DRAGON QUEST

This is a wonderful game and is very well suited to a mobile phone port. It also has an awful graphical bug that I can't believe they haven't addressed in, according to other reviews, at least eight years! While the pixel art of the characters and monsters is sharp and neat, the land tiles covering the majority of the screen alternate between thick and thin rows and columns of pixels. Instead of a charming fantasy landscape, the result is a godawful mess. You have to will yourself to ignore this problem for the entire game. You don't get to enjoy the art, especially during a certain moment when the tiles have changed. They have tried to disguise this problem in the store screenshots by shrinking and rotating the images, but you can see what I mean if you look closely. Developers: A sampler must never use a nearest-neighbor magnification filter unless every texture pixel will map to a whole number of framebuffer pixels. With a given level of zoom expected for gameplay, combined with unpredictable phone resolutions for future devices, you've set yourselves up to fail. This betrays the care given by your artists, who clearly wished to uphold the original game's charm. Since the character sprites do look correct, you can look to that implementation for a solution. Stakeholders: This is a modern player's introduction to the Dragon Quest series. Don't be cheap; make a better impression.

You buy the game. You play it. No servers, no log-ins, no in-app purchases, no excessive layers of currencies and pay-to-win mechanics. I had nearly forgotten phone games could be this straightforward. I bought this on a whim after the release of “Hero” in Smash Bros. reminded me of the original game (which was called “Dragon Warrior” in the U.S., in case anyone is looking for that game). Very happy with the purchase. The game itself is very old school. You’ll be doing a lot of grinding, but the touch screen menus make that more tolerable and it’s a decent enough way to pass the time. Most phone games force you into grinding anyway, but suggest you pay money to skip it. In this one you’ll just have to slash away at slimes until you level up to take on better enemies like the old days. The overworld controls are a little goofy, like all phone d-pads, but they get the job done and finesse is not needed in this kind of game. I like the vertical orientation; it makes it easier to switch in and out of the app to do stuff on your phone without having to turn the whole phone. The updated graphics and music give the game a cool SNES vibe. I’d love the option to use the original graphics/music/screen resolution, but I can see how that might be infeasible given the phone layout. In any case, love has clearly been given to this port, and if you like ‘80s JRPGs, this is well worth your $3. I’ll probably play through the series and see if I can convince myself to check out DQ11 for Switch eventually.

If there is ever a game that aged as well as wine and milk at the same time, this game is the prime example. Honestly this game makes me feel so weird. The controls are simple enough that porting it to the IOS store works out really well, it’s decently priced, and is as nostalgic as it can get. That being said, this game also has the plague of most old games: It’s hard as hell and grindy as hell. Seriously, it’s refreshing to fight monsters that are as strong as you, but god help your soul-and your gold sack-If you decide that you can risk something. You will die. A lot. The smallest numbers add up and can easily screw you over even if you are 1 level lower than you should be. That being said this game is still as charming as the day it was born. It’s the timesless tale of “Rescue girl, Slay dragon, kill villain (in this case this and the last one at the same time!), win everything.” And Toriyama’s monsters getting a fresh coat of paint makes them feel right at home. Would recommend. I gaurentee you will spend more money on something and be far more dissapointed.