Lovely Game, Terrible Presentation – DRAGON QUEST Review

Lemme start off first by saying I absolutely love the Erdrick Trilogy. And, gameplay-wise and translation-wise, this is definitive version of the first game. If this is all you care about, buy this version. You won’t be disappointed. It a short, sweet JRPG that fits well with mobile. HOWEVER, the presentation is terrible. And it’s not because of art direction or because of the simple GUI. That doesn’t bother me, and even if it did, it’s not a dealbreaker. No, the issue is with the tiles. They’re very poorly scaled, as if stretched in ms paint without any regard to even pixel size, creating a blocky, uneven look to everything. This is distracting, to the point that it hampers the experience in my eyes. It wouldn’t take much to fix it either: adjust the tiles to where they have a nice, square pixel ratio, and are scaled evenly. If a dev responsible for updates by some miracle sees this review, this version is good, but it would be perfect if the scaling was proper, and if this problem were fixed, I’m sure you’d have lots of happy fans! From my understanding, Dragon Quest II also has the same problem, and this issue only stopped with Dragon Quest III. Until this issue is fixed (if ever), if the blobby scaling gets to you like it does to me, I would recommend sticking with the Gameboy Color’s Dragon Warrior I+II. Yes it’s somewhat slower than this version, and the view size isn’t great, but it looks like it should. Alternatively, if you can read Japanese, play the SNES version. Maybe the PS4 version, as gameplay I’ve seen of that one seems to indicate that the tile scaling is much better. Finally, if you want to push through the presentation on this version, I would recommend playing on an iPhone SE or similar small-screen iOS device. Doesn’t fix the scaling, but the small size masks it alright.
Review by thepieddragon on DRAGON QUEST.