Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake Review

I received my first Dragon Quest – Dragon Quest III – as a birthday present in late 2001 on the Game Boy Color, and not only did it become one of my favorite JRPGs, it also sparked a love for the Dragon Quest games that came after; however, I’ve always had a hard time going back to the first two that started it all – and not for a lack of effort.

You see, I later picked up the Dragon Quest I & II bundle for Nintendo’s first colored handheld and found both too straightforward. Despite wanting to play each game in the Edrick trilogy, they took away my favorite aspect of Dragon Quest III: creating a party and changing classes. With a single hero in the first game and a set party in the second, I quickly put both down and didn’t attempt to play the second again until 2011 on the Wii. I never returned to the first.

As such, I have some experience with the first two Dragon Quest games but no particular attachment to them like I have with their sequel that canonically is a prequel; as a result, I’ve been cautiously optimistic leading up to the release of Dragon Quest I & II HD2D Remake. I adored what they did with Dragon Quest III HD2D Remake – a new class, more story elements added, reworked balance, and so on – that I could almost overcome my apprehension that any new updates wouldn’t be enough to modernize these titles from the 1980s.

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Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake expands the story to make Alefgard feel more alive.

After spending dozens of hours with both games, I’m happy to report that Square Enix has somehow succeeded in giving these classics a much-needed makeover both aesthetically and mechanically by turning their archaic weaknesses into strengths.

Adventuring Solo

Let’s start with Dragon Quest I, which stars a singular hero on this quest to defeat the Dragonlord. As a descendant of the hero from Dragon Quest III, it’s up to him to travel around Alefgard, enlisting the help of faeries, dwarves, and eccentric mages to collect magical keys and a handful of relics.

Square Enix has added a handful of characters that make this less of a lonely adventure, though they don’t join your party. Early on, there’s a bumbling group of adventurers that pop up now and again, as well as a more in-depth subplot for the royal guard that failed to protect Princess Gwaelin. While this is all surface-level storytelling, it does a great job at making Alefgard feel less like the generic fantasy backdrop it was in 1986 and more like a lived-in world.

Mechanically, there’s a handful of changes that make this a truly difficult Dragon Quest experience if you’re playing on the harder Draconian Quest difficulty – like I did – but still a challenging one on the regular difficulty. No longer are you battling enemies one-on-one; instead, you’ll often face several at once and need to utilize strategies you otherwise wouldn’t in other Dragon Quest games.

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You’re no longer one-on-one in Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake.

I frequently swapped between boomerangs and powerful single-strike weapons mid-battle while abusing Dodgy Dance to raise my evasion in normal encounters; bosses, on the other hand, required several attempts – and a little luck – to nail down a winning strategy.

The rematch feature, which allows you to start a boss battle over if you fail, came in clutch here. One mandatory fight saw my hero facing down four Dark Skeletons and a Knight Errant that would kill me in one turn. I equipped an Evasion Cloak along with agility-boosting accessories to make sure I survived that first turn before I worked out a strategy using Wild Side to take them all out with spells.

In other Dragon Quests, even on the Draconican Quest difficulty, I’d have just overwhelmed such foes with powerful spells and buffs combined with a dedicated healer, not bothering to change my equipment at all. DQ I HD-2D, on the other hand, challenged how I play Dragon Quest games, thus cementing itself as one of my favorite experiences in the series.

To learn new abilities to help with these battles, hidden scrolls that grant them are spread throughout Alefgard. Somehow, finding them makes exploration more rewarding than in DQ III HD-2D, yet at the same time, finding regular equipment – your leather shields and feathered caps – often comes paired with disappointment because, with only a singular hero, you can’t use the vast majority of it. It’s just fodder for merchants.

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The world of Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake looks fantastic.

A Beast of a Sequel

DQ I HD-2D is a short adventure, taking about 15 hours, but probably around 20 for a completionist seeking out all the mini-medals and other secrets spread about. Bite-sized and delicious, it was a mere appetizer for the huge game that it comes paired with.

Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake is a beast that surpasses DQ III in length. With plenty of new additions that better align it with the other two games, it plays almost like an entirely new adventure, clocking over 50 hours to finish. It also gave me whiplash when I switched over to it with a more cinematic opening, much more dialogue, a higher encounter rate, and a steeper difficulty than its HD-2D predecessor.

I actually had to drop down to the regular difficulty; otherwise, I wouldn’t have finished this review in time.

All three games in the Edrick trilogy follow a similar pattern: find a bunch of keys and relics and new methods of transportation before taking on some Big Bads. If you play them back-to-back like I did – I finished a second playthrough of DQ III HD-2D earlier this year – this can grow tiresome, no matter how much new content is added and reworked – especially because you’re visiting Alefgard thrice, though I did enjoy seeing how it changed from game to game.

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The characters have far more personality in Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake.

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The Princess of Cannock will join you now in Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake.

Tiring Travels

Unfortunately, in all three games, the overworld itself also looks much the same: green fields, darker green forests, sandy deserts, gray mountains, and that’s about it. I longed to see some unique textures and biomes, which thankfully arrived about halfway through DQ II HD-2D with an underwater realm to explore.

While an aesthetic change of pace, sailing below the waves mirrored the surface mechanically: there was nothing of note to find other than some sparkling item spots on the map while bouncing between story locations and dungeons.

Overall, I would’ve loved to see more of an evolution over DQ III HD-2D’s overworld – some diverse forests and jungles, some interesting hazards to navigate, that kind of thing. Instead, all the continents I traversed through three different games all kind of blurred together, which in turn made the massive DQ II HD-2D a bit of a slog by the end.

That criticism aside, Square Enix takes that aforementioned weakness – the lack of party customization – and turns it into a strength: the companions you travel with in Dragon Quest II HD-2D are now packed full of personality, making the adventure much more jovial and engaging.

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It can get a bit tiring exploring similar overworlds across all three games of the trilogy.

Memorable Friends

The Princess of Cannock, for instance, is a sassy, spirited girl who didn’t join the adventure in the previous versions of the game, but now escapes the watchful gaze of her father to bring the party total to four, though she doesn’t join until about halfway through. Her personality extends to combat, where she provides some incredibly useful support spells but often acts of her own will: she’ll taunt foes into raising their attacks, get distracted, and so on – much like the Gadabouts from DQ III.

On the other hand, her brother is a loose-lipped but earnest young man who provides quite a lot of comic relief. As a result, the interactions between the party members and the various characters you meet along the way give this entry into the Erdrick trilogy a strong identity of its own.

We all know by now that the HD-2D style, first adopted from Octopath Traveler, looks amazing; however, the real star here that I’ve neglected to mention thus far is the soundtrack. The fully orchestrated music in both the first and second Dragon Quests brings their worlds to life; while I didn’t have any particular nostalgia for either soundtrack, I now count them among some of the best in the series.

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There are many emotional beats in Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake.

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The underwater exploration adds a refreshing change to the overworld in Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake.

All told, Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake takes the two archaic classics and transforms them into JRPG masterpieces that better fit into the Edrick trilogy as a whole, despite how tiresome it can get to travel the same overworld again and again. I would’ve been happy with just a remake of one or the other, as Square Enix has gone above and beyond to show how remakes of classic games should be done by taking what made them difficult to go back and play and turning that into a strength that give them a new identity. Instead we got two fully revitalized adventures in one, making this package a must-own for any JRPG or Dragon Quest fan.