UGHHHH THIS GAME IS SO GOOD THIS REMAKE IS SO GOOD I LOVED IT SO MUCH I WOULD PLAY THIS EVERY DAY UNTIL I DIE THESE PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO MAKE A GAME!!! There were so many times throughout this game that I was like "wow this was an NES game. How did they do this on an NES" So I will be playing the NES game soon to discover how they did that on an NES. Just gushing with that good dragon quest feel and with a twist that I shant go into more detail on but I shit inside my pants! The tieback to dq1 is insane. The whole game is insane. It's also just so genuinely well designed in terms of level curve and encounters and pacing, thoroughly impressed !! I really only had to grind at two points and they were both just before major bosses. The party system is extremely fun!! I think everyone in the world should play this game!!

Stats!!

Final Party:
Lvl 40 Hero
Lvl 38 Martial Artist
Lvl 40 Priest
Lvl 36 Sage

80/100 Mini Medals (i got REAL good at finding mini medals)

All Pachisi (or TnT boards? this was the fan translation) Boards cleared, along with all the chests

I had like 90,000 G idk thats all thank you bye

After playing DQ7, I still very much had the bug for more playing Dragon Quest, so I thought what better time to finally tackle the one DQ game between 1 and 7 that I’d yet to beat: DQ3. I’ve technically given this a slight attempt before many years ago on a Famicom copy, but as soon as I saw that the game auto-scrolls text until that particular text box is done (meaning especially with my poorer reading skills of the time, there was no way in hell I was reading anything), I immediately put it down and shelved my DQ3 ambitions indefinitely. Until now! It took me around 35~40 hours (once again we have a game that doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on emulated hardware using save states instead of saves (and for one or two things in particular that I’ll get to later).

DQ3 is a prequel to DQ1 and 2. Loto (or Erdrick), the legendary hero they bang on about all the time in those games? That’s the main character here! Your father goes off to slay the demon lord many years ago, he never comes back, and on your 16th birthday, your mother sends you to the king. He tells you to go slay the demon lord Baramos where your father failed, and that’s how your adventure begins! Though this is technically a remake from December 1996 (which does add a few things that I’ll get to later), the text part of things is largely unchanged from the Famicom original from 1988, so it’s a pretty simple story that does what it needs to. It’s still largely remarkably solid for 1988, though. A lot of the silly and fun aspects of miscellaneous character writing are very much here, and there were a few NPCs in particular who absolutely had me in stitches with the weird stuff they’d said x3. The narrative even has some cool twists I really didn’t see coming, which was an added bonus. It’s hardly anything thematically meaty to sink your teeth into (with an exception or two here and there), but it’s a simple and fun story that it’s pretty easy to see where the DNA of successor DQ games originated in.

The mechanics are for the most part pretty typical Dragon Quest of the time. First-person turn-based battles against several enemies; your four party members each get a turn and then things play out from there; you explore the world, dungeons, and town in that familiar over-head style: It’s nothing that will be unfamiliar to anyone who’s glanced at an older JRPG before. What’s quite novel for a JRPG from ’88 is the job system. Instead of the party being bespoke characters like most DQ games (not to mention DQ2 and 4), your first stop after meeting the king is going to the bar in town to recruit some generic party members to add to your merry band of heroes (i.e. just you). There are an assortment of classes to choose from, and you can change classes later in the game (similarly to DQ 6 and 7), but unlike later games, class isn’t an aspect of your character. It IS your character. Your main hero can’t job change, because it’d mean they stop being a hero, but any of your recruited guys can. Once they hit level 20, they can get a new job at the job changing temple, which will halve their current stats and set them back to level 1. This means that there’s a fair amount of replayability and experimentation in this game in terms of finding which parties work best, and if your current loadout seems bad, you can either job change your party members or just get whole new ones. You can even dump your whole party right before the final boss and regrind them up to more useful versions if you so chose, though it’d likely take quite a while. All it’ll take is your time to grind it up. I stuck with my same team of warrior, fighter, and priest (who became a fighter, warriors, and sage respectively later on, all at the advice of our resident Popo).

This remake (as well as all successive versions of DQ3) also add in a personality system, where at the start you take a personality test to determine your personality (and you even get to pick your gender, in a neat change from the Famicom original), and then for all of your other party members, they get assigned one based on their stats & job when they’re created. If you don’t like your personalities, you can always find skill books in the world that’ll permanently change them, or almost every accessory in the game also comes with the added feature of changing your personality as long as you have it equipped if you want a more temporary change. Nowhere in the game does it tell you the stat biases for which personality you have, so it’s well worth looking up a guide for that. I don’t really love the personality system, myself. This game isn’t super hard, but it’s not terribly easy either, and it just adds a lot of weird new min/max-ing to something that honestly has enough of that already. I don’t think it ruins this game, and depending on how you like your DQ, you might even quite like it, but I certainly don’t think any other DQ game is worse for lacking it.

Something else you’re likely going to want to use a guide for is actually completing your adventure as well. For the most part, the signposting is really good for a game of this era, but there are more than a few places where I was utterly stumped on how to progress, and the game really shows its age in just how arcane finding that path forward is. This game also adds in mini-medals for the first time, and the remake adds in even more of them. Between story-important items and all them mini-medals, investing in a thief early on so you can get their ability to help find treasure on the ground will likely be well worth it. Dungeon design is quite good and so is the encounter rate and design. It’s also an extra neat feature in just how few bosses this game has compared to a typical JRPG, which only adds to the charm of its simplicity in my eyes. Overall the difficulty curve was one I found just right, even if I had to put in a good 3 or 4 hours at least to grind to get tough enough to beat Baramos.

Aesthetically, the game is pretty darn good, as you’d expect from not only a DQ game, but also a late ’96 SFC title. The graphics are very pretty and the game has gotten a really nice face lift in both theatrics and animations. The remake the gave it via the DQ6 engine has really paid off, that’s for sure. That also extends to the music, which is very nice and very Dragon Quest in a way you’re no doubt already intimately familiar with if you have any prior experience with the series.

Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s one of my favorite RPGs ever, not even on the SFC, but it’s still a really fun time well worth playing. This SFC version has a fan translation, I believe, and the English-released Dragon Warrior III on GameBoy Color is this same game with little dashes of extra extra content here and there as well. If you’re curious on Dragon Quest, I’d much sooner recommend 4 or 5 if you wanted a retro one to start out on (or 8 or 11 if you wanted a newer one), but this game is still a very approachable and enjoyable entry if you’re looking for a JRPG experience that’s relatively short, simple, and still charming & fun~.