While Final Fantasy has been popular in the US since the first game hit the original Nintendo Entertainment System decades ago, another franchise that equally shaped the roleplaying game genre, Dragon Quest, took longer to catch on here. 

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the original Dragon Quest's release in the US -- where it was titled Dragon Warrior -- making it a great time for a rerelease of the game so that veterans and newcomers can adventure with the hero Erdrick and appreciate gaming history. Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake came out Oct. 30 for PC and current consoles, giving the venerable games some quality-of-life upgrades along with a refreshing graphical facelift. 

It's the modernizing touch that's become a hallmark of the HD-2D series of games -- from Octopath Traveler to Triangle Strategy to Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake -- and who better to explain their signature style than Masaaki Hayasaka, producer on the new game who's been involved in each of the previous titles in the informal HD-2D series of games. 

Hayasaka was too young for the original Dragon Quest, but grew up playing Dragon Quest 7 (released in 2000), the last of the series to be released with 2D pixels before it switched to 3D. It makes sense that he'd make a career venerating older game styles and modernizing them for current players. When we chatted over a Zoom call, sitting behind him in his personal office were posters for three movies and games that held great meaning to him: Star Wars: A New Hope, Interstellar, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The HD-2D style is just one way that game developers have attempted to evoke the look and feel of two-dimensional, hand-drawn "sprite" graphics that were the cutting edge of gaming until the industry switched to 3D polygons in the mid-1990s. Some retro-looking games, such as Celeste and Stardew Valley, have attempted to strictly emulate the blocky 2D graphics of games from the NES and Super NES eras. But the HD-2D style subtly blends 3D elements in the background -- buildings, water effects, light flares and shadow effects -- that make the 2D character sprites pop.

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"We were trying to accomplish the effect of something like a miniature garden," Hayasaka told me via an interpreter. "They want to have this sense of density in the space. There are these 16-bit sprites within the environments, but then to make it not just look like the pixel sprites are placed and just left there, we employed effects like having the particles of dust moving, the leaves floating. There are shadows and sunlight. And that all creates this sense of density within the environment that makes it HD-2D."

The HD-2D style preserves enough hallmarks of the original games while quietly updating other elements for modern tastes. It makes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake arguably the best version of the title for gamers to experience, whether they're returning veterans like CNET game reviewer Oscar Gonzalez or total newcomers to the classic game -- which, alongside Final Fantasy, defined the Japanese RPG genre.

"I think that playing this game will really allow the users of today to touch and experience Dragon Quest history … and [what it] has contributed to JRPG history," Hayasaka said.

The first Dragon Quest is unique among the series in having players control a single character rather than a party of heroes. Though it wasn't dissimilar from other RPGs of the time that also had solo protagonists, like Ultima and Wizardry, it's a novelty compared to turn-based modern games like Expedition 33 that have diverse groups of characters you can bring into battle. 

"It's quite unique in this day and age, and in a way, I think it serves as something totally new and refreshing," Hayasaka said. 

The HD-2D approach: Quality of life updates, orchestrated music and lush two-dimensional graphics

Hayasaka has worked on many of the HD-2D series of games, and following their positive reception, it seemed like a good fit for the early Dragon Quest games as a method to introduce players around the world to classics that had mostly only been popular in Japan. After releasing many games using the HD-2D approach, it has been refined into a bona fide house style for refreshing older games for modern eyes, with updates to mechanics, music and graphics.

The HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 3 included a slew of quality-of-life upgrades over the original, beyond the graphical refresh, including ways to speed up combat and point out your next objective on the world map. These reflect the tightrope of updating an older game to modern tastes: its streamlining settings are optional, letting players preserve the slower pace of games from that era. Hayasaka and his team incorporated player feedback and added a few more improvements for the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 1 and 2, such as identifying treasure boxes on the map and toggling hidden spots on or off.

Orchestrated versions of the original Dragon Quest 1 and 2 background tracks enrich the HD-2D remake, which has become a hallmark of the style.

"I was the person who kind of decided or had the proposal of using the orchestral sounds for Octopath Traveler 1. When we fit it into the game, we found that there was such a great match of the orchestral sounds with the HD-2D visual style," Hayasaka said.

Most modernized versions of older 2D games either faithfully reproduce their pixel graphics or attempt to adapt them to 3D, as with the Final Fantasy 3 and 4 remakes for the Nintendo DS. The HD-2D system blends both, but preserves the pixel art, which Hayasaka views as an established graphics style that remains alive and well in indie games released on Steam, even as 3D graphics have become the norm for games nowadays.

"Playing a game in the HD-2D style with these pixel art sprites can feel like touching upon a piece of history for modern users, and it might be something like hearing a rock version of a classical piece by Beethoven or something like that," Hayasaka said.

Which isn't to say that every HD-2D game looks the same. Games like Octopath Traveler had color and taste more aligned with Final Fantasy titles, Hayasaka explained, with more chic or mature and dark color schemes. When the team transitioned to the Dragon Quest games, they took almost the complete opposite approach, opting for vivid, bright and colorful tones.

What's in a remake? How Dragon Quest differs from Final Fantasy 7 Remake and others

Remaking a classic game requires making crucial decisions about what to preserve and what to leave behind. 

With the HD-2D remakes of the first three Dragon Quest games, Hayasaka explained that they altered the scenario storylines significantly while retaining the core essence of the titles. He compared it to a couple of other games that have revived older titles: the recent Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, which mostly preserved its original; and last year's Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which wildly reimagined and expanded on a chunk of the original Final Fantasy 7.

"These directions and the ways in which they choose to approach the remake really differ according to the producer and teams involved," Hayasaka says. "It differs depending on, 'What do we want to deliver, and to whom?'"

While those Final Fantasy remakes are impressively and uniquely modernized, they're not reproduced in a uniform style quite like HD-2D -- and at this point, Hayasaka and many Square Enix developers have honed it into a format for new games and remakes alike. 

So, which classic game would fans like to see get the HD-2D treatment next?

"The one I hear the most is definitely Chrono Trigger," Hayasaka said, referring to the 1995 Super Nintendo game that featured the all-star collaboration of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. "I think there's going to be a lot of rights matters involved, so it would be a tricky one."

But Hayasaka has a different game in mind that he would most like to create an HD-2D remake of: the 1994 RPG Final Fantasy 6, which "would be a great one to see in that visual style," he said.