance, all the games have the Dragonlord Castle which is always annoying to explore.
In Dragon Quest 2 it’s meant to be a pleasant surprise that the continents and islands of Dragon Quest 1 are fully explorable in it, similar to how in generation 2 of Pokémon you could explore most of generation 1’s Kanto region as well. I appreciate the effort, but I didn’t really like re-exploring all the same dungeons. I can understand asset re-use in two games but for three games it was getting on my nerves. Some of the dungeons still have archaic design, they’re not hard at all but they don’t feel like how modern dungeons are designed and not enough effort was made to make these old dungeons fun.
In a sense, these games feel purist such as how Fire Emblem: Gaiden had the remake Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Shadows of Valentia was a beautiful game but had some drawbacks from the original such as a few awkwardly designed maps in the main story.
Although the designs of the dungeons are lacking, the graphics and special effects do look great in this remake, and although some of Square Enix’s other HD-2D games go too far with too much lighting effects I never had trouble seeing my characters or the treasure chests in the dungeons. In the originals sometimes the 2D tilesets got repetitive quick but I really liked how they made the overworld look amazing in this remake. Some of this remake’s changes are very welcome such as replacing random pitfalls to show the ground crumbling with unstable rocks instead. If you heard horror stories about certain parts of Dragon Quest 2 they’re all gone, the game is fun to play albeit a bit grindy and slow at times.
Although I listed a few flaws they’re easy to look past. These HD remakes are the best way to play the game and the new content in Dragon Quest 2 especially make it worth it such as new story scenes and full voice acting. They’re pure JRPGs at their heart and although they might retain a few old design choices here and there such as old dungeon designs and a high random encounter rate they’re still a blast to play and the new post-game in Dragon Quest 2 is phenomenal.
Dragon Quest 1 and 2 HD-2D Remake Review
Our Score: Great
Pros
- Fun turn-based JRPG to play with many modern quality of life improvements.
- New script that makes sense and full voice acting.
- New post-game for Dragon Quest 2 adding a definitive ending to the trilogy.
- Dungeon designs are very oldschool and full of random encounters.
- First game is very basic, featuring only one playable protagonist and a very basic story.
- Grindy at times and full of difficulty spikes especially in the first game.
– Brandon Harris
Reviewed on the PC (Steam)
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