‘DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake’ is developer ARTDINK CORPORATION and publisher SQUARE ENIX’s first remake of the widely influential Japanese role-playing classic. The series as a whole has influenced gaming in plenty of ways, with the late Koichi Sugiyama’s pioneering the way for orchestral soundtracks and DRAGON QUEST’s simplistic yet compelling battle system delighting millions in Japan. I’d argue its very style of graphics and gameplay is the basis of so many retro RPGs you see today, donned with the influential Akira Toriyama’s artwork. It’s no wonder the series saw so much success over in its home country.
DRAGON QUEST III hasn’t seen too many ports over the years, mostly finding its way to mobile platforms in a playable (if not cumbersome fashion). And for Xbox in particular, this HD-2D Remake marks the second time a Dragon Quest mainline title has been made playable on the platform. But plenty of works influenced by this old timer have come, are coming, and are in the rearview mirror—is there a reason to jump into one of Japan’s beloved RPG titles? Yes! But with a few things to keep in mind.
Ready to Become a Hero
In DQ3, players take on the role of the son (or daughter) of the previous world’s hero Ortega. On their 16th birthday, they’ve been tasked with the heaviest burden of them all—to defeat the Demon King Baramos and restore peace to the land. A quick chat with your mother and the king and you’re then tossed right out to figure things out. No three-hour long prologue, no hand-holding navigation until the game thinks you’re ready to pick a fight with slimes you’ve already seen in three different colour schemes. Nope, freedom is yours and boy does it feel good to be free of all that. Mind, DQ3 might offer a large map to explore, but progression is still very much linear—everything needs to be completed in order to get to the next portion of the map and its towns slash kingdoms. The difference here is that not everything needs to be done, but it’d certainly save you a bit of trouble when it comes to combat.
As it is an old RPG, you’ll need to become comfortable once more with the double-edged sword that is random encounters. Of the game’s some 30-plus hour runtime, I’d wager the vast majority of your gameplay will be spent running into baddies every 10 seconds or so. The good news is that DQ3’s combat is fun! Enemies will spawn in front of your four-party team in groups of the same type from left to right, and you’ll need to engage each baddie with the proper skills and magic to walk out unscathed. Make no mistake, DRAGON QUEST III will quickly tear you to shreds if you don’t come prepared to a fight. But! There’s plenty of tactics, gear to buy and find out in the overworld, and party members you can hire (and create!) that’ll play a key role in your victory against evil.
See, in DRAGON QUEST III, players can hire new friends to join their party as opposed to the traditional JRPG staple of having them come in over the course of the game’s story. Over at the beginning town, you’ll be able to create your own party members, giving them their unique classes, looks, and name. Keeping its Wizardry roots here, you can create a bunch of characters that’ll come in handy and swap between them when their skills are needed. The only problem is keeping everyone levelled properly as experience points are shared only between active party members. Personally, I found this to be a pain point in my playthrough of the game, but I’ll touch on that in a moment.
Going into DRAGON QUEST III’s combat a bit more into detail, I did say it’s simple. But there’s quite a bit of freedom of expression thanks to its class system and the “Tactics” you can assign your party members. And before you groan over the idea of entrusting the computer to dish out attacks and healing, don’t worry as I did the same. But I wish I used the system more as it would’ve saved me so much time in grinding and even save my butt from a potential whooping. The AI is surprisingly good at finding enemy weaknesses and exploiting them, and it also does a great job of healing you when the going gets tough between turn orders.
Dying in DRAGON QUEST has some serious consequences as low-level revive spells can take multiple attempts to work. Early game will be spent trekking back and forth between the town church and back into the overworld for grinding and boss fights. As your characters level up, they’ll unlock skills related to their class. Magic becomes readily available and very handy against large enemy groups, and other skills for defence and buffing become crucial in late-game battles. Levels matter, but you really don’t have to go beyond 40 to kick some serious butt—all though it will come in handy thanks to the skills that become available to you. Gear is important, so you’re encouraged to keep putting on the best stuff you can buy and find whenever possible.
Now, DRAGON QUEST III isn’t just a run-off-and-do-your-own-thing RPG. No no, it’s got a story, and it’ll tell it not just through dialogue but through action. You’ll visit many towns, some out in the woods, in giant grassy hillsides and mountains, some are even situated in sandy dunes and tiny little land masses off the mainland. Heck, you’ll even visit a gorgeous little Not-Japan in your trip. In SQUARE’s HD-2D remake, the company has gone all-out to ensure its 8-bit classic shines beautifully on modern displays. DQ3 uses the same 2D sprite on 3D plane style that the company’s prior RPGs such as ‘Octopath Traveller’ have used, which expresses DQ3’s beauty into lush colours and lighting that would shatter the jaws of all 80s gamers. Side note, the crosses have completely gotten the glass in this remake. But I don’t think that aspect of the series’ iconography has ever made it outside Japan.
Beyond visuals, the game’s score has been rearranged and given a full orchestra treatment and key scenario events have received full voice acting in both English and Japanese. This remake treatment is such a treat, giving this 80s classic an amazing uplift and made available across so many platforms and PC. The game has received plenty of quality-of-life, with autosaves catching you after your worst moments and marks on the map to guide you onto the next part of your journey. DRAGON QUEST III does its best to shake up its questing through the dungeons you visit and by using the game’s feature set to its fullest extent. Really, it’s a cool JRPG and it’s no wonder so many developers have taken inspiration from this old dragon’s tale since its release almost 37 years ago.
The Demon King in the Room
I have no love for the DQ series. I’ve never beaten a single one until DRAGON QUEST III, though I have played through The Cursed King, some of XI, and a fair bit of DRAGON QUEST VII on the Nintendo 3DS. When I look at the kind of game DRAGON QUEST III is and was back in its day, I can really see why it took off. It has a captivating little story about a hero in the making, almost fairy tale-like in its presentation. The hero goes from town to dungeon, meeting new faces that they’ll help in their journey to the demon king. It even gets weirder when you realise that a number of these people waiting to help the hero are just… sort of standing behind locked doors, possibly for eons, just waiting for your arrival to give you a key.
The large “open” world, the freedom to express yourself through the game’s tight combat system, the story sequences and the twists it brings along for the ride—some of which even caught me off guard. It’s like the best aspects of classic Western RPGs simplified and with its own unique take on the “hero”, “God”, and “monsters”. I really do see why DRAGON QUEST III took off, but after my playthrough of the game, I’m not entirely enthused by the experience. If anything, I thought the game was 10 to 15 hours too long. Part of the reason I feel this way is due to the amount of grinding you’ll need to do to keep yourself properly levelled and to get money into your pouch.
When I said that DQ3 will toss you into a battle every 10 seconds or so, I sort of lied. It’s more like every 5 seconds you’ll be confronted by hordes of slimes, skellies, trolls, you name it. Your journey across the earth will be stopped every chance the game gets. My favourite is when I get a random encounter right as I’m about to enter a town, like the game is actively mocking me. Running from battles will quickly become one of your best strategies as it’ll work almost 100% of the time. I’ve never run from fights so often as I have in DRAGON QUEST III and I don’t quite like that. There is a spell that you get that’ll help ward off enemy encounters a bit into the game, but that’ll only cover your hide for a short distance and against enemies lower levelled than you. Oh, and speaking of combat, there’s only one battle theme. One battle theme for 30 plus hours of gameplay. It’s a good theme! Bombastic as you can expect from Sugiyama’s composition, violins, tubas, and contrabass abound. But a minute thirty loop does get tiring after an hour—so try listening to it through the game’s entire runtime.
These encounters are honestly most of what you’ll run into during the game. And though the HD-2D uplift is beautiful, it does make some things stand out a little too much. Namely how empty the game world is. Besides some towns dotted every now and again, the vast majority of DQ3 is empty wilderness and plains. There are secret areas to explore and they stick out like a sore thumb, sometimes offering goodies that are worth your while in the beginning but lose their luster down the line. About halfway into the game I began to lose interest in pursuing exploration as I felt that I wasn’t finding much of use and running into encounters every other step was getting on my nerves.
Make no mistake, I had fun playing DRAGON QUEST III. I appreciate what it’s done and brought to the table. But over the course of its runtime, I found myself losing interest thanks to a bombardment of random encounters and not enough between all that. So many games have come since then (and are still coming out today!) that have been greatly influenced by this JRPG classic, bringing their own twists and turns to storytelling and battle systems. There’s a good time to be had here in the HD-2D Remake, but if you’ve never played DRAGON QUEST III before, walk in with tempered expectations and to be down a few more hours than the game really should’ve been. ∎
DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake
Played on
Windows 11 PC/Xbox Series X
PROS
- Gorgeous visuals and a fantastic rearrangement of the original game’s score.
- Fun, simple combat system with a lot of flexibility thanks to solid and functional Class and Tactics systems.
- An enjoyable fairy tale-like story enriched with great voice acting.
CONS
- Levelling up is a pain.
- Runtime is stretched too long thanks to plentiful random encounters and not much else sprinkled in-between story scenarios.
