by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Yuji Hori’s Dragon Quest was the first console RPG. It established the template that every other Japanese RPG has followed, and none of its sequels have fundamentally strayed from that form. It’s the unchanging grandfather of console culture. In Japan, it’s an institution. Here, it’s been a dud.

Maybe it was the name. Thanks to TSR’s lawyers, we knew the series as Dragon Warrior. On the cover, we saw a man who might as well have been Captain America, battling a huge, leering wyrm. Instead of a game where we took the role of this warrior, we got an introverted little quest where straying too far, too quickly was suicide.

Dragon Quest VIII is much the same; the only real change is in presentation. That might just be enough, though. Where the first game borrowed its abstraction from Ultima, reducing cities to icons, travel to a grid of grass and trees punctuated by random battles, and story to a two-pronged quest for the far-off ideals of love and conquest, the eighth finally fleshes most of this out.

The biggest change is to the gameworld: in place of a map, the game now has a whole landscape to explore. Mind, the world remains stylized, resembling more than ever a living Akira Toriyama illustration — but now when you enter a forest, it feels like a forest. The trees form a canopy. They darken the ground and characters beneath. The ground itself is uneven, as are the trees. Out in the fields, you can stare into the horizon. From high enough, you maybe can even see the next town, miles away. Paths wind above, below, and around the ordinary — often with no purpose outside their allure. As in the original Zelda or Riven, the world seems to exist regardless of the player’s presence.

The most unusual changes are in the US version. For our benefit, Enix has changed the traditional menu system to an icon-based one; they have added a full vocal dub for cutscenes (and it’s a good one, with British actors); and for the first time, we are presented with a Quest, in place of a Warrior.

All these details do is bring out the underlying wonder in the series, making it easier to find and leaving the player’s imagination to the finer details. A curious thing that you can check yourself — although Final Fantasy is nigh unplayable today, outside of some interface issues the original Dragon Warrior has hardly aged. There is something timeless to this series that none of its imitators has really captured.

For two decades, we have tolerated flashier games that have led us nowhere special. Now here’s a Dragon Quest that bowls over any modern RPG in presentation, while retaining all the spirit and wonder of the original. Considering the industry’s current existential crisis, this might be the right time for Dragon Quest. We might have something to learn.

Dragon Quest VIII from Square-Enix is due for release on PS2 this fall.