A Classic JRPG Reimagined – Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review
Dragon Quest III HD-2D is the latest remake of Dragon Quest III, which was originally released in 1988 (1992 in the West) and considered a landmark in JRPGs. If I had to summarize it quickly, this would be the definitive version of the game because of added cutscenes, additional gameplay content and voice acting. This would be the best way to get into the Dragon Quest series if you’ve never played any of the games. The games are loosely organized into trilogies and Dragon Quest III is a prequel that leads into Dragon Quest I and II so you don’t need to have played other games to get into this one.
I’ve played through the original English released which was localized as Dragon Warrior III on the NES as well as the Seeds of Salvation remake on the Nintendo Switch. I played through the GameBoy Color version as well but did not finish it to completion. Though I can’t comment on every single difference across all versions since this game has admittedly had many remakes I can tell you the big differences without any spoilers.
Being a game from the late 80’s there isn’t as much narrative content compared to modern games. This game is instead more focused on the gameplay and if you like gameplay-focused games you’ll enjoy this title a lot.
You’re given the choice between choosing a Hero or Heroine as a protagonist and you’re essentially given the quest of saving the world from the archdemon. There is a lot of interesting dialog from NPCs who comment about the world and substories in each city. I remember that the original NES game kept mis-gendering the Heroine (it recycled most of the same dialog from the Hero’s version of the game), but this has been fixed in modern releases of the game.
The protagonist’s father is Ortega, a legendary hero who explored the world and is revered by everyone. This remake adds a lot of much needed cutscenes regarding Ortega through flashback scenes and the main story cutscenes now have voice acting. All these added changes makes the story flow much more smoothly, so you don’t really need to use your imagination as much compared to the original games.
Dragon Quest was inspired by the Wizardry series and it shows gameplay wise. The focus is all about making your own party and intense dungeon crawling. In this game you don’t have a fixed party and instead you need to make your own party, similar to the original Final Fantasy as well.
You can choose a variety of classes for your party members and you unlock the Sage class later in the game from finding rare tomes. The Hero/Heroine is a fixed class for the protagonist that cannot be changed, but otherwise you can make a team with the protagonist and three other characters in total with any combination of mages, priests, fighters, thieves that you want.
This version of the game has the Monster Wrangler class, which lets the player recruit monster enemies to use in monster arenas – this wasn’t present in the original NES version but it was present in some of the remakes before this remake and is a great addition to break up dungeon exploration. Monty (the monster caretaker) and monster recruitment was first introduced as a big feature in Dragon Quest V (my favorite Dragon Quest game) so it’s a great callback.
The player can store even more party members at Patty’s Party Planning building as well to experiment with more than 4 members. There is a reclassing option that can be unlocked a few hours into the game, which lets the player keep a character’s skill and half their stats but resets their level. Different classes have different stat growths and learn different spells and abilities when leveling up.
The stats are what you’d find in any JRPG such as attack, defense, agility, luck and more. Although it’s turn-based combat, the order of the individual character actions are somewhat random but are somewhat based on the agility stat.
Essentially the player selects all their character actions at once and the enemies select their actions as well, then a round of combat occurs where the order of all the moves is dependent on agility and a bit of randomness. It’s the kind of combat system seen in pure dungeon crawlers games and if the player wants a character to go first they better have a high agility stat compared to the enemy.
Let’s say the player has a healer who is slow and the player wants them to heal at the beginning of the turn order. The player can make them into a thief who has amazing agility stat growth, level up for stat gains, and then reclass them into a healer who will now have amazing agility and will now usually act at the beginning of turns. There’s also Personalities for each character that also affects their stat growths and it can be changed by using collectible books. It’s thankfully nothing as complicated as Effort Values and Individual Values found in the Pokemon series – that’s instead saved for the Dragon Quest Monsters spinoff games.
Although it sounds harsh to reset a character’s level they do level up very quickly and the added stats means that a character that was reclassed would be stronger than one not reclassed. Since reclassed characters keep spells they can even master all spells on a single character which is very overpowered if the player wants to grind all those levels. The class system really makes the game fun to play and the quality of life improvements in this remake make for an extraordinarily fun game.
The only downside of having a generic party of characters is that it’s only your protagonist that has any interaction in the story. The interaction in this title is very basic with a nonspeaking protagonist pretty much just emoting. With these kinds of games you need to use your imagination for how your party interacts with each other. I did feel the silent protagonist a bit off-putting in Dragon Quest XI where all characters were in a modern 3D world, but I don’t mind silent protagonists in older 2D remastered games.
The journey to defeating the archdemon isn’t as straightforward as just walking down to their castle and beating them. You’ll need to journey across the world to get there and solve many problems to get there. You’ll also need to become stronger as well. The small substories in each kingdom aren’t anything to write home about but they have good old JRPGs tropes. For instance, to get access to a ship to sail you need to accept a job from a king to get his favorite pepper from another city that is opposite of a mountain. Of course when you go there they won’t have the pepper to sell and you’ll have to solve another problem.
You can think of it as game flags to block your progress until you fulfill main quests. In the original game I would just talk to all NPCs to progress and it’s never really a problem progressing but the developers did add in a lot of extra lines of dialog to the major characters to help you figure out how to progress. In the worst case the game does have the option to add quest markers and it’s a togglable feature in this remake so if you don’t want to use it you don’t have to.
One change is that a lot of optional content in the original games aren’t optional anymore (like Alltrades Abbey which is used for class changing), but this is a good change since you don’t need to worry about missing significant content.
The gameplay involves exploring the overworld and dungeons with your character sprites and unfortunately the game does have random encounters every few steps just as the original titles did. The game switches to first-person for the actual fights, but the exploration is done with character sprites on the screen. I do wish that the character sprites on-screen had ore animations but it is sufficient.
If you like dungeon crawlers such as Wizardry or Etrian Odyssey this game will be up your alley. The overworld has plenty of new additions and collectibles compared to the original game. The enemy designs are the same as the original games, but redrawn in HD. The game does use a lot of palette swapped enemies (same enemies with different colors) later on, but this was the norm when the game was originally released.
Playing this remake now I’m surprised how many references Dragon Quest III has to Wizardry that I didn’t catch when playing the original games. There are many dungeons across the world to explore but they’re not too labyrinthine. The dungeons have new visuals that make them easier to explore though some endgame dungeons can be a bit tricky. There is definitely a difficulty curve so the player is eased into the game’s difficulty slowly but there are a lot of difficulty spikes throughout. I really like how the dungeon floors have interactivity with each other. For example, if you see an island surrounded my water that you can’t get to in a dungeon just go to the floor above and drop in from above. There’s never anything frustrating like random pitfalls so don’t worry – well except the desert dungeon but if you played the original you’ve likely memorized where those are. This version of the game also has maps of all dungeons that are pre-filled (you don’t slowly unlock more of the map as you explore), so if you’re truly stuck just check the map and explore.
There are random enemy encounters and you need to fight enemies every few steps. It would’ve been nice if the enemies were on-screen and could be avoided in this remake, but the original game wasn’t designed with that in mind.
The gameplay is turn-based and you can use physical & magic attacks, buffs, debuffs, and healing spells. Different classes will specialize in different parts of the battle. For instance Warriors are damage dealers and can tank damage, Mages use magic spells but are frail, Priests use healing and support spells, and Thieves have passives such as increasing item drop rate and are fast in combat to go first – and this is just to name a few of the game’s many classes. It’s very fun to experiment with different combinations of character classes but it’s not too difficult to learn and you can read the in-game menu to learn what all the spells do.
The game uses its own spell naming scheme, similar to what Persona and Shin Megami Tensei do, but once you learn the nomenclature you’ll know how to use spells across all Dragon Quest games.
Classes have abilities now too that consume MP which wasn’t present in the original game or old remasters. I liked these a lot since now the Fighter class has abilities to use instead of only using basic physical attacks. Having no class abilities felt extremely barebones in the original game.
Like older dungeon crawlers you need to be careful of resource management. Your party will only have so much MP for healing. Although enemy encounters are generally not too bad they are frequent over the course of a dungeon and do take a toll on the player and it’s really fun. Sometimes you’ll need to use Evac, an emergency exit spell and do the dungeon again after healing in a city or you can take the risk and keep going through the dungeon. I like that the game doesn’t hold your hand in dungeons and the battle system is hands down the best aspect of the game.
There aren’t many save points just like the original game. The game only lets you save at churches and priests who will never be in the middle of dungeons. This is actually a fair compromise because the original game only let you saved when talking to kings! Saving at churches wasn’t introduced until Dragon Quest IV.
Thankfully, this game has many autosaves now (usually automatic when entering a new zone) and like the old games you can continue after a game over at the last visited town but you’ll lose half your gold. It’s not much of a punishment because you can just grind for more gold and if you die frequently you lose less and less gold as punishment. You can also instantly retry the battle as well, which is helpful if you get an unlucky encounter or if enemies spam the worst moves in the game.
I think the save system was the biggest drawback in the older titles especially if you’re playing on a Switch while you’re out (or even if you’re home and life gets in the way and you want to turn off your Switch) but the game’s autosaves are extremely generous (the autosave icon appears frequently).
Some of the gameplay mechanics are still old-school, such as reviving characters. You need to manually revive characters by talking to a priest in a church in a city until you unlock resurrection spells. Even when you unlock resurrection spells the lower-tier spells only have a percentage chance of reviving a character. This is bad in combat but fine when you’re out of combat and it’s not bad, it’s a decision choice that was kept throughout the years and if you’re used to old dungeon crawlers it’s not too surprising once you’re used to it. Revival items are very rare in this game!
My only larger criticisms is that the random encounters can feel a bit excessive. This remake has a very high encounter rate in all areas just like the original games and it can feel annoying often, especially in the modern age. This remake re-did the graphics for all areas, but in doing so the areas are a bit bigger than the old games which had small and tightly designed maps. I wish that the developers reduced the encounter rate and made the fights give more experience points for leveling.
There are cheap items that are easy to get at vendors called Holy Water that reduces or even eliminates the encounter rate but you need to be higher leveled than the enemies and it might not work in certain regions. I understand that different environment tiles do have different encounter rates, such as mountains having a higher encounter rate than regular grass, but even when going on regular grass tiles the encounter rate is still frustratingly high.
The mimic chests are in the game too, who will spam insta-kill spells on your party! Don’t even think about using old maps for the original games – in many maps the chests’ locations were changed causing the mimic chests to not be identical anymore. This game has many spells for dungeon exploration and I’d strongly recommend getting the ability to detect mimic chests.
You often need to grind for levels to fight bosses, otherwise they will one or two shot your party. Thankfully you can assign orders to all party members, even the protagonist, meaning you can pretty much autobattle by just pressing the Fight button making grinding a lot easier. Surprisingly the AI orders are really intelligent and actually does an amazing job fighting both enemy encounters and even boss fights.
The game’s difficulty is done well and I found the game moderately challenging on its normal difficulty. The original game didn’t have many bosses; however, this remake adds bosses to almost the end of every dungeon which is a much needed change.
I was surprised by how difficult the newly-added bosses were and I played the original games. The bosses were using every move in their arsenal such as buffing themselves and debuffing your characters. Some bosses were re-skinned enemy encounters and they kept summoning more of themselves, so I had to destroy them all at once with an area of effect spell. The bosses in this game were genuinely harder than Shin Megami Tensei bosses for me, so don’t be afraid to turn down the difficulty to its lowest setting to get through the game especially if this is your first Dragon Quest game. In this sense I feel like the game was made for fans of the original game who know what to expect.
The voice acting is generally great. Like the original game NPCs and kings of different cities will each have their own accent (each city is like its own country) but it’s never offensive though I’m not the biggest fan of it. I grew up with Chrono Cross which overdid accents making the dialog difficult to read, but this game doesn’t go to those lengths thankfully. Some smaller regions had characters with very obnoxious voiced accents that got on my nerves but the important story cutscenes such as Ortega’s flashbacks have excellent voice direction.
Although the game has a few faults, it’s still a very fun game I’d strongly recommend. If you like dungeon crawling and don’t mind old JRPGs the gameplay is top notch and the character classes are extremely fun to experiment with compared to fixed party members. Even if you played the originals and know the story this game has a lot of quality of life enhancements such as a faster battle speed and new character class abilities. In the original games you could only Zoom (teleport) to the biggest cities but in this game you can teleport to the entrance of any city, town or even dungeon (after visiting them once of course) which is a huge improvement. I really enjoyed the newly added cutscenes explaining Ortega’s backstory. I spent 45 hours to beat the game, which may be more or less depending on if you pursue sidequests and how efficient you are with grinding levels. There is also a post-game with more cutscenes as well with even harder enemies and bosses. Just be prepared for some old-school design decisions that were kept in such as having a high encounter rate, challenging bosses and having to grind for levels and gold every few regions.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
Our Score: Excellent
Pros
- Fun job system where you can customize your party in limitless ways. This remake adds character abilities.
- Very fun dungeon crawling that never holds your hand.
- New fully voiced cutscenes that make the story easier to follow. New boss fights added for each region.
- Very high enemy encounter rate like the original games.
- Newly added boss fights in the main story can be grueling.
- Old-school design to a fault. It’s still a very grindy game.
– Brandon Harris
Reviewed on the PC
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Nice review, i read that the game is roughly 25 hours and twice as long with side content.