Dragon Quest I HD-2D Review

Introduction:

I can still remember it like it was yesterday; I had a week-long trip planned to Puerto Rico with my aunt approaching. There was only one problem:

It was the same week Persona 5 released.

Nowadays there would be no problem; just bring the Steam Deck or Switch along for the plane ride. But back then (wow I feel old), that wasn’t an option. But I still really wanted to scratch that JRPG itch. So I did something I almost never do; I went on the App Store and looked for a decent game to play on my phone. To my surprise, Square Enix has done a decent job at putting tons of their classic JRPGs on smartphones. As you can probably guess by the title of this article, I spent that vacation playing the very first Dragon Quest on my phone.

I fell in love with it. There’s a uniquely lonely atmosphere to the first DQ game. You obtain no party members, and you don’t talk to very many people throughout your adventure. All fights are one-on-one to make it fair. And it’s a very brief 10 hour game. For all of these reasons, I still find DQ1 a very special and unique game. One I still recommend to JRPG fans.

To my dismay, many of those reasons are lost in this new HD-2D version bundled with Dragon Quest II. While the game thankfully retains its solo-hero structure, everything else I loved about the game is gone.

Presentation:

Luckily there’s absolutely no issues here. If you’re familiar with the HD-2D games by now, you’ll know that they mostly look and sound fantastic. If Square Enix decided to stick with this style forever, I’d be incredibly satisfied with it. I do miss the small chunkier sprites of the older games, but what’s here still looks good. The orchestrated music is gorgeous and cozy- a staple of the DQ series. Since the original Dragon Quest released three years into the Famicoms lifespan, the compositions here are extremely basic. And yes, the orchestrated facelifts are nice, but it can’t hide the simplicity. Very few tunes really stuck in my head the same way they did from later titles in the series.

One noteworthy change to the presentation is the voice acting which plays during certain special cutscenes. This is…

Look, maybe I’m a purist (especially in a series rooted in deep tradition), but I don’t need voice acting in my 2D Dragon Quest games. I understand why it’s in DQ8 or 11, but these little retro throwbacks don’t need it. What am I supposed to do while these pixelated characters speak? Just stare at the game while no animation or anything eye-catching happens?

Speaking of cutscenes, there’s a lot more present here in this version of DQ1. Like…a lot more. It’s been almost year since I finished DQ3 HD-2D, but from my memory, there were an equal or even fewer amount of cutscenes when compared to DQ1. DQ3 will probably take most new players between 30-40 hours to finish. This never version of DQ1 will probably take between 15-25 hours. For a game almost half the length to feel just as bloated with cutscenes felt really obnoxious to me. It killed the game flow at many times. The sprites also have tons of little animations that take up time too.

While DQ5 had a particularly great story, I’d argue it wasn’t until DQ7 and onwards that the series tried to have well-written characters and plots. I don’t really need a remake of a Famicom JRPG to feel so bloated with dialogue and cutscenes. In comparison, when the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters released on consoles a few years back, I played through Final Fantasy 1 and a bit of Final Fantasy 3. The pacing was lightning fast and the games were still entirely focused on its gameplay- much like the Famicom originals. I understand that these HD-2D versions are meant to flesh out the story of Dragon Quest’s most legendary character, Erdrick, but it severely hurts the games flow. Is anyone really going to be citing any character in Dragon Quest 1 as highly memorable or well written? Probably not. Even in this new version! Perhaps the developers were afraid that modern audiences would be bored of a game where you play as a silent protagonist with no party members to talk to.

Gameplay:

It’s Dragon Quest! What more is there to say? The series is steeped in its traditional turn-based combat and progression system. There’s no job system here like in DQ3, so you don’t have much agency over how your character grows. A small addition are the “scrolls”. Scrolls basically let you pick and choose who will learn a spell or ability. This would actually be important in a game with party members like DQ2. But in a game like DQ1, it’s essentially pointless since you only have one character to read these scrolls.

The big new additions are the “sigils” which are boosts to your abilities. They provide additional effects like potions being more potent, adding to your max HP, and making spells and attacks stronger if you have less than 50% HP. To be honest, I never felt like any of the sigils were especially helpful other than the >50% HP one. But even then, it’s quite a dangerous sigil to take advantage of because if the enemies hit you hard enough, you can very quickly die and get a game over. This brings me to my biggest issue with the game…

The original version of Dragon Quest 1 only featured one-on-one battles. This meant that each fight had a “I go, you go, I go, you go” flow. In this new HD-2D version, you can oftentimes fight 6 or 7 enemies. And unless you spam a skill known as “Wild Side” for two turns instead of one, it’s quite challenging to win fights where 5-6 enemies are attacking you. And Wild Side simply doubles your input. So let’s say you have Wild Side activated and would like to heal yourself and then attack an enemy- you can’t. Instead, you’ll just end up healing yourself twice. It can take around 3 turns to set up your buffs and your Wild Side, and by the 4th turn those buffs and Wild Side will start to deactivate.

I am no Dragon Quest novice. I’ve beaten 1 Mobile, 3 SFC, 3 HD-2D, 4 DS, 5 DS, 8 and 11. This is genuinely the toughest experience I’ve had with the series. It really doesn’t feel balanced to the one-person-party thing they’ve got going on here.

There was some fan speculation due to developer interviews that perhaps they would implement a monster recruitment system a la DQ5. But no such system exists. So maybe during development they tried making the game around that and then abandoned it? It’s important to remind everyone that DQ3 HD-2D was announced almost 5 years ago and didn’t release until 2024. There was a fear amongst fans that it was cancelled, but we didn’t know at the time that DQ1+2 was happening. It’s possible that all three of these remakes were developed alongside each other and maybe some botched experiments with DQ1 led to this unbalanced feeling.

In the Dragon Quest series, there’s only a handful of ways to deal with large swarms of enemies at once. Whips allow you to hit a group (the same type) of enemies, not all of them. Boomerangs sacrifice damage in order to let you hit every enemy in one turn. And spells like Boom or Kaboom let you damage every enemy. Unless I missed something extremely obvious, I didn’t obtain Boom or Kaboom. And unlike in previous games, merchants do not sell boomerangs. You can only find boomerangs in chests (the first one isn’t even in a chest, just hidden by a tree) or by trading mini medals.

I say all this because I truly don’t feel like this game is balanced enough for one playable character. Especially when enemies start inflicting status effects such as sleep or paralysis on you.

While it’s certainly no “proof” that I’m right, it is noteworthy that there’s quite a few threads on websites like Reddit or Gamefaqs complaining about the same things I am.

Midway through my playthrough I decided to start exploring more and popped on a few podcasts while I grinded Metal Slimes and Liquid Metal Slimes (popular grinding enemies in DQ due to extremely high EXP output). Even after finding optional super armor like Erdrick’s Armor and hours of grinding Metal Slimes, I still found this game brutally hard.

Story:

To series outsiders, it may seem strange that Square Enix released these remakes in the order they did. But it becomes obvious why they did fairly quickly. Without spoiling anything too much, DQ3 is a prequel to 1 and 2.

It’s fun to hear characters in DQ1 praise Erdrick and the people who helped him on his fabled quest, because that was you- you were Erdrick! It’s like the Spider-Man meme of him pointing at himself.

With the original release of the game, there was an almost Saturday morning cartoon vibe to the story:

“The Dragonlord kidnapped the Princess of Gwaelin and it’s up to you to save her!”

That’s it! That’s all you needed to know for your adventure. The sparse dialogue gave the original game a foreboding sense of loneliness. But with the tons and tons of added dialogue and cutscenes, the HD-2D version of DQ1 feels like a slog that takes itself far too seriously.

Overall:

This new version of Dragon Quest 1 will probably satisfy new fans. The story is expanded upon, the added abilities add more depth, and everything looks and sounds great.

But for old-school fans of DQ and JRPGs, this feels like a substantially different game. Dragon Quest has long been the comfort food of JRPG fans; not something you have to think too deeply on. But in DQ1 HD-2D, you really need to “lock in” for 90% of battles due to poor balancing. The scroll system feels pointless in a game with one playable character. And the constant cutscenes and dialogue really comes off as padding.

Overall, I felt neutral about Dragon Quest 1 HD-2D.

(In an effort to move away from traditional numerical scores, I will use the following metric: Hated, Felt Neutral, Liked, Loved, Can’t Stop Thinking About)