Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Review

     A great game is a great game, no matter when it’s released. And Dragon Quest 3 is a great game. I had never played any version of this game, nor have I ever beaten any Dragon Quest game, despite certainly pouring hundreds of hours into Dragon Quests 7, 8, and 11. Dragon Quest 3 is precisely the game I needed to resolve this.

    Freedom. That’s really the greatest draw of Dragon Quest 3. The opening hours, as you’re first finding your feet, are (helpfully) fairly linear, with a couple of side paths to get distracted down like the fantastic sidestory involving Norvik and the Faerie Village. But help out enough people, find yourself in enough new cities, and you will eventually be rewarded with a ship. And that ship is freedom.

    The game truly opens up in an extraordinary new fashion, and this was my favorite part of the game. You start on the western side of the westernmost continent, and you can go either north or south. Whichever you choose, you will be quickly rewarded by finding a new town, though notably, you can do nothing yet at either of them. Whichever one you stumble across first will set you on a journey to whole new continents, to aiding in the construction of a whole new city, finding artifacts stolen long ago, sneaking into palaces, facing dungeons with your hero alone, and unmasking the world’s villains for who they truly are. Your quest is to find six orbs of various colors. How you go about finding them is entirely up to you.

    This freedom extends to the mechanics of the game. While you will always have the hero in your party (they are you, after all), you have three additional party slots you can choose to fill. You could even choose not to fill them. There are several classes you can choose between for your new party, from standard mages and warriors, classes with unique abilities like thieves and merchants, and the wholly new and interesting monster wrangler. Mix and match these classes to your heart’s delight, there’s nothing stopping you save how many new characters you wish to recruit.

    Before even the halfway point of the game, however, the class mechanic gets completely redefined. Find yourself Alltrades Abbey and you can switch one of your existing character’s classes to another, while retaining some of the stat growths. This creates so many possibilities for the future, as your martial artist can learn healing spells, or your warrior can take up the thief’s mantle to become a dungeoneering expert. They start at level one again, but if you survive your first couple of battles, they’ll catch back up fairly quickly. This might also be a good time to see what exactly that gadabout class is all about…

    None of this would work, however, if the world itself weren’t so extremely fun to explore. Dungeons are just the right size, allowing for some adventure off the beaten path while still making sure you’re going where you’re needed. But to be honest, for me, this game is all about the cities. Every time I found a new city, I spent easily half an hour running around, chatting with the locals, checking out the local shops, and seeing if there was any well I could climb down (one of my favorite things to do in any Dragon Quest game). Each new location feels like its own individual place, with unique characters and their own worries and problems. You can even tackle these in pretty interesting ways sometimes. For example, I’m fairly certain I missed fully half of the plot of Manoza because I took the advice of the guy who approached me outside the castle and told me not to go in, that the villagers themselves could help me. They pointed me in the direction of the cave with the plot relevant item, and it was only later I learned of all the people in the castle’s dungeon whom I, presumably, would have interacted with had I gone inside.

    There is a caveat to my enjoyment of this game, however, and it comes in the latter part of the game. Spoilers ahead for an over-30-year-old game, but after defeating who I thought was the final boss, another enemy rears his head, and a whole new world opens up below us. This is the world of the original Dragon Quest, and you’re able to explore this area to your heart’s content. Unfortunately, many of these areas felt very similar to each other, with every locale speaking in ye olde English and no real individual predicaments to rescue them from, just the single over-arching threat of the Archfiend. This doesn’t last too long, truth be told, but it’s made excruciating by the enemies on the overworld and in dungeons here. Random enemies start to have insta-kill spells and use them constantly, as well as every single boss (except, oddly, the final two). Moving around can start to feel infuriating as you spend every battle reviving party members who died despite their “please don’t insta-kill me” accessories and the time after each battle healing back to full, just to get insta-killed again in the next one. It wore on me in such a way that I almost completely gave up at this point.

    A final word on freedom now, though. You can truly take any combination of characters you want to the final battle. It will be difficult, as mine was, but you can. I took my hero, a thief, a sage, and a monster wrangler into those final battles, and a less synchronous party for boss battles I’m not sure could exist, especially with the thief (whose focus is exploration and crowd control) being essentially useless at this point. And though it took a while to work out an effective strategy, I did find one.

    And it was worth it. From beginning to end, this game rewards your sense of curiosity, your desire to understand the place you’re in. You find every new city by talking to the people around you (I should note I turned off the objective marker at the start of the game; I recommend you do so as well). You learn a little bit more about the situation of the world, yourself, and your family with every step you take. And when you finally struggle through to the very end of the game, a bright new dawn awaits you, bringing hope to your world as well as theirs. Dragon Quest 3 is a fantastic journey, one well worth undertaking.