I have now played almost every Dragon Quest game, and yet there are only two that I actually want to play again. DQ3 perfectly captures the tabletop adventure feel that I want from an 8-bit RPG, and happily sits next to Final Fantasy 1 in my mind as one of my go-to games for that fix. When I want a buggy, beautiful, charming mess, I go for FF1. When I want to play something similar that has gotten cleaned up and put its life together, I reach for DQ3.