I have very fond memories of early RPG games because I was just the right age to be very interested in this sort of thing. As a child, I was playing D&D with friends using dice and pencils - you know the routine, so when there was all of a sudden a way of playing this sort of thing on my own as well I jumped at the opportunity. Of the many RPG's that came out in the early days, The Dragon Quest games were some of my favorites.
Somewhat recently, one of those titles, Dragon Quest 3 was remade for a variety of platforms with updated music and graphics as well as some general additions to the quests themselves. I was very interested at first and thankfully a friend of mine had already purchased it on Switch so I didn't need to buy it. He let me borrow it from him once he was done with it. Unfortunately, it just wasn't as awesome as I had hoped it would be going back down memory lane with this one.
The original was quite a momentous thing when it was released in 1988 and it looked basically like what we would expect an RPG at the time to look like. There was only so much that the NES was capable of and for me and many other people it wasn't about the graphics so much as it was really great to have a long story and the ability to save right on the cartridge! This notion seems silly now because people today just presume they will be able to save locally but this was a relatively new thing at that point in time.
I was so dedicated to this game and it was a toss up as to which I liked more, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. I was happy that Dragon Quest didn't try to make their game 3D like Square did with FF, but in the end the overall experience was actually a bit disappointing and the surprised me.
The remake, as you would expect, looks totally different. Things aren't pixelated, the musical score was done by a real orchestra using the original beeps and boops from the original game as a basis for these epic songs, and combat has been sped up and "modernized" for today's discerning gamer.
This was interesting to me for about a couple of hours but in the end unfortunately, the experience playing the HD remake was kind of a letdown and in a way, it sort of blemished my memories of the original game. I am a LOT older now than I was in 1988 and my mindset is different as one might expect over the course of nearly 40 years. I do still enjoy turn-based combat but honestly, things move extremely slow in this game even though they sped up combat.
I'm also not a huge fan of the voice overs they did for the modern version and I think this is because back in the day, I had this idea in my head about what the characters were like and there is no way that they were ever going to be able to capture that. Also I'm not a fan of characters being overly wordy anyway and this has been an issue for me in recent Dragon Quest games as well as Ni No Kuni among others as well.
One thing that kind of irritated me is that while the spells and attacks definitely look a lot better as you would expect after nearly 4 decades of innovation and improvements to gaming, you don't ever get to see any actual character animation as far as casting or attacks is concerned. Why? Was that going to take too much time and resources? Seems lazy to me but this is Square-Enix we are talking about here and they are well-known for getting muddled up in production.
In the end I only ended up playing this for a couple of hours and then gave it back to my friend who then told me that he had a similar experience. We both kind of agreed that going back to do remakes of cherished classic games might not be the best idea for either of us.
Our memories of games being great were not necessarily a reflection of the game itself but rather, a reflection of who we were, what age we were, and the times we were in that formed our opinions of certain gaming experiences. It really shouldn't be that big of a surprise that both of us have changed quite a lot over the years.
So in the end at least I didn't buy the game in order to learn this, I just borrowed it. It also taught me that in the future I should probably leave remakes alone when it comes to any turn-based game. Zelda remakes have always worked out for me because the action is a lot more fluid and there isn't a ton of waiting around through masses of dialogue and instructions that is so common in turn-based RPG's. I guess there was a reason why the industry kind of moved on from this sort of gameplay, and perhaps it is time for me to admit that there is a very good reason why that happened.
I would recommend to anyone out there that feels the pull of nostalgia by this and other remake games, to maybe just watch a few videos of other people playing it rather than doing it yourself. I don't like what I did to my memories of this game by attempting to relive my youth.
