I've only played Dragon Quest 1 portion so far so this review is about that part. First the good things: the graphics are beautifully updated as is the reorchestrated sound (although they could have really gone for making more variety in the music beyond what the original game had). The fact that the princess has a much bigger role (especially if you choose to keep her around) really adds a lot. The new dungeons and plot elements are a lot of fun.
Here's the issue: The original Dragon Quest is a one on one battle system. You don't get a party and so neither do the enemies. As soon as I saw that you would be fighting multiple enemies in one battle in this remake I wondered how they were going to do that. The answer is, not very well. I think this was a big mistake. What they did is add a couple weapons that can hit all enemies or groups but they are weaker than your normal attacks. They also gave you some abilities you can activate on your turn which will negate all magic cast on you or give you around an 80% chance to dodge any physical attacks that come your way. There's a heal over time spell. There's also an ability that lets you do the same action twice in a turn. However, the problem is all of these things have limited duration, usually like 3 or 4 turns. So you couldn't for example apply all of those buffs at once, the first ones would start to expire. Also, it's just boring to have to spend your first turn putting on those buffs at the start of every random encounter. And you will need to do something to mitigate the enemies as they can come in huge groups, 3-5, and some of them will be debuffing you. Later in the game they get two actions each. For example, in one dungeon there's an enemy who can make you hallucinate (which makes you miss most of the time), lower your defence, lower your attack and is also a powerful attacker themselves, who gets two actions per move. There are frequently two of them in every random encounter in that dungeon. In that same dungeon, there's also enemies who have the instant death spell and can take two actions in a turn so they can cast it twice in case the first one doesn't connect. Not even the bosses are one on one. There are bosses that are made up of 4 powerful regular enemies and one super enemy or 5 powerful enemies. And all of these enemies hit very hard, pretty much anyone of an appropriate level could kill you in 4 or 5 attacks all by themselves.
The only mitigating factor is there's the ability to just turn on invincibility as a difficulty setting. Or you can just grind combat until you're so high level nothing can touch you. I played the original a lot and I understand that grinding is a major factor of the game, but I always felt that game was fair. This one just seems unbalanced and mean. The combat is not fun, it's not strategic it's just a slog.

I don't like that hard mode is called "Draconian Quest" because draconian implies playing the game without any of the modern concessions like autosaves and the like, and I also really, really don't like how the translation is handled. I also hate every time I can tell when the translator(s) got bored and changed ♥♥♥♥ around to "spice it up." Aside from that, I love how it looks and I love playing it.

A lot has changed since these games were originally released. Fortunately, you can still get puff puff in 2025