Dragon Warrior III

This is an absolutely wild game and the fact that it was originally on the NES is nothing short of mindblowing to me. I'd criticised Dragon Quest II for the way it felt as if it was trying to go bigger without really understanding how to upscale the experience without a lot getting lost in translation, but this not only manages to be an even bigger experience, but it's also insanely polished in comparison. The more I played this, the more I thought that this was really what I feel that Dragon Quest II was trying to be in the first place and then some more on top of that, not only being such a grandiose and charming adventure, but also a summation of the first iterations of Yuji Horii's design formula of the series, acting as a nice closer to the Erdrick trilogy and tying in with the other games in a way that makes it feel even more unimaginably massive than it was for the time.

The first thing that I quickly noticed is that this really felt like the first game in the series that actual humans could beat without having to consult a guide every 20 seconds, while still being quite challenging and full of tricky bits of problem solving to accomplish all of the goals you have. The structure is pretty much the same as DQ2 as well for the most part, which makes the comparison all the easier to make. The first section of the game is a neat little self-contained, linear adventure as you're getting to know a small section of the world and solving a series of problems all for the journey to culminate in being granted a boat to sail the open seas and discover new lands. Once you get a boat and things open up, you get the goal of finding a series of key items scattered across the map and go from town to town picking up new bits of information to inform you of smaller scale goals to reach for along the path, with this section of the game making up the bulk of the playtime, before the final act wraps things up and increases the stakes by a considerable margin.

What I love is that each of these phases feels as if it was significantly improved from its original incarnations in one way or another. The first phase, before the boat, is big enough that with a couple of small tweaks, it could have almost passed off as a game in itself for the era, with its wide variety of locations, usually with their own small narratives to provide a deeper sense of individuality, feeling as if they exist for reasons beyond furthering the player's own goals. To make it even more impressive, each of these smaller scale narratives feel as if they're also contributing to the player's larger goal of escaping this continent, each step not only solving these smaller problems, but letting the hero to get closer to a port town to acquire a boat, which makes each accomplishment feel far more tangible to the player. It just feels like there's so much to do and discover in this opening stretch and the progression is absolutely on point. I feel like the vague directions about where to go next also work here due to the fact that the scale is small enough that pure experimentation and exploration will lead to you discovering and figuring out practically everything you need to do, similar to the atmosphere of Dragon Quest 1 in the sense of carving out your own little adventure with only vague inklings of what is expected (though it's handled so much smoother here).

However, it's the 2nd section of this game that really made me start loving this, and is also most indicative of how much more tightly designed the world as a whole is. The world might be even larger (or at least the same size) as the 2nd game, but it also feels way more interesting and digestible, with the moments of me needing to look up a guide being few and far between, with the answer almost always being something I went "ah, should've thought of that" rather than questioning how anyone was meant to figure it out in the first place. Objectives are paced out as to ensure you always have some idea of a landmark or location to aim or watch out for along the way as well, which ends up making the game simultaneously feel very open, as there's no set order for most of these events to take place in, while still guiding the player to make sure they're not just aimlessly wandering and hoping to find somewhere that might give you some basic idea of what's next. I also love the way that each of the key items scattered across the land feels as if they have rather unique methods of obtaining them to the point where I could probably list off all the step you'd need to take to get them all after only having played the game once. These range from using an item to turn invisible and sneak into a castle to steal a magic pitcher to reveal a shrine, to leaving a merchant at a tiny clearing and having him work to build an entire town over the course of in-game days. So much life is brought into the world through all of these interactions and the open-endedness of this section as a whole makes it just feel like a grand adventure.

The final section of the game is undoubtedly my favourite part though, and manages to really clearly demonstrate the fact that Dragon Quest as a series has a knack for absolutely nailing the endings and final sequences of their experiences. Not only do the stakes feel even higher here, but the entire extra bit of the map that gets added is insane to me in how much it adds to the game, not just in terms of gameplay, but with its narrative as well, putting the player in an increasingly isolated, hopeless environment that lacks all the upbeat elements of charm that it had before. Rather than some quirky townsfolk and cities that demonstrate determination in the face of a doomed situation, you instead get greeted to the sight of entire towns being plunged into a deep despair where there's so little to look forward to that they've given up on life and no longer have the drive to even leave the house in the morning. It's a powerful part of the game that lasts for quite a few more hours and makes your own journey feel all the more important, being this beacon of hope in the face of overwhelming adversity. This section also reminds me about how I think that giant sprawling nightmare dungeons in JRPGs are actually awesome and usually lead to some of the most intense, suffocating atmosphere in the games as you're confused, lost and trying to conserve every resource you have while being on the edge of death throughout. While I think that DQ2 actually captured this feeling even better, with it feeling as if the universe itself was against you as you were making your way to the final boss, the final dungeon in this game is pretty great as well and hits a lot of the same beats while being a bit more conventionally manageable, which could definitely and understandably be seen as a positive depending on what you value in these games.

While the world and objective design as a whole is excellent, as is evident with the last 4 paragraphs being dedicated largely to this, Dragon Quest III also succeeds in a variety of other areas as well. The combat in this game just feels better in a lot of respects, with a greater variety of spells and equipment lending itself to some deeper variety to the game for both the player and enemies, often leading to some more specialised scenarios that require bits and pieces of strategy rather than just spamming attack, it's the character customisation that brings this to the next level. The ability to create your party members is a really cool idea that's handled nicely, where you can choose their class, gender and even allocate some additional stats to fine tune your playstyle to a downright granular level. This combined with the ability to change your class at a certain level while retaining certain traits of a character's previous class is also awesome and can lead to some great scenarios where you can essentially combine the best elements of multiple classes into what feels like an unstoppable machine with insane versatility. On top of all this, you can even mess with their individual stat growth between levels if you want to get really detailed with things, all in all making for a robust set of systems that make later parts of the game even more fun with all this experimentation. This is also a game that requires next to no grinding at all in (at least the SNES version) which is just awesome considering it makes the world feel even more open while still being able to have those moments of danger to throw you off balance.

I know a lot of people joke about this series being as stock standard as they come and building entirely off tradition without adding its own flair, but I find this pretty reductive, especially considering how many interesting fantasy conventions there are out there that could be pulled from. From a narrative perspective, it's really interesting that you're essentially a B-list hero stuck in the shadow of their father, with you only being sent on this journey after he mysteriously disappears. The entire game not only feels like a quest to stop this big bad evil from destroying the world, but also to carve out a name for yourself and prove that you can live your own life and are also worthy of being appreciated. Every action you take to get a key item not only leads you closer to this antagonist, but is also another step in proving your own power and worth, essentially creating your own legend on your travels, with the goal of killing the ultimate evil not only being for the sake of the world, but on a smaller level, being able to do the one thing that your father wasn't able to. This is taken to even more insane heights in that 3rd act and the end result is worth it, with an ending that I think is not only beautiful and amazing, but outright insane with how it ties into the other games, feeling very ahead of its time while being thematically consistent as well. The game is also able to effectively craft a world that feels equal parts charming and horrific, with constant reminders about the impact of the Archfiend Baramos without feeling repetitive or at odds with any other aspect of its presentation. This is really impressive to me as usually I've noticed that JRPGs typically either represent this through massive events or through throwaway lines of dialogue that tell without showing, so to have this more full bodied, consistent looming threat and evil presence is much appreciated.

With all this said I also don't really think that the game is perfect by any means, with a couple of areas letting it down a bit from being something even more impressive. While the middle section of the game is generally incredible from an exploration perspective, it can feel a bit stagnant in terms of combat, where the bits and pieces of nuance get thrown out in favour of hours worth of spamming attack as you get bombarded with random encounter after random encounter. While this didn't detract too much from the game's sense of exploration, it was still obnoxious as all hell and ended up feeling a bit mindless in all the wrong ways. I also felt that it was odd how the combat was balanced in regards to magic, with the player not having an option to reduce magic damage taken by any meaningful amount, but then giving all the bosses insane magic attacks. I feel that this ends up promoting grinding rather than strategy and tactics in places, which is rather unfortunate as a design decision as it does make a lot of the options given to you feel a bit redundant, as the dominant strategy for a lot of the big, scary fights can boil down to buffing your attacking unit and then going full offense to take them down as fast as possible. It's still cool but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to create a level of nuance to match the extraordinarily detailed character customisation. While the writing is usually pretty good, I do also feel like some of these locations are a bit redundant though, being very small scale and not really adding a whole lot of personality to the world, which stands out a whole lot more when it can be contrasted by so many of the more lively and interesting towns the game has to offer, though once again, it's not a dealbreaker as the inconsistency isn't egregious enough to really take you out of the experience.

Overall, while a bit flawed and janky in certain regards, as is to be expected from a JRPG that was originally made for the NES, I think this is a genuinely amazing game that deserves so much of the praise it gets and maybe even a tad more in certain regards. Dragon Quest 3 puts the player in a vast world and then tells them to run wild all without ever feeling aimless in the process, the game guides you almost every step of the way, but you can do what you want at your own leisure and can take in all the quirks and individual pieces of this world however you see fit. A love letter to the series up to this point, along with feeling like a true culmination of the artistic ambitions that Yuji Horii had since the original Dragon Quest, finally being able to take all the ideas he had for years and make a game that truly embodied everything he wanted to make. This game is an absolute triumph and I respect the hell out of it even with the aforementioned issues making this an experience that I probably will take a bit of time before wanting to return to.

In my Zelda II: The Adventure of Link [リンクの冒険] review I start off the review by concocting a fictional joke reality where Zelda II: The Adventure of Link [リンクの冒険] was seen as one of the best games ever made. Within that joke reality were allusions to the fact that society basically stopped over this one games release date. As when I wrote that I thought it was ridiculous enough of an exaggeration to get across the insanity of the alternate reality I was proposing. No one can seriously think society would stop for that or any other game right? If I had made such exaggerations about Dragon Quest 3 it would be a little harder to tell if I was telling the truth or not especially if you're from Japan. Dragon Quest 3 was such a widely anticipated and popular game at it's release that rumors persisted for years that the government told Enix there that they had to not release their games on a school day, as it's too disruptive to do so. I don't really think it's important whether this rumor was true or not but what is important is that people ever believed the possibility that it was true there. It shows the scale of Dragon Quest's overall popularity in Japan and put's how popular this game was and is into perspective faster than anything else I can really say to you. So did it live up to that anticipation? Was this the RPG everyone was hoping for? Did it make up for Dragon Quest 2? The short answer is "yes" and the long answer is also "yes" with a lot of "S's" added to the end.

The first thing you'll notice that is massively improved in this game especially if you play the SNES versions like you should be, is that the graphics in three have quite an upgrade from the first two. Building's actually look like a building, your character sprites have a lot of detail. As with the previous games Akira Toriyama returns with the same style and flare but with more of it and applied to a better graphical palette. I like the look of all the player character job's and the design of enemies.

The game like the first two before it has a basic JRPG turn based battle system typical of the genre, but the third game adds a lot more complexity to this in a few ways. Like the second game you have multiple party members again, but unlike the first two Dragon Quest games it also has a class based party system. The magic system and more generally skills for the character are much more complex and varied than the first game due in part to this class system. The main character only has the option of staying a "hero" class, but your recruited party members have an option of six classes and the ability to change class once they reach level twenty later in the game. Later versions of the game beyond the NES added two more classes. Most stats are based on a characters given class and the ones you may have before switching, but there is a random mitigating factor regarding stats in that your characters have a "personality trait" that can lower some stats and make some higher depending on the trait given. I really don't like this, for one because it's just a needless obstacle when most people are going to find ways to min/max the system anyway and your personality in the game is determined before you can possibly know the importance of this at the very start of the game based on a small quiz. I think western RPG's already knew the folly of this system before it was even created and almost all of those just allow a character to directly chose or roll for stats.
The game allows the party including the main character to be either gender. Making this one of the first RPG's along with Phantasy Star which I'm reviewing at the same time right now to have a female protagonist.
The game feels a lot less grindy than it's predecessor, while probably still being more so than a modern audience would tolerate, but I think it's balanced pretty well. It doesn't have the huge spikes in difficulty and awful scaling issues that DQ2 suffered from near the end either. It manages to stay challenging though and the complexity of the class system offers new ways of playing the same type of game for the third time.

One of my biggest complaints with the second game was that the world was poorly designed with monotonous terrain and it had islands and even at one point some sparkles in the ocean you had to navigate to which wasn't easy with the way the layout of everything was designed. Three has a much bigger world but because it's a copy of our own world I find it easy to recognize the layout of the map and know where I am without much trouble and even without that we actually have a real map in this game so finding things isn't the chore it was in the previous game.


The story of DQ3 is a little bit more complicated than the first two games, but is still a very basic story at heart. Your character is the descendant of a hero named Ortega. Ortega was tasked with destroying Baramos the ultimate evil of the land but unfortunately rather than doing that he has seemingly vanished and most people presume him dead at this point so the task is given to you instead. Most of the games story after this is you going from one set piece to the next trying to get items for more over world mobility or later the keys and later Orb to unlock a bird who can fly you around the world and most importantly use it to fly to the "final" area. Once you do that, you learn that it is infact not the final area and you get teleported to the land from the first game. If you played the first game before and you played this then you slowly learn that you're in fact the hero from that games legend and that this is actually a prequel rather than a sequel to that game. I imagine this was the Japanese equivalent of the "I am you father" moment, except you know they also had Star Wars there. I guess you can say for a different generation this was like the "Kanto" reveal in the Gold and Silver Pokemon games. I'm sure there is something in your head you can relate this to. The point is this game was already received well before this but because of the twist it became one of the most important games in Japanese history and had an influence on more games than I can possibly list here. Shigesato Itoi, Yasumi Matsuno, Hidetaki Miyazaki and even Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi have expressed not just their love of the Dragon Quest series but the third game in particular. Just take my word for it when I say that a metric fuckton of other game companies and game creators cite Dragon Quest 3 as an influence on them and even when they don't directly say it you can see it in the large amount of games that feel like direct clones of the series after you play this. After you come into Alefgard it's a lot like the first game you gather the same items you did in that one and you go to the same castle to finally fight the real evil in the land Zoma. Who looks a lot like both of the Dragon bastards you killed in the previous games.
In short I think this games story is like the second games, but it manages to be a lot more memorable and it's "twist" at the end is actually a good surprise that is built up well rather than two's haphazard placement of a second final boss we don't have any reason to care about. The game starts with you in your home town, which you come to find out is on a small round island. The rest of the world is somewhat of a facsimile of our real world map and each town and area reflects the themes and people's that would be there in our real world. Like northern Africa has an Egyptian like town, the Japanese islands have a town that is like Japan, Rome for Italy etc. This makes each town standout a lot more than the previous games since each has it's own theme and culture and it makes the world more interesting to traverse and see. In DQ2 aside from a few port towns and one underground village most places were just a generic medieval-ish fantasy village. Some quests even allude to real world historical events and things like the spice trade, "new world" colonization and the Japanese practice of sacrificing young female virgins to a demon. I was really surprised they would stick with such boring bit's of history, but like with the Mother series that does this to a similar effect, I think it adds a bit of weird charm to the story. A demon has to eat too.
There is a recurring almost comic relief boss named Kandar (Robbin' 'Ood) who shows up a few times and eventually becomes a helpful NPC after he changes his evil ways. You eventually find out what happened to dear old dad... *Salutes the screen as a single tear goes down his face.* I can't press "f" enough times, so I'll just say I'm sorry we couldn't make it in time pap. Anyway, the puff puff girl makes her most humorous appearance yet, by not really appearing unfortunately, what is a guy to do without his *puff puff?" Instead you get a fake out moment that is almost just as good.
Unfortunately the class system came with a drawback in that none of your party has any characterization or personality, they're blank slates for the sake of functionality. Aside from one possible member who you can send off to help found a town in the north eastern US of A. I will say that even though this game had quite a fun little story I would be lying if I said this was the best aspect of the game for me and I think the first two Phantasy Star games which were out at this point both had stories miles ahead of this in terms of complexity, realism and characterization. I think in parts Dragon Quest 4 also has a much better episodic story and characterization, if only it connected into something as interesting as DQ3. Yeah I will say for it's stories short comings it does stick with you and it did make playing the trilogy feel worth it as a whole. I'm also really surprised at just the sheer amount of shit this game can even fit on an 8-bit cartridge.


Overall I think DQ3 is a vast improvement over the second game. The game play is smoother all while being extremely more complex. The map is gigantic and you have tons of small story bits to engage in and remember. If I had played this game as a child I could easily see it being one of my favorite games of all time, it has all the hallmarks of classic JRPG's and I would even say it fares pretty well against RPG's of the 16 bit generation let alone it's own era. I definitely think this is the best 8-bit RPG when you consider everything about the game. It managed to incorporate the class system of early role playing games and it's upcoming rival Final Fantasy and it's graphics were only a little bit worse than Phantasy Star and with the SNES version it's superior. It's influence is gigantic even among it's own already very influential series. This is a really important game in the history of RPG's and after playing it and enjoying it quite a bit for myself I can easily see why.

Dragon Quest has grown on me tons over the years, and it’s definitely one of my favorite game series. These games are RPGs at their most intuitive and engaging level. There are flaws along the way, but obviously that applies to everything. I think Dragon Quest III is a wonderful game, and quite arguably the most successful old-style NES RPG in terms of execution. After this game, the series took a more story-oriented approach, which I also loved, but I think one reason Yuji Hori went down that path was because he couldn't top III by repeating its concept anymore.

Dragon Quest III is a game with player interaction at its core. The challenge, enjoyment and satisfaction that the player gets depends entirely on his own actions and choices. This is most clearly evidenced by III’s initial team recruitment. You are given a choice of six classes (Soldier, Mage, Cleric, Jester, Fighter and Merchant; Thief in the remakes) and told one can change to a Sage later on. That’s all the tutorial you get, but it’s enough to make logical decisions. Players who take the game lightly and pick the joke classes will endure many hardships; players who plan well are rewarded.

Exploration is the second critical factor of the game, and it is again tied to the player’s choices and motivations. Only rudimentary instructions guide you; filling in the map and learning how to take down enemies is your responsibility. The game sets traps for players who don’t prepare themselves as well. One memorable trap is the pyramid, which I explored instead of visiting the nearby town first despite an NPC’s advice. In the pyramid, I fell to the bottom floor through a hole and landed in a room where, to my surprise, magic was unusable and the enemies were stronger than what I had faced so far. Needless to say, I barely escaped alive. DQIII pulls few punches: it trusts you to overcome challenges and think ahead.

There are some challenging bosses to deal with, particularly the final bosses of the game’s two halves. In both cases, leveling up was not the solution I used. I was able to defeat these enemies by switching strategies, focusing on different status magic and shifting my characters’ inventories and equipment setups. People who say these games are all grinding have no idea what they’re talking about. A player who takes a few minutes and thinks has no need to waste time walking in circles and farming metal slimes. Other strong enemies in the game simply required further exploration of the map. One, a snake beast named Orochi, was easily dealt with on a second attempt after I held off on fighting it for another dungeon. I think what the game throws at you is entirely fair: you just have to do a little work to get past things sometimes. That’s the genius of Dragon Quest III’s design in a nutshell, and this aspect of challenge was something sorely lacking in RPGs during the SNES and Playstation eras.

Of course, the game is not without problems. Many of these are fixed in the remakes, but some aren’t. The walking and ship speeds are unbearably slow, which was common in these games until the DS remakes. I don’t know why nobody complained about how slow vehicles were during testing, but when exploring the globe takes a lot of sailing, you’ll curse that speed. Encounter rates are much too high in some places (like sailing) , as is common in NES RPGs. It’s hard to complain about an older game’s story, but I do think a few of the tips could have been clearer, especially in the final sections of the game; even in the Japanese version you’re sometimes at a loss about what to do without a guide. The game gives you a memo pad type feature to help remember things with, but I could not get this to work on dialogue that I really needed. I’ll just assume that was my own error and give the game the benefit of a doubt.

Dragon Quest III is in many ways the ultimate RPG of its time. It blows the first two games out of the water both in scope and overall design. It’s the standard by which future games in the series should be judged, and it makes Dragon Quest IX look completely pathetic. No amount of tinkering with the job system is going to help if your core quest isn’t exciting, and it’s sad that a game from 1988 has cooler maps and better pacing than a game from 2009. I highly recommend this title to anyone who loves RPGs and wants to play a pivotal game in their development as a genre.