While Final Fantasy has been popular in the US since the first game hit the original Nintendo Entertainment System decades ago, another franchise that equally shaped the roleplaying game genre, Dragon Quest, took longer to catch on here.
Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the original Dragon Quest's release in the US -- where it was titled Dragon Warrior -- making it a great time for a rerelease of the game so that veterans and newcomers can adventure with the hero Erdrick and appreciate gaming history. Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake came out Oct. 30 for PC and current consoles, giving the venerable games some quality-of-life upgrades along with a refreshing graphical facelift.
Masaaki Hayasaka, producer of Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake, who has worked on all of Square Enix's other HD-2D games. Square Enix
It's the modernizing touch that's become a hallmark of the HD-2D series of games -- from Octopath Traveler to Triangle Strategy to Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake -- and who better to explain their signature style than Masaaki Hayasaka, producer on the new game who's been involved in each of the previous titles in the informal HD-2D series of games.
Hayasaka was too young for the original Dragon Quest, but grew up playing Dragon Quest 7 (released in 2000), the last of the series to be released with 2D pixels before it switched to 3D. It makes sense that he'd make a career venerating older game styles and modernizing them for current players. When we chatted over a Zoom call, sitting behind him in his personal office were posters for three movies and games that held great meaning to him: Star Wars: A New Hope, Interstellar, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
The HD-2D style is just one way that game developers have attempted to evoke the look and feel of two-dimensional, hand-drawn "sprite" graphics that were the cutting edge of gaming until the industry switched to 3D polygons in the mid-1990s. Some retro-looking games, such as Celeste and Stardew Valley, have attempted to strictly emulate the blocky 2D graphics of games from the NES and Super NES eras. But the HD-2D style subtly blends 3D elements in the background -- buildings, water effects, light flares and shadow effects -- that make the 2D character sprites pop.
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"We were trying to accomplish the effect of something like a miniature garden," Hayasaka told me via an interpreter. "They want to have this sense of density in the space. There are these 16-bit sprites within the environments, but then to make it not just look like the pixel sprites are placed and just left there, we employed effects like having the particles of dust moving, the leaves floating. There are shadows and sunlight. And that all creates this sense of density within the environment that makes it HD-2D."
The HD-2D style preserves enough hallmarks of the original games while quietly updating other elements for modern tastes. It makes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake arguably the best version of the title for gamers to experience, whether they're returning veterans like CNET game reviewer Oscar Gonzalez or total newcomers to the classic game -- which, alongside Final Fantasy, defined the Japanese RPG genre.
"I think that playing this game will really allow the users of today to touch and experience Dragon Quest history … and [what it] has contributed to JRPG history," Hayasaka said.
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