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While Final Fantasy has been very popular in the United States from the beginning game It arrived on the original Nintendo Entertainment System decades ago, and another franchise that helped shape the role-playing game genre, Dragon Quest, took even longer to get here.
Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of Dragon Quest’s original US release – where it was titled Dragon Warrior – making it a great time to re-release the game so veterans and newcomers can adventure with hero Erdrick and appreciate gaming history. Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake It was released on October 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.
It’s the retrograde touch that has become a hallmark of the HD-2D game series – from Octopath Traveler to Triangle Strategy to Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake – and who better to explain its distinctive style than Masaaki Hayasaka, the new game’s producer who has been involved with each of the previous titles in the casual HD-2D game series.
Hayasaka was too young for the original Dragon Quest game, but he grew up playing Dragon Quest 7 (released in 2000), the last of the series to be released in 2D pixels before it switched to 3D. It only makes sense that it would venerate old gameplay styles and update them for existing players. When we spoke via 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: Kingdom Tears.
The HD-2D style is just one way game developers have tried to evoke the look and feel of the hand-drawn 2D graphics that were the cutting edge of gaming until the industry switched to 3D polygons in the mid-1990s. Some retro-looking games, like Celeste and Stardew Valley, tried to strictly emulate the 2D graphics of games from the NES and Super NES eras. But the HD-2D mode skillfully blends 3D elements into the background — buildings, water effects, flares and shadow effects — that make the 2D characters pop.
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“We were trying to achieve the effect of something like a miniature garden,” Hayasaka told me through a translator. “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 look like the pixel sprites are just placed and left there, we used effects like dust particles moving, leaves floating. There are shadows and sunlight. It all creates this sense of density within the environment that makes it HD-2D.”
The HD-2D style maintains just enough of the character of the original games while quietly updating other elements for modern tastes. It makes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake the best version of the title for players to experience, whether they’re returning veterans like CNET Games reviewer Oscar Gonzalez or newcomers to the classic game — which, along with Final Fantasy, defined the Japanese RPG genre.
“I think playing this game will really allow users today to touch and experience the history of Dragon Quest… and what[it]has contributed to the history of JRPGs,” Hayasaka said.
The first Dragon Quest game is unique among the series in that it has players control a single character rather than a group of heroes. While it wasn’t that different from other RPGs of the time that also had solo heroes, like Ultima and Wizardry, it was new compared to modern turn-based games like Expedition 33 that had diverse groups of characters you could bring into battle.
“It’s quite unique in this day and age, and in a way, I think it’s like something completely new and refreshing,” Hayasaka said.
HD-2D approach: Quality-of-life updates, curated music, and rich 2D graphics
Hayasaka has worked on several HD-2D game series, and after their positive reception, it seemed like a perfect fit for the early Dragon Quest games as a way to introduce gamers around the world to classic games that were mostly only popular in Japan. After releasing several games using the HD-2D style, it has been refined into a true homestyle style that updates older games for modern eyes, with updates to the mechanics, music and graphics.
the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 3 It includes a large number of quality of life upgrades over the original, beyond the graphical update, including ways to speed up combat and indicate your next objective on the world map. This reflects the tightrope of updating an old game for modern tastes: its streamlined settings are optional, allowing players to maintain the slower pace of games from that era. Hayasaka and his team have incorporated player feedback and added some additional improvements for the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 1 and 2, such as identifying treasure chests on the map and toggling hidden spots on or off.
Harmonized versions of the original Dragon Quest 1 and 2 background tracks enrich the HD-2D remake, which has become a hallmark of the style.
“I was the one who kind of decided or had a suggestion to use orchestral sounds in Octopath Traveler 1. When we brought them into the game, we found that there was a great match between the orchestral sounds and the HD-2D visual style,” said Hayasaka.
HD-2D graphics mode places 2D sprites in 3D environments rich with light and shadow effects.
Most modern remakes of older 2D games either faithfully reproduce their pixel graphics or attempt to adapt them to 3D, as is the case with the versions of Final Fantasy 3 and 4 for the Nintendo DS. The HD-2D system blends the two, but maintains pixel art, which Hayasaka considers an established graphic style that remains alive and well in indie games released on Steam, even as 3D graphics have become the norm for games nowadays.
“Playing an HD-2D style game with these pixel art sprites can feel like touching a piece of history for modern users, and it might be like hearing a rock version of a Beethoven classical piece or something like that,” Hayasaka said.
This doesn’t mean that every HD-2D game looks the same. Hayasaka explained that games like Octopath Traveler had colors and taste more in line with Final Fantasy titles, with more elegant or mature and dark color schemes. When the team moved on to the Dragon Quest games, they took almost the exact opposite approach, opting for bright, bright, and colorful colors.
The battle system also features HD-2D graphical touches while maintaining turn-based menus.
What’s in the remake? How is Dragon Quest different from Final Fantasy 7 Remake and others
Remaking a classic game requires critical decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind.
With the HD-2D remake of the first three Dragon Quest games, Hayasaka explained that they changed the story of the scenario significantly while retaining the basic essence of the titles. He compared it to two other games that revived older titles: the recent Final Fantasy Tactics: Chronicles of Ivalice, which mostly retained its original; And last year’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which reimagined and expanded on much of the original Final Fantasy 7.
“These trends and the ways they choose to approach the remake vary depending on the product and teams involved,” says Hayasaka. “It varies depending on what we want to offer and to whom?”
Although the Final Fantasy remakes are impressively modernized and unique, they have never been reproduced in quite the same unified style as HD-2D — and at this point, Hayasaka and several Square Enix developers have refined them into a format for new games and remakes alike.
So, which classic game would fans like to see get the HD-2D treatment next?
“The one I listen to the most is definitely Chrono Trigger,” Hayasaka said, referring to the 1995 Super Nintendo game that featured an extensive collaboration between Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. “I think there will be a lot of rights issues, so it will be difficult.”
But Hayasaka has a different game in mind and wants to create an HD-2D remake of it: the 1994 RPG Final Fantasy 6, which “would be great to see in this visual style,” he says.