We recently had a chance to visit the Square Enix offices in Los Angeles and to get some hands-on time with the HD remakes of two vital NES-era games, Dragon Quest I and II. If you’re from the older generation of gamers, you may have known Dragon Quest I by its localized title, Dragon Warrior in 1989. The franchise has been massively successful in Japan as Dragon Quest since its inception, but was referred to as Dragon Warrior in North America until the release of Dragon Quest VIII. These new remakes are stunning reboot of these classic games. The games follow what fans have come to know as the Erdrick Trilogy,  following the legendary hero Erdrick and his descendants. Dragon Quest III chronologically takes place first in the story, so Square Enix rebooted Dragon Quest III first before coming to parts I and II of the story.

The original Dragon Warrior (as it was then known in the USA) seems positively prehistoric in comparison to this redux. In its time, it was a beautiful and expansive RPG game, allowing the character to fight inventive monsters, level up, cast spells and what now may look like a somewhat blocky experience. But it was a top-down experience with a blocky character traversing obviously square panels. This Dragon Quest I reboot is a veritable whole new imagining in a completely modern color palette. The game is gorgeous, using a luminous twisted 2D perspective with beautiful music. As with the original, the character starts in a church, and you must name them yourself. There was an enormous introductory town and castle to explore we got lost almost immediately just wandering and chatting with the town’s various denizens, honestly blowing too much of the precious little time we had with DQ1. We moved on from the town and began the character’s initial journey. In an updated treatment (evoking the original but with a fully redesigned combat system) we started to face random encounters in the country. We fought the title standard slime monsters in the style of a “Bubble Slime.” We also took down a Ratslace, Lunatick and various Ghosts on our way to a dungeon to see if we would win the legendary hero’s favor.

Time running short we shifted to Dragon Question II. Just like DQI, the game was beautifully rendered, and we were encouraged to head straight for the main mission of reaching Moonbrooke Castle. We were also told by PR reps on the scene the game would feature enhanced cut scenes and eventually (not yet present in these previews) voice acting for those scenes. We headed through the game’s lush countryside and faced a comparable bevy of monsters. The controls allow for complete toggle of battle speed, including letting the computer decide for you how the characters should fight. We favored the mid speed so things didn’t go too fast and we had time to make choices. We took down numerous beasties including corpse generals, legerdemain, smog (looks pretty much what it sounds like—a cute cloud monster), dragonfry, cumulus (yup, another cute cloud), skeleton scrapper and even badboons. In spite of getting distracted by item caches in the wilderness, we made it to Moonbrooke Castle to learn of a tragedy that befell the family of one of the main characters. Even that small piece just visually breathtaking seeing the guts of the run-down castle. All in all, these remakes look like amazing remakes of such NES-era classics. It’s only a shame we just had such a short time to dabble with each. You could easily lose yourself in each for hours just looking at it all.