Overview
Without boring you, Dragon Quest 3 originally came out in 1988 to critical acclaim and it looked like…this. It’s amazing how far we’ve come but it has had a couple different remakes/ports in the past, so does the newest remake capture the magic that made the original game so good? (I embedded the original games soundtrack here! Pretty neat right?) This review does contain spoilers for the game but the story…is very similar to how it was all those years ago so I’m not sure who I’m protecting? Snape kills Dumbledore.
Facelift
The game obviously doesn’t look like that anymore it looks like this now!
It looks great in Unreal Engine 4 and you don’t need a high end card or anything to run it. The enviornment, effects, and sprites look amazing like this, bringing to life the effects that long ago we would’ve just had to imagine in our mind while sprites either blinked or had a hit effect go off. (Sometimes nothing at all would happen other then the two tiny lines of text stating something had happened.) The voice acting does help bring the characters to life but they don’t have any actual spoken lines other than the predetermined ones for certain events and cutscenes like “Welcome Back!” and “Good Luck!”. The sound effects however still manage to retain their original charm with some sound effects I’m pretty sure are just straight up reused/remastered from the original game which some people might thing would detract from the new look but it somehow fits perfectly into the world, battles, and characters themselves.
The music is somewhat reused from a symphonic version tracklist made years ago (from my quick research) for a soundtrack but it works wonderfully here, some tracks sound very similar but not exactly the same either leading me to believe that some were either rerecorded or some parts of the original were mixed slightly differently to better fit into the setting of a game and not a complete soundtrack. The music stays true to the original while keeping the the fact that you are exploring a vast and open world. The battle music is pretty mid honestly but it was 1988, there was only so much to work with. Even the overworld theme which I adore becomes somewhat grading after looping for the 1000th time after wandering around the wilderness looking for a specific tree that gives Yggdrasil leaves between 4 rocks in the middle of a massive forest.
Character Creation is fairly limited when it comes to your hero, you get the choice between Appearance A and Appearance B, which is where I’m going to knock this game for the first time.
You would think that picking between A and B would have no impact and is just for looks, me liking the sleeker design of the hero in Appearance B picked that one however this is NOT the case. It turns out this also determines your Hero’s canonical gender. Appearance A is male and Appearance B is female. It wasn’t until the opening cutscene of the game proper that I noticed my mother said “She” when it looked like mother dearest was referring to me, I shrugged it off and figured maybe it was one of those pronoun games JRPGs like to play and mom was talking about some ambiguous third party. Then I entered combat outside the village to test some things and noticed that my character sounded feminine in their battle sound effects. Now this may come as a HUGE SHOCK to some of you in todays environment, I didn’t care. I didn’t give a single flying fuck and aside from being minorly surprised for like 10-15 seconds after realizing, I played the whole game like this for two very important reasons!
I didn’t wanna go through character creation again and I did prefer the design more over Appearance A. I’m only knocking it because it was unclear, would it have been so hard to put (Masculine) and (Feminine) in parathesis after the A and B? I feel like maybe the developers and team thought this might’ve caused a stir with some certain anti-woke content creators who hunger for red meat to feed their outrage money machine audiences but who cares? I think this decision only influences how you’re referred to by your family in a few cutscenes by replacing he with she and one cutscene where you become king…queen? See below. I didn’t notice any tangible stat differences because of my appearance choice, if there it it can be fixed up with accessories or reassigning a personality anyway.
Exploration
This was going to go into the below section but this actually turned out to be its own monster after I wrote it so let that be the basis for what an absolute joy exploring in Dragon Quest 3 is. There are hidden items almost EVERYWHERE, in barrels, in drawers, hidden on the ground that you can only see with a thief’s ability called snoop. Hidden areas that contain even more hidden loot! Even if these aren’t your thing and you’re only here for the combat you can find hidden monsters with a monster wrangler or thief that join you can cause monster pile on to do more damage with it quickly becoming the best move in the game if you really devote yourself to finding all the little guys and being able to participate easier in the monster arena which grants large amounts of money and rare items to use.
Think you’re done with an area after you’ve turned it over? NOPE! Items like Ra’s Mirror and the day/dusk/night cycle encourage you to visit an area multiple times to experience different events, open areas that might not be open at that specific time, and find monsters who only come out at certain times of the day or who might be masquerading as NPCs to recruit to your cause. If you’re a socialite that loves to talk to all the NPCs some will give you hints for areas that come way later in the game or give you an unmarked side quest to look for someone and will reward you accordingly. The most notorious I found being very early on a dancer who has seemingly disappeared and is not able to be found until towards the very end of the game where you are given one of the best armor items for female characters as a reward for remembering this random quest. The one people probably know most is learning about Ortega’s past, this is completely optional like most things in DQ3 are but finding out what happened to your missing father does add some in my opinion very much needed oomph to the main character and very satisfyingly pays off later. Its simple and intriguing enough for the player to want to explore more of the world to find more traces of him. (and pickup some very sweet loot along the way!)
Traversal in DQ3 is your standard RPG fare, you get a ship, a way to fly, another ship, and teleportation but the way it’s presented does make it feel fantastical. With the amount of hidden areas and items to pickup you will never be bored exploring the world, the only way I would feel like someone COULD be bored would be if they beelined the main story and didn’t look at all this game has to offer off the beaten path. There were entire stream sessions where I didn’t touch story and instead would explore the ocean or walk across large swaths of land to find hidden areas to try and recruit monsters. It keeps it exciting and fun and you keep wondering what you’re going to find next. I do have one minor gripe, if you are a completionist this is frustrating, you know what I’m talking about. the world is so huge that you end up looking for one singular thing for 2 hours that you can’t find but need to find and you refuse to use a guide because you’re better than that….but that is a very niche situation that mostly only applies to me. If it also applies to you then Horray! Welcome kindred soul! My writing has found my intended audience. Behold me being blind.
I really really enjoyed flying too. The music from it is something I’ve added to a personal favorites playlist. It’s slow but extremely relaxing and also allows you access to areas you couldn’t get to before!
Gameplay, Battle, and my Journey(The Important Bit)
Dragon Quest 3 is starts you with the option of 3 difficulties Dracky Quest, Dragon Quest, and Draconian Quest, which are easy, normal, and hard difficulties respectively. Now I have been playing games for a long time and mama didn’t raise a bitch so we’re playing on Draconian Quest or Hard difficulty. The game starts with a personality test and I got Wit but because I didn’t realize Wit is a mage personality I did NOT build my party accordingly.
Behold my starting party! The Hero, Monster Wrangler, Mage, and a Thief. This setup has no priest or healer, I figured I’d be good since I know the Hero in this game always learns at least one heal spell. Spoiler alert this was a massive oversight on my part so I’ll frontload this. The game does allow you to switch out party members by going to Patty’s Party Planning and just hiring one but its an entirely new adventurer. You lose your exp and any learned abilities and you have, yes you can pick them back up later but me the min-maxer who hates losing progress deciding that I’m going to roll with it and tough it out until we can start changing jobs around. This led to me and the Monster Wrangler acting as the party’s healers and because I have the Wit personality and can’t hit all that hard, this rendered me quite useless in most fights for damage (Up until about the 75% progression mark where I finally stopped being a stubborn idiot and switched the monster wrangler off into priest) and relying on the thief and monster wrangler to deal most of the damage. Now for some people this would ruin their experience but not me.
I loved it. The game had dealt me a shitty hand due to my poor planning, each fight became a desperate fight for my life. There were fights where I would just know if I went down, that was it. GAME OVER. Again I didn’t have a priest so that also meant that I was the only one who could cast the Zin spell to resurrect fallen party members and it doesn’t have a 100% chance of working either. I had to rely on smart tactics and nothing else, the thief knows Sandstorm and Wit personality is decent in speed and wisdom growth meaning I can dodge attacks and learn skills and spells faster plus the Hero class learns the ability Dodgy Dance upping just the users Speed and Evasion even further.
This led to boss fights especially being a careful dance of the Hero buffing themself and patching up hurt or dead party members, the Mage casting Kabuff and Decelerate to help with our party’s lack of a tank and to control turn order with an odd spell on free turns, The Monster Wrangler spamming Monster Pile On for big damage and using a Prayer Ring whenever they’d run out of MP, and the Thief spamming Sandstorm or Sleepy Slap to keep gamble on the enemy missing if they used physical attacks or to remove their turn altogether and if I got really lucky they could throw a Propeller Blade in there. This sounds solid in THEORY however I do not have any reliable party healing past the Monster Wrangler’s weak Soothing Song Ability and I need them on damage to keep the fight’s tempo going. I do not have anything for magic damage mitigation either which is DEVISTATING. The Ripper of the Rift made this painfully obvious with me opting to keep a Kylla alive the whole fight to stop the Ripper from busting out high level wind magic to avoid wiping my party.
This also applied to Orochi. The developers definitely played their game because later bosses almost always have multiple actions and a high damage dealing magic attack, very not so subtly telling the player that they absolutely should have something in their kit to help with this. If they do not then Perish I guess. I would go so far as to say Orochi is the door to mid-late game.
This only applies to boss fights though, I quickly learned that this party comp trivializes most regular monster encounters up to about just before Mt Necrogrond (I do this orb last for obvious reasons). This would be how a typical random encounter would go, The Hero and Mage cast Boom which allows for some hurt to be laid on most enemies outside of the few that have magic damage resistance like slimes, the Monster Wrangler busts out Monster Pile On which is absolutely devastating to encounters with less than about 5 enemies. The Thief cleans up the rest with a propeller blade which I made him change class to a Martial Artist as soon as I got the boat which means he crits easily. Usually if the encounter had less than 5 it was usually done, if it had 5-6 they were usually just hanging on, now if they had 7-8 things would get a little dicey but if I just repeated the same order described above it would 100% of the time clean it up with little damage done to my group thanks to my high speed stat.
Toward the end of the game I found an excellent rhythm, I loved the monster collecting quest so much I reclassed everyone who could to have Monster Wrangler skills and just spammed Monster Pile on for every fight and since damage for the move scales with how many monsters you’ve found it’s very devastating. It was glorious. Unfortunately outside of Bosses and very high damaging enemies this trivialized almost all encounters in late/end game. Even Baramos here had trouble figuring out what to do with me.
Unfortunately I don’t have much to say past this point. My battles followed this pattern until the final boss itself and I had unfortunately learned Omni-Heal by this point and with the large MP pool from the Wit personality I started with meant I could spam for about 8 turns with the Monster Wranglers using Wild Side and Monster Pile on for massive damage.
Verdict
Dragon Quest 3 is a fun, lovable, and exciting game with easy to learn yet difficult to master battle mechanics that doesn’t take itself seriously most of the time but knows exactly when to drop the fun facade and reveal an uncaring, cruel world underneath for a bit before returning you to your happy go lucky adventure. Dragon Quest 3 gets a …
10/10 Perfect
while it doesn’t deviate to hard from the original or push its boundaries in the genre Dragon Quest 3 knows exactly what works, and makes an RPG fun. It worked in 1988 and it still works all these years later in 2024/2025. I couldn’t put it down. I would spend all week wanting to stream and play Dragon Quest 3. I wasn’t even interested in making content for it to keep up with my streaming, (alas now I must edit the whole series all at once. Woe.) I wanted to see what happened next, what new hidden things I could find, what monsters I could recruit to advance the monster arena or to help with a especially challenging boss, wanted to class change some members to learn skills that would make it easier to endure certain moves. This game is what I would call a classic RPG lover’s dream, infinite replayiblity with the classes and class change features, a simple yet challenging (should you choose to) adventure to help push their limits and a post game that I have yet to touch! I fully recommend Dragon Quest 3, now here’s hoping the rest of the Erdrick Trilogy DOES shake things up at least a little for the Dragon Quest 1 and 2 Remakes. DQ1 is a little to simple in my opinion and DQ2…..please rescale the female party member…she just explodes.
Not bad for a first review. See you in the next one!
-Soupa
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