In this version of the game, when you use a Chimaera Wing or cast Zoom, you can always choose your destination from any town you've visited, rather than automatically returning to the last place you saved. This makes it much easier to move around the world. Every time you get a new key, all the locks are close at hand. This greatly eased the cognitive burden of backtracking: no longer do you have to remember where you were going and what you were doing as you trudge across the world, possibly accosted by random encounters depending on whether you outlevel them enough. It's mostly just the small shrines that you have to keep an eye out for. The in-game map conveniently pre-marks the location of every place you can enter, too, and renders visible all invisible objects (even the ones that you need a hint to know to look for them), and indicates when you're adjacent to a door, even one that you can't see because the interior/exterior layering system conceals them. Additionally, not only is there a context-sensitive action button (an innovation added to the series in 1992 and brought to a verson of Dragon Quest 2 in 1993), but they go a step further than the Nintendo DS versions of other games in the series by removing the classic action menu altogether.
All of these modern amenities dispense with gameplay elements that are considered archaic today. To be honest, I don't miss a lot of those things, and was glad for the help. There's a very fine line between a subtle mystery and a dirty trick. All these archaicisms, however, are fundamental to the character of Dragon Quest 2. It is in many ways a more quintessentially archaic game than its own predecessor, which is too simple a game to really test the limits of what obscurity can accomplish as a game design tool.
The process of increasing the convenience of Dragon Quest 2 in order to improve its market fit among ca. 2014 smartphone players applies systemic changes in order to address friction which arises from the content. It would be quite possible to make a good and fun RPG with identical systems to the 1987 release in which all doors and items are visible, all destinations are straightforwardly navigable, all points of interest are easy to locate, and so forth. You could even make such a game as a modest romhack with just a handful of small tweaks to the tile layouts of the base game.
Here's the question: if you did such a thing, and compared it with this 2014 port, which of these two versions of Dragon Quest 2 would be the one whose authenticity was less compromised? Well, the answer is obviously the 2014 one, because Yuji Horii directed the remake like he directs all Dragon Quest remakes - but let's have a little fun and apply Death Of The Author inconsistently, and suppose that the ultimate wellspring of authenticity is not the author but this curious artifact from 1987, an original work of commercial art that was as much a product of its time and technology as anything ever was.
With video game remakes, we seem to acknowledge a difference between moving the little squares around in order to make them easier to deal with, and leaving all the squares in the same place but changing how they work in order to make them easier to deal with. We categorize one of these as "content" and the other as "system," and treat changes to the one as qualitatively different from changes to the other. Heck, there's also changing what the little squares look like, call that "graphics," and that kind of thing happens all the time. Fundamentally, a game is software, and content, systems, and graphics are all just rules, all just code. I daresay that I understand this principle better than most people even within my own profession of software development. The distinction we draw here is an invention of the critic, not a fundamental property of the medium. It's normative. It's part of how we render this artform comprehensible.
I don't have an answer to that question. It's simply something to bear in mind as people who are trying to comprehend this artform.
Anyway, I had a great time blitzing through Dragon Quest 2 (2019). Although I've played several previous versions of this game, this is the first one I've completed, and for that victory I credit its convenient modernized gameplay systems for that fact far more than my own determination. These conveniences serve to give the player "foreknowledge" of things they have not yet experienced - it makes the game feel, in some respects, like you're replaying it even on your first playthrough. The map and so forth don't exactly give you the solution to the puzzle, but they allow you to "remember" certain discoveries that the player might (or might fail to) have noticed on their own from an imaginary previous attempt at solving it. I often find replaying a game to be a more comfortable experience than playing it the first time. An awareness of the overall context and structure that each part falls into deepens my appreciation for its fine details. When not everything I see is equally novel, I can pay closer attention to the parts that are the most clever and meaningful.
