Dragon Quest (2019) [Switch]

“Exchange information, learn to talk sensibly about any subject, learn to express your thoughts, accept new ones, examine them, analyze. Think objectively. Think toward the future.”

-Anne McCaffrey, The Dragonriders of Pern: Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon

I’ve completed my very first Dragon Quest game, at last!

Even after years of playing video games, I have never played any Dragon Quests, and that’s coming from a guy who loves old RPGs and JRPGs, or proto-RPGs as my good friend the Iron Mage phrased it in his Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior review for NES. For whatever reason, whether sloth or downright indifference, I passed right by the Dragon Quest series. Breaking into it was made even worse (in my head) thanks to the numerous DQ entries that have come out. What’re we up to eleven of these, already? But I knew in my heart of hearts that if I was going to get into this series at all, I needed to start with the first game. Still, that task, even for someone who loves retro games, was pretty daunting. Retro JRPGs aren’t always renown for their polish. Indeed they’re rudimentary, as innovative as they were in their own right, removed from the improvements to vital systems made over time.

This is why I jumped at the opportunity to snag the Dragon Quest trilogy, the three original games, when they released on Switch.

I went even further: I decided I wanted to add them to my physical collection. That meant ordering them from Play-Asia, which I’d never done before. The ordering part was just fine, and I expected a long shipping time, but my local post office lost the package and it turned into a big ol’ mess… long story short: I finally got a hold of Dragon Quest 1+2+3 for Nintendo Switch and I finished DQ1!

What struck me most about the whole experience was just how short the game really is. Of course I wasn’t expecting some 100-hour epic the likes of a modern AAA action-RPG, but I also wasn’t expecting a mere handful of dungeons and bosses. What clued me into its brevity right away was just how small your character’s inventory is. It fills up easily with a few pieces of equipment and some consumables, making even fitting key items into your sack a trial in micromanagement. I soon found myself grinding to purchase really expensive gear, then plowing through a chunk of the game, grinding then plowing, grinding then plowing, then finding myself at the last castle. Most of the time was taken up grinding, and I was happy to discover Gold Golems that dropped a ton of filthy lucre.

Honestly, I compared most of my experience to playing the first Final Fantasy, a game that I found much longer and more difficult, requiring more strategy and care. I knew that Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest had been rivals back in the day, so I suppose the comparison was inevitable. While there are a lot of similarities between the two, it’s easy to see the many differences, as well. Dragon Quest has only one playable character, only one core save point, it has magic keys that disintegrate upon use, no inkling of a job or class system, a completely different battle screen perspective, apparent connectivity with its sequel, and so on.

It does however share unnamed heroes with Final Fantasy. The singular unnamed vagrant in Dragon Quest arrives at castle Tantegel. I named him “Hero”. I used to do this a lot with older RPGs, so it felt natural.

As it turns out, Hero is a descendant of heroes, from the line of Erdrick, a now mythic figure who once fought against the Dragonlord, a fiendish magical mastermind that has captured Tantegel’s Princess Gwaelin and shrouded the land in darkness and despair. Erdrick’s descendant must do what Erdrick never could: defeat the Dragonlord and rescue the princess. It’s an epic straight out of a fairy tale.

Crossing the land and uncovering ancient artifacts, the Hero acquires the Mark of Erdrick to prove his lineage, as well as the Sunstone and Staff of Rain to build the Rainbow Drop bridge to the isle of the Dragonlord. It’s deep at the bottom of Charlock’s dank dungeons that the Dragonlord awaits, clutching the Ball of Light that can restore goodness and health to the world. As simple as this story is, we’ll come to see in a moment why it represented such a crucial shift in the history of game development.

Really, I played it for its historical interest for this Dragon Quest Nintendo Switch review.

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 4/10

The original 1986 Dragon Quest appeared on NES/Famicom, and it would later be remade for Super Famicom and Game Boy Color, but this Switch collection seems to draw most heavily from 16-bit era graphics. The backgrounds in particular are very reminiscent of JRPGs from the Super NES. However, the graphics attempt to straddle three visual styles, unsuccessfully in my opinion.

While the backgrounds look like they belonged to the SNES, the character sprites resemble something you’d find in RPG Maker or on Steam. There’s a big difference visually between the size and shape of the pixels used in the sprites vs the backgrounds, and they don’t fit well together. The character sprites look as if they’d been manually shrunk in order to fit over the backgrounds. And then there’s the matter of the battles, set from a first-person perspective so you’re looking at a framed monster and landscape. This allowed the original game to craft more fully realized and detailed enemy sprites based on the artwork of Akira Toriyama. But in this remake, the enemies have been re-rendered as digital drawings, not at all pixelated. Because they’re separated for battles and not roaming over the 16-bit countryside, the effect isn’t as jarring as with the character sprites, but it is a clash of styles nonetheless. Of anything, this made me want to play the original game the most.

As it stands, Dragon Quest isn’t going to impress anyone with its war of aesthetics, but it is at least an intelligible adaptation of the original game’s graphics. Its best feature are the fights against an elaborate Toriyama bestiary.

 Audio: 7/10

Chirpy chiptunes have been replaced with more organic orchestration. The music in Dragon Quest on Switch remains catchy. The modern revision simply makes it easier to listen to at length. Oddly, a few artifacts from the era were preserved in the score, such as a fanfare which plays at the end of every battle, a single rising trill that had me reach for the volume button. Beyond that, though, I think this is a pretty decent soundtrack, if limited. Its limitations are easy to come to grips with, given this was originally an NES game, after all.

Sometimes it’s more Dragon Ball than Dragon Quest…

Gameplay: 7/10

I would call Dragon Quest’s gameplay fairly traditional. Journeying from town to town, battling random encounters, learning spells as your hero levels up by gaining experience, purchasing equipment with money dropped from monsters… these are all familiar RPG gameplay tropes. However, Dragon Quest threw me for a loop with its single playable character. This makes every battle a 1v1 duel, oftentimes an exercise in knowing when to heal while still keeping up the damage output.

As someone who became accustomed to JRPGs according to Final Fantasy, this was a bit of a shock, and something I had to be conscious of throughout the game. The times I died I chalked up to not paying close enough attention to the hero’s health points, though there are no game overs here: dying returns you to Tantegel castle before the throne of King Lorik, who saves your game. This was another shock. The only save point in the game isn’t the most accessible on all of DQ’s loosely spiral-shaped world map. You do learn a Zoom spell that can teleport you there, but you will have to hoof it back out into the world all over again from this point several times, made slightly less wearisome by a spell that prevents easier monsters from encountering you all over again. Oh, and I should note though that upon dying, I noticed I lost something like half of my gold. That can be quite a blow to the spirit of determination when saving up 14000+ gold for the Silver Shield, or some such.

Fortunately, this Switch re-release comes with a single-slot quick save option that can be accessed at any point in the game, dramatically reducing difficulty as you can save right before a boss fight and try it as many times as you like.

Dungeons are dark, so you need to use a torch or the Glow spell to light the way.

 Narrative: 6/10

While the story is indeed rudimentary, perhaps even infantile in the sense of its age in this medium, especially from the vantage point of modernity where we’re treated to real actors, gigantic in-game universes, and cutscenes as long as short films, Dragon Quest represented an epoch in the context of video game storytelling. Sure, it relied on the weary premise of rescuing the princess, but realize that it didn’t set that as the final goal, one. Secondly, it presented its story as part of a larger one. More than just the fulfillment of some vague prophecy, Dragon Quest’s hero came from a long line of heroes, and the player discovers the fragments of this saga through the NPCs of the game. This gives Dragon Quest an internal sense of history. Playing the game provides the sensation of walking across a land that’s already been tread, following in the footsteps of Erdrick and “thinking his thoughts after him”, to borrow a phrase from Kepler.

We are now so accustomed to our game worlds having their timelines, myths, and histories built-in that it’d be easy to miss the importance of Dragon Quest playing it for the first time blind in 2019. But this is not a minimalist indie game from the 2010’s. This is a detailed vintage game from the 1980’s. That distinction is significant.

I’m even more interested in seeing how the mythos of Erdrick cycles through the next two games in the series.

 Challenge: 4/10

As mentioned, the quick save feature goes a long way in making Dragon Quest easier to play. Constantly dying can wear down your coffers! I can’t be sure, but while I spent a lot of time grinding (most of the time playing, in fact), I suspect there might have been even more of the stuff in the original release. Perhaps some balancing and glitch-fixing also made the road a little smoother. Dragon Quest rewards players that are willing to spend time with it, point blank. There’s no other way to overcome it other than with grinding and finding all of the required items to progress.

Luck, indeed. This was the hardest item to find on a blind playthrough and proved to be the one thing that made me consult a walkthrough.

 Accessibility: 9/10

One of Dragon Quest’s biggest innovations in the realm of the role-playing game came in making its systems and rules more transparent, more easily understood by a wider range of players, whereas previously RPGs filled a niche that only the hardcoriest were into. Like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest can (and should) be credited with popularizing the RPG and making it much more accessible. We enjoy modern games in this genre in part because of Dragon Quest’s simplifying of ideas, a game which from the earliest stages of development eschewed the arcane and opted for the plain. It has made numerous lists of most important games ever made for this very reason. As it turns out, there’s a big place for straightforward game design.

 Uniqueness: 6/10

Since I’m grading the re-release and not the original, I must needs lower the uniqueness score. Dragon Quest was a landmark title that took the Famicom by storm back in the day but these days, there are too many competing titles, even new ones, to consider. Or, as Iron Mage astutely pointed out, the late localization of the original game meant there were already lookalikes on the shelf. A few unique traits keep this particular score afloat, though: the singular hero, the changes to the “rescue the princess” cliche, and so on. Its dedication to archaic English is another thing worth mentioning. I think it’s done more successfully and elegantly here than in many modern titles that sound like they’re making it up as they go along, a la Octopath Traveler and the like confusing thees, thys, thines, and thousts. Can’t all be the King James Bible, I guess.

Personal: 7/10

In talking about my journey through Dragon Quest for the first time, someone asked me if I would recommend it. I suppose that’s the crux of any friendly discussion about games and their value, but I’m hesitant to put a “yes” on Dragon Quest. That’s due in no small part to its many time-wasting features and its lack of improvements that would later be made to the genre it helped popularize. Something like not being able to buy multiple items at once is frustrating in its strict adherence to historical accuracy, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Thus we cometh to the fact that Dragon Quest 1+2+3 is ironically made for a niche crowd (those who want to play games for their historical value or those who like vintage JRPGs), whereas the original release was made for a wider audience and not a niche crowd. If you find yourself a fan of modern RPGs at large, odds are you won’t get hooked by Dragon Quest, though you can assure yourself that it’s a short experience should you decide to stick it out. But if you enjoy retro gaming and discovering new (to you) titles for the first time, learning more about them and through them the origins and roots of gaming, then you’ll find lots to enjoy here, just like I did. Things matter to those to whom they matter, and it’s clear that the DQ trilogy re-release is for fans (I had to get it from Play-Asia with its foreign language cover design because DQ has been more historically popular in Japan than in the West). Don’t forget about the whole point of having to get it imported.

I suppose this is the fairest recommendation I can give, and I’ll add to it that I’m excited to dig into Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line… right now!

Aggregated Score: 6.3

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.