Dragon Quest Is Always Dragon Quest

It’s a little funny, at the time that you read this, that one of the big videogame debates of the fall revolved around Final Fantasy’s identity crisis. Why did its newest games miss Square Enix’s sales expectations, was something wrong with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or Final Fantasy XVI, was it the marketing or the way the games were designed or the complete or timed exclusivity, respectively, and so on. Meanwhile, a new Dragon Quest was released—well, a remake of an old Dragon Quest, anyway—and promptly became the fastest-selling game in Japan in 2024, with over 821,000 physical copies sold in its first week. Yes, that means that sales from the Switch’s shop, or the Playstation Store, or Steam, or even whatever the Xbox Marketplace can muster in Japan don’t count toward that total. 

That’s one reason we might not see that number climb in a way that reflects demand in the second week in the charts. The other is that physical copies are apparently sold out across a number of shops in Japan, and won’t be restocked until December. Square Enix might need to rethink its expectations for two series.

Why the massive and immediate interest in Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake? That’s simple: it’s Dragon Quest. That might seem reductive, but it’s the truth of the matter. Dragon Quest is always Dragon Quest, and that’s why it endures. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is the most recent completely new entry in the mainline series. Released in 2017 in Japan and worldwide the next year, it featured beautiful, modern graphics that showcased the wonderful work of series artist Akira Toriyama, on the most powerful hardware it had appeared on to that point. It has all the kinds of trappings you expect from a modern role-playing game, with voice acting in multiple languages, elaborate cutscenes, a massive world, stunning effects, and so on down the line. It also has a mode where you can shut all of that off and play with 16-bit-style sprites in a 2D mode, adapted for the most powerful videogame platforms of the day from the Japan-exclusive Nintendo 3DS handheld edition of Dragon Quest XI that styled itself after the look of the Super Famicom remakes of the original trilogy. The game is, functionally, the same in 3D mode as it is in 2D mode. Which is Dragon Quest explained in a single sentence, really.

Dragon Quest is always Dragon Quest. It might get shinier, it might get prettier, it might add some new features in, but it’s always Dragon Quest, not just at its core but in every respect. There is no identity crisis here. Dragon Quest IX might have seemed like a massive departure in some ways, as it allowed you to play online with created characters of other players filling out your party, but not really. That was just a wrinkle on what you could already do in Dragon Quest III, which was to create your party out of thin air and set out on your quest with them—which is, in fact, what you do in Dragon Quest IX during the times you aren’t playing online. You either make characters yourself, or allow the game to give you options to recruit, same as six entries prior. Dragon Quest X had the series venturing into the MMO space, except it was still designed to be Dragon Quest, to the point that a single-player remake titled Dragon Quest X Offline was released in 2022. Dragon Quest V might have made the storyline a little more personal, but it was still Dragon Quest—the most ambitious of its day, but Dragon Quest all the same. Moving to a fully 3D world on the Playstation 2 didn’t make Dragon Quest VIII any less Dragon Quest. Just polygonal.

The series is considered a hardcore RPG sometimes, but that’s not what it was made to be. It was actually designed as more of an introduction to the ideas of role-playing games, which were truly hardcore experiences in the mid-‘80s. Chunsoft, the original developer for the franchise, made their name with these kinds of adaptations of existing genres, from Dragon Quest with RPGs, to the Portopia series with adventure games, to Mystery Dungeon for roguelikes. They knew exactly which edges to sand down—not to fundamentally change the genre they were working in, necessarily, in a way that would make it unappealing to existing fans—but to instead broaden its appeal. Little concessions here and there against the established system of roguelikes with Mystery Dungeon games, such as creating spaces to store some weapons and items that’ll remain even after death, or making it so that, at least in early runs, players would know the names of items they discovered in their exploration of the dungeon, and what they were used for, as well. Making it so that you kept your earned experience in Dragon Quest, but lost half of your gold when you died, in order to keep players from feeling like they were wasting time, and that giving things one more try would let them continue to progress since they were guaranteed to be stronger in their next attempt.

Chunsoft left development of the series behind after its fifth game, but their vision for what it was supposed to be remained. Dragon Quest games can be difficult, yes, but only if you don’t approach them in the way they are meant to be approached. And as they are purposefully created to be approachable, even in what is now considered to be their old-school design, so long as you are open to learning its ways, the game will teach them to you. 

That the series has retained these core philosophies through various decades and developers, that each game always feels like Dragon Quest from start to finish—visually, in the game design, even in terms of new additions to the gameplay experience—has made it so that people always know what they’re going to get from one of these games. In Dragon Quest XI, you could mess around with a more modern take on combat where you can free-roam the battlefield and arrange your characters in different areas, or you could just switch to classic combat. Neither has an advantage over the other, it’s just whatever you felt like doing, in the same way you could play with these gorgeous polygonal character models in a 3D world, or lovely 2D sprites in a 16-bit rendition of the world if that’s more your speed. 

Dragon Quest III HD-2D is as much of a reminder of the timelessness and flexibility of Dragon Quest’s design as Dragon Quest XI was. It’s a remake of a game that was first released in 1988 on the Famicom in Japan, before ending up with remakes for the Super Famicom and Game Boy Color, then additional remakes for iOS and Android that were adapted for the Switch and Playstation 4. And now, we’ve got the HD-2D edition, that seeks to update the original loveliness of the 2D design, but with the power of today’s engines behind it—a marriage that results in these absurdly detailed 3D environments for these 2D sprites to explore, along with all the little changes the series has made since the days of the Famicom. Easier to navigate menus and action inputs, difficulty levels to choose from, little bits of encouragement like giving you a few stat-improving seeds to help you get started making a new character you’ve recruited into a useful teammate sooner, and even optional quest markers for those who maybe don’t want to explore an RPG world like it’s 1988. This should all be familiar to anyone who’s played modern Dragon Quests at this point, as they’ve become normal parts of the series—little quality of life additions that keep the series approachable in the present, but still Dragon Quest. 

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake has sold like wild out of the gate, and chances are good that Dragon Quest I + II HD-2D Remake will, as well. If Square Enix decides to also remake Dragon Quests IV through VI in this style, they’ll surely sell well, too, and whenever Dragon Quest XII comes out… you get it by now. They’ll all be Dragon Quest. Tweaked to be as playable in the present as they were at the time they originally released. Still a testament to the skill of Chunsoft and the core Dragon Quest team that worked together on all 11 of the mainline entries. That’s Dragon Quest, baby, then and now, and it’s why a remake of a 36-year-old game not only topped sales charts in its debut week, but emptied store shelves across an entire country in the process.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.