Wilt thou slay the Dragonlord? No? But thou must! Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake is the worst title for what is one of the best video games of the year. Yeah, I’m not really burying the lede on this one, I had an absolute blast with this game – these TWO games, really. In a world where some companies want to charge you $80 for a single video game, Square Enix is over here charging $60 for 2. Now, if you’re a fan of the originals on the NES, you might be wondering if these live up to those classics. If you’ve never played the originals, you might be wondering if these work well as modern-day JRPGs. I’ll be getting into both of those topics, so stick with me. Now, both games play extremely similarly, but there are enough differences that it’s probably worth me breaking this review into two so I can cover each one’s unique elements. Then I’ll hit on the things they have in common together. Okay? Okay. First up, Dragon Quest 1.
Dragon Quest 1
Dragon Quest 1, or Dragon Warrior as I knew it back in the days before my knees hurt all the time, was the first JRPG I ever played, long before I even knew what an RPG was or that J was a country. It showed up mysteriously in the mail one day, and I fell in love with it. Most games had me running to the right and jumping on platforms, but this game gave me a whole world to explore. The characters all talked funny, like Shakespeare – or so I thought, boy was I in for a surprise when I got to high school and read Shakespeare for the first time. Those thees and thous in Dragon Warrior were downright understandable compared to the frickin’ bard. But yeah, here was a game that let me explore forests and caves and mountains and fight all sorts of monsters. I was hooked. I was also terrible at it, so I couldn’t beat it. I don’t think I even came particularly close. Regardless, this game has always been really important to me, so I was equal parts excited and nervous about the remake. I played and reviewed Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D last year, and it was beautiful and the gameplay was solid, but it didn’t do it for me in terms of story, so I figured this would be much the same. Surprisingly, I was dead wrong. The story of the original is the barest of bones: Hero must save princess from dragon and defeat Dragonlord to save kingdom. That’s kinda it. Oh, and I guess you’re the descendant of someone named Erdrick, but that’s not all that important. The remake takes that premise and, while hitting all the major points, expands on it all so significantly. Not just through expanded dialog, but through new characters and brand new events that make the world of Alefgard feel so much more real. It’s a place populated with people who are trying to live their lives, they have relationships and struggles. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a pretty barebones story in the grand scheme of JRPGs, but it’s so much more fleshed out than it’s ever been. Additional story quests have been added to tie the game more tightly into the trilogy, with a ton of references to Dragon Quest 3 and more that lays the groundwork for the events of Dragon Quest 2. That’s the benefit of having the history of the prequel – when they made the original, they hadn’t planned Dragon Quest 3 yet, so they didn’t know where they were going to take it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, they can make this game feel like a vital piece of the puzzle.
Like I said, I don’t want to oversell the story. This is a remake of the earliest JRPG to ever hit the West, so don’t expect a level of complexity like Final Fantasy VII or Dragon Quest XI. But as a fan of the original, I was so incredibly charmed by the whole thing – from the way it tackles the plot points of the original to the way it seamlessly weaves in the new elements to tie it all together. If you’re coming in brand new, just set your expectations appropriately and you’ll have a good time. This is a classic tale, and while you might be surprised by the turn of events once or twice, you’re going to enjoy the overall experience much more if you just let yourself relax into it.
The gameplay has been changed about as much as the story, which means there are some really cool new additions. The biggest, and the thing that caught my attention first, is the fact that you now face multiple enemies at one time. In the original, every single random battle was a one-on-one fight. Now, there’s really no limit. Enemies might attack singularly, but most often they’re going to be in groups. The game is using the same engine as Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D, so if you’re familiar with that game, you won’t have much to adapt to here. I was afraid the multiple enemies would cause the game to become unbalanced. After all, you’d think your options for strategizing would be pretty diminished without a party. But they made some very smart changes to your abilities to account for that. In the original, you were a warrior, but you also learned a few useful spells, like Heal and Hurt, and eventually, Healmore and Hurtmore. (The lack of a Healmost and Hurtmost always confused me, to be honest.) But of course, magic power was limited, and if you had to stray far from a town and into a dungeon, you might run out and be left with nothing but your sword. The fights all being one on one helped mitigate this a bit, but in the remake, you’re not guaranteed a fair fight. So now, your hero has a lot more spells to learn as you level up, along with a whole ton of special abilities. These special abilities range from attacks that are particularly effective against certain types of monsters, like undead or beasts, to techniques that raise your evasion or defense. Right out of the gate, you’re a much more effective combat unit than the hero in the original game was. But beyond that, you can also find scrolls hidden throughout the game that teach you spells and abilities, so you can grow your character beyond what they might learn as they level up. By the end of the game, you’re basically a powerhouse, a whole adventuring party in one. That doesn’t mean the game is easy. I honestly felt like it was at first, that early difficulty spike you hit in the original just isn’t there. But there are a few points where the difficulty leaps through the roof and strangles the heck out of you, and I definitely wasn’t ready for it the first time it happened. If I had a major criticism of the combat in this remake, it’s that, in some of these super tough fights, sometimes they’re over long before they’re actually over. What I mean is, enemies will knock your health down so far that all you can reasonably do is heal yourself; but there are multiple enemies, each of which is going to attack you in the next round, which completely undoes whatever good your healing did. You can struggle against the inevitability of this and hope the AI does something stupid to give you an opening, but it’s unlikely. You can retry boss battles, but random battles can’t be retried right away – you go back to your last Autosave, which is not terrible, since the game autosaves after every fight, but it’s still frustrating to know it’s hopeless but still feel compelled to try. This is why a party is so much better, and it’s why, despite how much enjoyment I got out of Dragon Quest 1, I was so excited to start Dragon Quest 2.
Dragon Warrior on the NES was like a back-of-the-napkin outline for what THIS game ultimately is. This is the full potential of that classic. The only way I could find this any better is if they included the original game as well, so that it’s easier for people who don’t still own the old hardware to compare. But man, this game is an achievement. I feel like I just had a smile on my face for so much of this. There were parts that made me laugh out loud, and even a scene or two that legitimately tugged at my heartstrings. It didn’t completely subvert my expectations – it’s still Dragon Quest 1, so it can’t change things up TOO much without risk of derailing the whole Erdrick trilogy – but it met and exceeded my expectations anyway. Now… moving on to Dragon Quest 2, the game which has always been very near the top of my favorite Dragon Quest games list. How does it hold up?
Dragon Quest 2
I don’t have the same history with Dragon Warrior 2 that I had with the original. I knew about it, I read all about it in Nintendo Power, but I never asked for it for my birthday or Christmas or whatever. I think I was a little bit afraid, to be honest. I struggled with the first game, so no way I’d be able to handle one that’s even bigger. And Dragon Quest 2 is BIGGER. Very early on in the original experience, you put together a party of three. There’s your silent hero, along with the Prince of Cannock and the Princess of Moonbrook. Years and years later, when I finally played the Gameboy Color version of Dragon Quest 2, I pretty quickly fell in love with it. For years since then, it’s been at or very near the top of my favorite Dragon Quests list. So I had much higher expectations for Dragon Quest 2 HD-2D than I’ve had for any of the others. And this game lives up to those expectations. And maybe even exceeds them.
There’s a lot to talk about with this game, so I’m going to break this up into sections of its own. I’ll start with the story.
DQ2: Story
The overall story in a Dragon Quest game tends to be a bit simplistic, especially compared to a lot of the other juggernauts in the JRPG space. Typically you are some sort of hero, and you journey with a party of companions to defeat some sort of evil. That largely describes almost every Dragon Quest game. However, where the real joy in Dragon Quest reveals itself is in the smaller stories that happen along the way. This was something I was a bit critical of in the Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D remake last year. The small stories in each region felt underbaked, and a large part of that was because you didn’t just have a silent protagonist this time around, but an ENTIRE PARTY of silent heroes. No personalities, no conflict. The characters couldn’t react to events that happened in each new town or dungeon, they just moved forward, killed bad guys, saved the day. Dragon Quest 2 HD-2D is different. We meet the Princess of Moonbrook right away, as her kingdom is overrun by monsters. There’s genuine tension and pathos on display as her father desperately tries to keep her safe while preparing for his last stand. A survivor of the attack manages to drag himself to the Kingdom of Midenhall, where the king sends his son – the prince, i.e. YOU – to see what happened. On the way, you stop by to pick up your cousin, the Prince of Cannock, but you’re waylaid a bit by the fact that he’s stepped out. Instead, you team up with his sister, the Princess of Cannock, to try and track him down. Eventually you find him, you meet up with the Princess of Moonbrook, and the three of you get on with the adventure. But even if you’ve played the original and seen all these events play out in 8-bit form, there’s so much more to love about this version. The characters have so much charm, and just seeing them interact already makes this leagues better than the Dragon Quest 3 remake in my book. Moonbrook is driven by a need for revenge, and Cannock understands this, but he frequently acts as a sort of calming agent to her raging temper. Not to suggest that the characters don’t get along – honestly, their friendship feels so sincere and heartfelt that more than once I found myself literally almost brought to tears by their dialog. This is powerful storytelling, and it manages to do this in what is still ultimately a pretty basic frame.
Since this is a remake of a game from the 1980s, you won’t be surprised to learn that most of the major “events” that happen involve you traveling to a new dungeon in order to acquire one of the mystical stones or knicknacks that you’ll need to advance. If you focus in on how basic that feels, it might put you off a bit. But again, this is why I think Dragon Quest 2 succeeds so much more than Dragon Quest 3 did. While your goal in each chapter of the story is pretty simplistic, basically nothing more than grabbing the next MacGuffin, it’s the stories that happen around the goal that make the overall plot worthwhile. Because your characters have personalities and histories and quirks of their own, they’re able to interact with the people they meet in interesting ways. They get into conflicts, they make friends, they do the sorts of things you want to see happen in a big, epic, JRPG story like this.
I mentioned the changes made to the plot in Dragon Quest 1, and Dragon Quest 2 has some changes of its own. The biggest and most obvious is the addition of the fourth party member, the Princess of Cannock. Her addition brings fun sibling bickering between her and the Prince of Cannock, as well as yet another distinct personality to throw into the mix. She’s a bit younger than the rest, so she’s therefore a bit more compulsive and rambunctious. It’s clear to me from this that the team is willing to stretch themselves outside of the bonds that a lot of fans want to keep them in. There’s this idea that Dragon Quest as a series is all about tradition, and anything that breaks with that tradition is anathema to the series. Each game is like a holy text, and changing things is the equivalent of blasphemy. But to me, the “traditions” of Dragon Quest have always been more about the little things – the things that I think most people would agree aren’t really all that important anyway. Certain sound effects, certain monsters, spell names, puff-puff. But Dragon Quest has been very willing to take big swings and experiment in some pretty significant ways. Think about Dragon Quest 4 introducing multiple main characters whose stories are told in chapters, leading up to uniting with the main hero for the finale. That was bold and completely out there; not something you expect to see from a series that is supposedly so steeped in its traditions. I say that to basically say, they made the right call in adding the Princess of Cannock to the roster. Her interactions with the other characters are incredibly fun, and she’s a joy to have in the group. I’m all for DQ taking more big swings in future remakes, because with Dragon Quest 1 and 2, they’ve proven they know what they’re doing.
Dragon Warrior 2 was a huge step forward for JRPGs back in the day, there’s no doubt about that. But this game is able to truly realize the potential of the original story, and it elevates the whole experience so much. I really can’t say enough good about it. The writing, the performances, the humor, everything is just perfectly spot on. I love it.
DQ2: Combat
If you’ve played any Dragon Quest, you know how the combat goes. That’s one of the benefits of being a series fan – you’re not going to be thrown for a loop when a new game comes out. And even though this is a remake of a very old classic, in many ways it feels like an entirely new game. The framework is there, but even just in terms of gameplay there’s so much more. Your four party members are balanced out in their own unique ways. The hero is pure muscle, no magic but a ton of powerful special abilities and attacks. The Prince of Cannock is similar to the hero of the original – he’s a fighter, but he has access to some pretty good spells as well, even if magic isn’t his main focus. The Princess of Moonbrook takes over the full-time mage role, and she has the most variety of healing and stat boosting spells, along with debuffs to use against monsters. And the addition of the Princess of Cannock is a little bit of a wildcard. I mentioned a bit ago that she’s younger and more rambunctious than the rest of the group, and the game chooses to show that in an interesting way when it comes to combat. Now, you can set any and all characters to auto-battle and have them focus on specific things – like attacking all out or playing it safer, that sort of thing. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll set each character to Manual right away. I like having control over my characters, and honestly, that’s the “game” part of the video game for me. If it’s playing itself, I don’t really know why I’m here. But the Princess of Cannock doesn’t always play by these rules. You can set her to manual, and yeah, MOST of the time she’ll do what you tell her to do. But occasionally, she’ll run out with some crazy, random attack or buff, often things that aren’t even available to her on your menu. Usually, these are useful attacks on enemies or stat boosts for your party, things like that. Sometimes, though, they go wrong. For example, she’ll randomly pick up a large boulder and chuck it at the enemies. Sometimes, though, she misses, and it hits your team instead. It can be a real nuisance at times, especially when things are dire and you really need her to perform a particular action. Now, like I said, this only happens occasionally, maybe 10% of the time or less, but it’s odd. But other than her strange propensity to go off script, she’s similar to her brother in that she’s a mage and a fighter, but whereas the Prince leans more toward physical fighting, she leans more toward the mage end of the spectrum.
This four-person team is really the Dragon Quest battle system exemplified. I know a lot of people really enjoy character customization, you know, choosing what type of class each one is and deciding how to divvy up stat bonuses and things like that. But that’s never been for me. I think that’s part of why I struggled a bit with Dragon Quest 3 last year. Give me a ton of options, and I’m usually struck with choice paralysis. I much prefer having the game hand me a deck of cards and letting me decide how best to play them, rather than cobbling a deck together myself, if that makes sense. If you play it right, this is basically a dream team. Your team is so balanced here, in fact, that I never really felt like any particular battle was unwinnable. Well, except once – but that was kind of my fault, I went somewhere I definitely wasn’t supposed to be yet, and I got one-shotted by some horrific thing with a bunch of tentacles. That was my bad. In general, following along the critical path, I rarely felt underleveled, and that’s without doing much explicit grinding. For the most part, I just fought battles when they came up in the natural course of progression, and that kept me at just about the right level throughout. Your repertoire of spells and abilities is so huge, and the variety of enemies is so great, you’ll never get bored. I mean, at least I didn’t. And I have a relatively low tolerance for repetitive gameplay, so that says something.
Because Dragon Quest games steer so close to each other in terms of their combat, this game really does feel to me like the epitome of Dragon Quest gameplay. Which is funny, considering it’s Dragon Quest 2, and there are a bunch of games that “came after it.” One downside that I should mention, and it was the same in the Dragon Quest 3 remake as well – the default battle speed is SO… SLOW. Like, slow to a ridiculous level. Like why on earth does it take so long for everything to happen? I had to immediately change the speed to Ultra Fast, which is great, and honestly about what the speed should have been by default, but there’s a small downside: The text flies by really quickly. Most of the time, that’s no issue. If you pay attention to the lower center portion of the screen while actions are taking place, you won’t miss anything. But sometimes you just will. I understand why they wanted the text to scroll automatically, so you wouldn’t have to sit there hitting the confirm button over and over and over through every single fight. But the compromise between the hair-pullingly slow Normal speed and the better-in-every-other-way Ultra Fast is that you’ll occasionally miss some pertinent text. I think this could be fixed by adding a text log to the game – let me push the left trigger or something to bring up all the most recent battle text so I can see what I might have missed. But other than that, I really have no complaints about the battle system. To me, with these characters, it’s an improvement on every other Dragon Quest remake in just about every way.
DQ1&2: Aesthetics
Okay, this section really applies to both games, the same as it applies to Dragon Quest 3. These games are all being made on the same gorgeous HD-2D engine, and they all look fantastic. The soft focus, the water effects, the shading. It’s a really beautiful engine, and the games benefit from it a ton. Sprite animations outside of battle are simplistic in a not-exactly-great way, very stiff-legged walking animations and only a very small handful of other animations for each character. It’s not a big deal, but it’s something I’d love to see them improve on if and when we get an HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 4. Tons of indie JRPGs are being made these days in the old-school pixel style, and many of those are going the extra mile to make their sprites look beautiful in motion, and I’d love to see that same care given to these games. I do love that the designers took my feedback and actually created diagonal-facing sprites and animations for all the characters. I’m just kidding, I know they have no clue who I am, but I am legitimately very very glad they did that, because HD-2D games have been skimping out on diagonal animations for far too long. Hit me up in the comments if the lack of diagonal animations ever bothered you, I’m just curious if I’m the only lunatic out here.
The music is classic Koichi Sugiyama. The tracks you loved coming out of the 8-bit NES are here, but they’re fully orchestrated and beyond beautiful. If you’ve ever enjoyed a Dragon Quest soundtrack, you will love this. I do find myself wishing for a bit more variety in themes, though. Like, in the original game, every town had the same theme, and that was kind of the case for most JRPGs back then. But hearing the exact same theme presented in every town in a game in 2025 does feel a bit off. No matter how gorgeous the track is, there can come a point where you’d like to hear something else. Small complaint, and understandable, too, because Sugiyama isn’t around anymore to write any other tracks or variations on them, but worth noting.
Dragon Quest 1 & 2: A Quest for the Ages
It might sound hyperbolic for me to call this a masterpiece. I mean, maybe, but a lot of people already consider the originals to be masterpieces, too, right? And these are them, but MORE. More and BETTER. It’s not just the old games with a fresh coat of HD-2D paint and some modern conveniences. These are rebuilt from the ground up, reimagined into a form that feels to me like the truest version of these games. It’s a triumph not just in the creation of remakes, but in game design in general. It’s still got a lot of that old school difficulty at times, and there are still some “traditional” elements that might leave non-Dragon Quest fans scratching their heads, but those head scratching moments are going to be much fewer and further between than in any other version of these games for sure. Long-time fans, you’re already on board, so get this game and love it. Non-fans who are looking at this as an opportune time to jump onto the series, do it. Yes, this is the time. You’ve got the first three games in HD-2D with modern conveniences to enjoy RIGHT NOW. I know Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is coming soon, and I’m excited for that, but I really hope they give us remakes of 4, 5 and 6. I’d love for this whole series to be made super accessible for everyone, not just in terms of being physically able to play it, but in terms of the approachability these remakes have brought to the games. Masterpieces, both of them, and so long as you understand at a basic level what Dragon Quest is and what it’s doing, you will have a great time with these.