Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review: Although Final Fantasy is the first name that comes to mind in the West when it comes to RPGs, there is a much more famous and beloved series in Japan, Dragon Quest. We have previously reviewed Dragon Quest XI and talked about classic JRPG games. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake invites us almost to the beginning, to play one of the most important games in JRPG history in its renewed form.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review: Here’s the Sword, Here’s the Enemy

I am serious when I say Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is a JRPG classic, all the standards of the genre that you can think of have emerged with these games and one of them is the story. There is a huge evil enemy, and the task of stopping it is in our hands as the child of a great hero. We make various companions along the way, help people and kingdoms, and work to write our name in history as the new hero.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review

It is a game with a very standard story and a traditional “you save the world, son” style. As I said from the beginning, it is the game that brought out these traditions. On the one hand, we follow in the footsteps of our father, who is a great hero, and on the other hand, we help the people around us. Meanwhile, the game gives us some information, but we figure out how to go and do side missions in the meantime.

To give an example, at the beginning I was trying to find a tower to find the key in the hands of a bandit, but I confused the directions and went a little too far north. In the town I reached, I saw that all the people were sleeping, and the only person who was not sleeping told us that the solution to this problem was in the hands of the fairies. I moved west and found the fairy village, where everyone was avoiding humans and the queen hated us. Finding the queen’s daughter who ran away with a human would also solve the sleeping problem, so I found the relevant place and barely reached the end. Ultimately, the whole town woke up, but how successful I was in the mission is a relative matter. I later realized that what I did was irrelevant to the main story. It was a nice side adventure experience.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

Although the main story of the game remains the same with Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, it has been expanded with new dialogues and different content. It did not disappoint me with its dialogues, important parts of which were voiced, and the magnificent world it presented, and I do not think it will disappoint any JRPG lovers.

The Hero’s Personality is Important

Although there were different remakes of the original Dragon Quest III, which was released for the Famicom in 1998, they were versions released for different consoles and did not have any innovations other than graphical improvements. This time, we have a complete remake that includes many innovations in sound, graphics and gameplay. Let’s see what has changed.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

First of all, let me say that they managed to preserve the JRPG atmosphere of the game. It offers the complete old-style JRPG game experience with turn-based combat, lots of different class and personality options, and random battles that get tiring after a point. You know, if the difficulty were a little more brutal, it would be at a level that would drive away the new generation of JRPG players.

There are many improvements on the gameplay side of the game, including newly added classes, a renewed Monster Arena, a fuller map, many QoL features that increase the gameplay pleasure and a quick registration system, some of them. QoL features are really good, you can speed up the battle (normal is extremely slow), you can make all the characters attack on their own, you can even escape death depending on the game difficulty. On top of that, the game has plenty of automatic saves, and if you need to quit suddenly, there’s even a quick save option that’s deleted the next time you log in.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

There are many small points on the map you use while traveling the world, some of which contain treasures, while in some of them we encounter friendly monsters that we can use for the Monster Arena. I will touch upon this part separately. In addition to the world map becoming more complete and encouraging exploration, there are also updates to the mini map in the game. Now we have a map in the dungeons and we can directly examine the place we entered. It is a nice feature, especially for those who do not want to go the wrong way and waste their valuable resources after difficult challenges. By the way, there is a day and night cycle in the game and you can encounter different people or monsters in the same place at different times of the day, and they have integrated this into the game beautifully.

The classes and personality system in the game were already detailed, but with HD-2D Remake they overhauled them to make them more complete. First of all, a completely new class, Monster Wrangler, has been added to the game. This class can learn the abilities of friendly monsters that you find in the environment and add to your Arena team and use them against enemies. I bought it because I wanted to build a team with interesting characters and I used it with pleasure throughout the game. In fact, the class system of the game allows the character to start over with a different class after a certain point, resulting in different combinations. First of all, I took a wizard, a merchant and a Wrangler alongside my hero and had very difficult but entertaining fights. It was nice to see that while we were a team that threw stones at the enemy’s head and ran away, trying to collect more money, we turned into a solid force as we got stronger.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

Another important factor in character development is our personality (in the game). When starting the game, each player is subjected to different tests, among which there are tests that determine our personality according to the choices we make, such as helping the old man asking for help or not listening to the sign saying “don’t go to the right”. I also say “good luck” to the game that made me stubborn just because I didn’t listen to the sign. Each personality determines the proportion of statistics you receive when you level up. You can also change your personality with books or equipment in the game. With more than 40 personality types and classes that you can combine in many different ways, as well as things that increase your statistics, we can say that the customization options of the game are enormous.

Monster Arena is a mode that was also available in the old version of the game and offers major innovations with 2D-HD Remake. Friendly creatures that we find around and send to the city go out to the arena on our behalf and engage in a kind of Pokemon battle. Even though we cannot directly control these characters, we give them some tactics and watch them fight. Among the trainers of the Arena, there are mostly children or elderly people, but as we progress, we defeat opponents from higher society and earn various items and money. It’s a nice side activity, especially if you’re out of money, spend some time here.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

Dragon Quest Traveler

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake looks great on next-gen with its completely revamped art style. I constantly repeat in reviews that I love the HD-2D style, which started with Octopath Traveler, and the same is true in this game. The character models are beautiful, the environmental design is great. When we first enter each city, I can’t help but say to myself “how beautiful it looks” in the parts where he shows the region from different angles. Switching to the first camera angle during fights and the lack of attack animations can be considered a minus, but we can attribute this to not spoiling the classic atmosphere of the game.

I mentioned that all the important dialogues and attack sounds in the game are voiced. Even though there are still silent dialogues at most points, voice-over reveals itself when we encounter important characters or find a note that advances the story. I would also like to point out that although I usually play in Japanese, when I installed it on a different device, I forgot the game in English and played it that way for a long time without any discomfort.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

As someone who listens to a lot of game music, I was more or less familiar with the music of this game, and I loved the re-recorded version with the symphony orchestra. In every place you enter in the game, the music with changing tempos depending on the time of day is amazing. Although, I remembered that I haven’t played the old style JRPG for a long time, with the boredom I experienced as I played the same combat music over and over again while my team was barely standing. But the music is very nice.

Conclusion

While Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake preserves its original JRPG roots, it is also a game that welcomes players who have entered the genre with new generation games. A special game that combines a true JRPG classic with magnificent HD-2D graphics and unique music, which manages to show how different it is from the new generation games even with the personality tests at the entrance. It’s a game that stays in the back of my mind even when I can’t spare enough time due to various work, and makes me think all day long about how to move forward at a point where I get stuck at night.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Examination

I recommend Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, which I finished after an average of 60 hours of adventure, to everyone who is interested in JRPGs. However, one effect of the game preserving its old style was that it brought with it various features that would annoy the audience accustomed to new generation games. Sometimes you won’t be able to figure out what to do, and if you don’t play on the easiest way, you will get bored and stuck with random attacks. Despite the many QoL features the game brings, it does not hold the player’s hand and direct him to what he needs to do, which is a great thing for me because I feel like I’m playing the game myself. Whether everyone will feel this way is up to the player.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake