Nintendo

Square Enix has been re-releasing Dragon Quest games on the DS and 3DS for a decade now, if you can believe it—beginning with 2007’s Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, the developer has released five remade mainline DQ games for Nintendo’s dual-screened handhelds (plus Dragon Quest IX, a new title first released on the DS).

Up until now, all of those remakes have been upgrades from the originals—the DS was more powerful than the NES and the SNES and the 3DS is more powerful than the original PlayStation. Square Enix used the extra power to give all the games a shiny new coat of paint in addition to the streamlined gameplay and new content. The 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII, released in the US today, is different. Rather than being a ground-up redesign of the game as Dragon Quest VII was, VIII is more-or-less a straight port of the PS2 original with a few changes stacked on top.