Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake makes me feel like I'm sipping on warm cocoa, minimal meddling keeping these oldies golden

As Y2K fashion trends dominate Tik Tok, Stranger Things and the 2010s rush to capitalize on the ‘80s feels like a distant memory – with noughties nostalgia now Hollywood’s hot new ticket. A return trip to Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake makes it seem as though someone forgot to send Square Enix the memo. While nu metal bands once again fill arenas and indie devs swap sprite-based sidescrollers for PS1-style polygons, Square Enix is turning the clock back to where the Japanese RPG began – 1989’s Dragon Warrior.

Yes, Dragon Warrior. Released back on Nintendo's very first console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), in the United States the humble Dragon Quest went by a different name. Europe, on the other hand, didn't get a single taste of the Dragon Quest fruit until 2004's Dragon Quest 8 on PS2. Overworlds, turn-based battles, stats – in Japan, these early NES titles that make up Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake popularized the RPG conventions that are vital to the genre now, laying the groundwork for the all-conquering Final Fantasy.

Quest log

Now, in a bid to reintroduce Dragon Quest to the world, Square Enix is finishing what it started last November with Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake. Taking a confusingly Star Wars-like approach to storytelling, Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake picks up where last year’s luscious prequel left off. Telling the tale of King Erdrick, these first two titles actually conclude the high fantasy trilogy's storyline, lovingly preserving and repackaging these pioneering pixel RPGs by blowing the dust off and imbuing them with some much-needed spit and polish.

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Put into the pointy leather shoes of the unimaginatively named Hero, this double pack is once again developed by the creators of Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler, Team Asano. As the charmingly rendered sprites designed by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama shuffle across sharply rendered backgrounds, it’s impossible not to smile – even seven years after Octopath Traveler first wowed us with its eye-catching HD-2D art style.

If you've ever played a sprite-based RPG, you can't resist the charms of this cozy little remake. These expressive little sprites and comfortingly simple story capture that feeling of having your head buried in a Game Boy during long childhood car rides – and as I dive into Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake at Square Enix HQ, I’m immediately transported to a simpler age. Where Final Fantasy 7 Remake fundamentally changes the feel of the original – for better and for worse – playing these shiny Dragon Quest remakes today feels like a platonic ideal of an RPG, the rose-tinted memory of 8-bit and 16-bit epics in your head.

Like the best remakes, this double pack captures the charm of a bygone era while imbuing it with all the modern gaming luxuries that we now take for granted. Everything on your journey now exists to make the core adventuring as enjoyable as possible, giving players the options to remove the genre’s arcane annoyances or to opt to play with them sadistically intact. The most obvious quality of life improvements are to the battle system, once again transforming the archaic grind of NES turn based battling into a furiously fast frenzy or even a skippable afterthought, letting players toggle auto battle and switch between four different battle speeds.

Death is less of a hair-pulling frustration this time around, too. If your entire party falls on the battlefield, you can count on the modern magic of autosave to instantly let you replay the fight again, skipping a frustrating retracing of footsteps. Where these classic RPGs often had your objective uttered once by an NPC and then immediately forgotten, here, any time you speak to someone, you can choose to commit the last thing you heard to memory, ensuring that you always know what your objective is, even if you've booted your 20 hour save file again after a four month absence.

Churches still allow you to save manually in classic fashion, as well as letting you buff your party. Yet each party member’s individual death remains refreshingly old school. Slain party members can only be resurrected by visiting your local church, their corpse following you in a comically rendered coffin sprite until they’ve been revived. In true Catholic fashion, though, you must cough up gold in order to receive this divine blessing, of course.

The battlefields are bursting with newfound personality. In a nice touch, backdrops to turn based battles match the background of wherever you’re standing in the overworld map. Grass sways in the wind behind an army of slime, casting a sizz spell scorches a murder of stark ravens with a vibrant flame.

Yet like with last year’s Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, it’s the lavish fully orchestrated soundtrack that really seals the deal. Performed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, those once distorted 8 bit bleeps and warbles have been utterly transformed into cinema-worthy scores, with battles and exploration transformed into rousing jaunts, each soaring string section putting a spring in your step. In a nice touch, the lush modern orchestra is broken up with authentically distorted bitcrushed battle noises, with those classic level up and door opening noises left pleasingly intact.

Voice of reason

Like with the third game's overhaul, pivotal story moments across these two games also get the fully voice acted treatment, with players able to experience the delightful melodrama in English or Japanese. Non-voiced dialogue is still charming enough, mixed with your classic ye olde text crawl, or even brought to life between important characters with expressive anime style animations appearing above their head with a Golden Sun-esque charm.

Where many games have become increasingly complex, Square Enix have smartly opted to make the core adventuring as simple as possible. Tutorials pop up explaining what items do, and these optional quality of life improvements remove the frustrating quirk that makes it a pain to return to these early RPGs today, ironing out the kinks and turning these classics into a breezy good time. The map system is a lifesaver, too, allowing you to always see your objective on the map, saving hours of frustration by eliminating aimless wandering.

I only get twenty minutes with each game, with Dragon Quest 2 being party-focused like the NES original. Yet during my time with the first game, as I save a villager from a monster-ridden town, he enthusiastically encourages me to capture any monsters I see roaming the overworld – a nod to Dragon Quest 5 and the Dragon Quest Monsters games. Whether these monsters are purely collectable and remain in an arena in town (as is the case in Dragon Quest 3), or are partymon pals that fight alongside you a-la Dragon Quest 5, however, still remains to be seen.

While games like Sea of Stars provide quirky love letters to their genre forefathers, Square Enix has instead opted to just let you replay the classics with minimal meddling, polishing their rust soaked code into a pleasingly accessible new package. Whether you're slaying your first slimes in Alefgard or the thought of playing Dragon Warrior on a CRT makes you embarrassingly misty eyed, it's hard not to be charmed by this loving ode to gaming past.

The playable equivalent of sipping a steaming hot chocolate on a frosty winter evening, I feel a wave of warm, fuzzy nostalgia wash over me throughout my demo – despite not even being born when the original hit shelves. It’s the perfect mix of 8-bit charm with modern sheen, and once again leaves me crying out for Game Freak to remake those classic Pokemon games in this gorgeous art style. While Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake are largely a continuation of what Square did with the third game, these lovingly made refreshes are shaping up to be a wonderfully accessible way to experience a crucial piece of gaming history.

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