In fact, they’re all quite gorgeous examples of 8-bit art. Dragon Quest and its first two sequels were never aesthetically poor. It’s an insult to Dragon Quest, and more broadly shows how little respect many game developers have for the classics in the medium. These are tiny issues in the grand scheme of things, but it altogether creates the impression of a series of cheaply made ports, ported as cheaply as possible, with no thought to the prestige of the series or the integrity of the property. The action button isn’t anywhere near as responsive as it should be, and I found myself on many occasions reflexively pressing the button multiple times to try and hurry the action up. There’s a noticeable pause every time you encounter a random battle to the moment that the battle pops up on the screen. The programming itself is shoddier than you’d expect, too. Blown up to full screen, they clash painfully to the point of inducing headaches. Backgrounds, which do feature a degree of pixelation, clash horribly with the smoother character models, and the developer lost all control over colour in their original bid to make this all work on the (initially) tiny mobile screens. With these remakes the classic Slimes, Drackys and other monsters are more bland than the iconically cheerful mob that you expect from Dragon Quest. The sprites of modern Dragon Quest are “better”, in the sense that they feature smoother curves and greater details than what we saw in the 8-bit graphics from back on the NES, but aesthetically they are hard and ugly on the eyes, and exactly what you might expect from someone that decided to remake the games in RPG Maker using free, shoddy characters and enemy designs.
On the big screen, playing with the console docked, it’s even worse. On the Switch screen, the effect his hideous. Rather than bring us the original titles and original art, Square Enix, in its infinite wisdom, decided to instead bring us the “modern” versions of these games, which use the sprites and other “art” elements taken the mobile phone ports of each. The problem, to deal with the bugbear right from the start, is that these games all look absolutely terrible.
I’ve decided to lump the reviews of these together into one, because my thoughts on each is largely the same, and, being upfront, I’m equally annoyed by all three of them. On the same day, albeit arriving with far less fanfare, ports of the first three Dragon Quest titles also landed for download off the eShop. Last week the Nintendo Switch got a superb port of the most recent Dragon Quest title.
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