It's very easy to see how influential DQ3 was for RPGs and Japanese pop culture, which it entirely deserves. 

All the designs for the classes are immediately iconic, and the monsters are all memorable and expressive. This game is really good at signposting where you need to go next, until you get the boat, then it gets a little more shaky but still doable without using a guide. Combat is fairly simple but enjoyable, but you never really encounter something to challenge you due to there not being that many boss battles, with almost all of them backloaded.

I enjoyed the majority of this game, but I do feel that once you get to Alefgard, the game starts to drag, even if it is cool conceptually. Ultimately, you are stuck doing another fetch quest, which I did not find as enjoyable as looking for the orbs. At this point, I also started to find combat more tedious, with enemy encounters becoming more frequent and taking longer to deal with, especially in the final dungeon. It would have been nice to have MP restores outside of the limited rings and more types of healing herbs that do more than 30 HP.

Even with all that, it is still 100% worth playing. 

Reviewed on Mar 19, 2023


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