Weirdly amazing.

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.

Land tiles are ugly as sin

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.

Disappointed

Three stars for a good try. But not the same as the original or at least dragon warrior the American version. The difficulty has been lowered. Monsters are easier to kill, they are not in the traditional locations therefore you can walk farther without danger. Your gear is more powerful so they are easier to kill. In addition, they all give you more gold and XP making the game move along a lot faster. Although I can appreciate that. They also give you a minimap with key loa toons listed. It almost feels like cheating. With auto save included they basically dumbed it down so there is no risk reward involved. You can play 100% mindless. Although this is the case in the original for the last 1/3 of the game when you have to grind for 2+ hours to level up. The beginning 2/3 requires you to fight with caution and conserve gold to get ahead. One misstep and 1/2 your gold gone and your back to the castle. May seem rough to the new guys. But back in the day it was normal for games to be rough if you missed stepped. Wasted 2.99 for a sub par experience of the original.

Generally worth it

The game plays pretty easy, it is definitely a game from the 80’s. And it’s a great casual game to have on your phone to play in downtime. The level progression is strong, where you definitely feel that your character is getting stronger. The bosses where they exist are challenging but not impossible. Really I only have a few negative critiques (but a lot of these are just because of the games age): 1- the game is artificially made longer by the amount of world traveling that’s needed, the goal points that require you to travel between are on opposite sides of the world and the trek is done on foot exclusively. 2- not a single NPC is story compelling in the slightest. Mostly non existent actually. When I think about it the protagonists story is actually very weak as well.. 3- there is no direction to point you from point A To point B. Not that I like games holding my hands, but there is nothing in the game indicating any direction at all to complete the game. It’s quite literally just “to kill the dragon lord” and you’re expected just figure it out yourself. All that aside it still plays pretty nice, it’s a short game and I would say the price is right on the game. You pay for what you get here.

Fun playing through this classic on iOS!

My first Dragon Quest game was VIII but when I saw the iOS adapt d version for $.99, I had to give it a try. For what it is and it's price, it's a great game to play for historical fun. Obviously, don't expect to much since this is a direct port of an old, NES/Famicom classic from the 80s but it's still fun regardless. I decided to write a nee review today because I'm also glad to see that SE is taking the time to keep their older iOS library up to date so that their software can work for iOS 10 and beyond. Of course, I launched my old save just to be sure everything is working properly. After a few minutes of game play, everything sounds and looks great! Thanks SE for releasing awesome games from your past. Now, what's it going to take to get a re-release of Rad Racer? ;)

I LOVE DQ

I love the dragon quest series and everything about it (except for some games like DQ2 and DQ Heroes 1), so seeing that you can play the older games on mobile is amazing! I understand how at first the games can feel a bit bad at first, but the newer ones are amazing! As a Long-standing DQ fan (I've been playing DQ games for half my life), I feel so much nostalgia going back to the first games, and the Akira Toriyama's art style is so charming to me! All in all, this game is definitely worth the price, you should get it! (DQ Builders 1 & 2 are also amazing games and are definitely worth $60)

Great Old Game

Faithfully reproduces the classic RPG: Dragon Quest (or Dragon Warrior for those of us here in America who discovered the game on NES). This version is similar to the GameBoy version. They did add a "quick save" function that is amazing, especially for mobile devices. All the monsters seem to be there along with all the items, including that cursed belt. The quick save function does make you less cautious because you can always just reload if you run into a scorpion before you learn Sizz (or Blaze), but the save function is definitely needed for mobile gaming. Amazing addition to any lover of classic RPGs!

An amazing game

This is an outstanding game. It's a short, basic game, yet fun and nice. Nothing too hard, nothing too easy. It was something I thoroughly enjoyed playing again and even a second time. It's s classic and a great one at that. My only problem is that you can listen to music as you play the game. The game just shuts out music entirely. Maybe make the game cheaper as well since it also doesn't have that much of a replayability to it, nor is it a long game. I beat it in a week. Maybe ¢99 or $1.99 is a good price. But other than that, the game itself is great.

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