Enix’s Dragon Quest is one of the most important JRPGs ever made and can be credited (alongside Final Fantasy) with turning the genre into the huge commercial proposition it is in Japan today.
However, given that the game’s Western release – under the title Dragon Warrior – wasn’t quite as acclaimed in the US, there’s a good chance that some of you reading this haven’t actually experienced the first game in the franchise.
Before running to Square Enix’s official ‘remaster’ of the game on your Switch, you might want to check out Dragon Quest +, a fan-made remake from NightFly Studio. Described as a “full remake” for PC containing around six to eight hours of additional content, it has been in development for over a decade and finally got a full release late last year.
Dragon Quest + features remixed monsters, new weapons and armour, an orchestrated soundtrack, new locations inspired by Dragon Quest Monsters and Dragon Quest Monsters 2, new mini-dungeons in Alefgard and three fresh minigames.
It’s free to download but is only compatible with Windows XP SP3, Windows 7 Pro, Windows 10 and Windows 11. It’s also playable on Steam Deck, although there appear to be some issues which are still being ironed out.
I picked Plok up out of a bargain bin in the 90s and it changed my musical preferences for life. One of the best sounding SNES soundtracks imo. RIP Geoff.
There’s a great reconstruction of Beach, the musician sought out all the original samples and redid it with modern production techniques. Sounds amazing: youtu.be/qLpyA27MZRA
Many of the hardware problems I’ve seen people have with MiSTer setups stem from bad add-on boards bought cheap from AliExpress. Hopefully these DE10 Nano FPGA clone boards will be good quality and won’t cause a bunch of bug reports where there’s no problem with the code.
That gameplay video looks much better than I imagine the Vic-20 could to for this game. It looks like there was a sacrifice in color palette, but it was well worth it for the fidelity to the original release.
@k@kbin.social I wonder if a cartridge version could include more levels and features… the disk based version obviously has to make some concessions due to the limited RAM.
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