Dragon Quest is certainly no stranger to remakes. Dragon Quest III was and still remains an important cornerstone of the turn-based RPG genre, leaving a legacy that could be called ubiquitous to what came after it. Its original release on the Famicom wasn’t where its story ended, however, as it has since gone on to receive several remakes of its own. 2024’s newest version, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, combines its classic appeal with new ideas first originating from the likes of Octopath Traveler.
Where It All Begins
The appeal of the stories of Dragon Quest can typically be likened to old-fashioned fairy tales. There’s a fantastical mystique where many elements of the world, characters, and story are left deliberately under-explained to encourage players to fill in the gaps or come to their own conclusions on things. While the series is famous for using a series of broadly disconnected vignettes to communicate its narratives, you could say a lot of its best aspects started with Dragon Quest III.
The story of III starts off simply enough. After having a dream on the night before your 16th birthday, you awaken to continue the quest of your late father Ortega. The realm you call home is threatened by the Archfiend Baramos, who promises to sow chaos and misery wherever he pleases. With the blessing of your mom and the king of your hometown, you gather companions whilst stepping into the shoes of daddy dearest to finish what he started. Really, though, this plot is largely something in the background for most of the game.
The story mostly serves as an excuse to get the player out exploring the lands with some urgency. Instead of focusing on the larger plot and villains, Dragon Quest III’s focus is largely aimed at local-level problems and characters. While you might be on your way to slay Baramos, your immediate attention might be more focused on waking a village that’s been cursed to sleep because of a racist faerie. Or maybe you come across a town ransacked by demons and need to help a wandering soul peacefully pass on. Thanks to how varied these snippets of story are in their emotions, it’s always fun to see what happens next. Better still is that many stories presented here don’t have happy or clean endings.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake takes the narrative a step further, adding many new scenes that help enhance the emotion or properly answer lingering questions. The player’s mom is a technically important character, but she’s given quite a lot of sensible and bittersweet depth here. If you retrieve your dad’s old helmet and show it to her, she’s given a new scene where reminisces about the past. That’s just one example among what feels like dozens of smart and natural extensions to an old story. It’s wonderful stuff, and although III’s story is ultimately still simpler than what came after, the writing is nothing to sneeze at.
Let’s Go Questing
What’s held up the most remarkably about Dragon Quest III is its bang-on quest design. True to the spirit of many RPGs in the ‘80s, you explore a world map and travel across towns where you slowly piece together what to do next. While a somewhat linear affair when broken into parts, the game places a lot of trust in the player to figure out where to go and what they should be doing in order to progress. Once you reach the mid-game section after getting a boat to travel the seas, the world truly opens up to you and you’re tasked with making sense of it all.
All of this is relatively normal, but what makes it so special in the case of Dragon Quest III is its enormous sense of scope. While the first few hours are fun and adventurous as you dart between towns, caves, and a tower in search of the way forward, the game essentially mocks that once you leave it. Suddenly you’re thrust into a world several times the size of the initial areas, and that isn’t even the last time the narrative pulls such a trick. With nary a clue on what to do next, you’re left to your own devices and have to talk to NPCs that will grant hints on important points of interest. They don’t mark your map or put down a waypoint, so paying close attention to the hints in their dialogue is the most you’ll get.
These hints often come in the form of directions like “head to the continent southeast from here”, but they can also be more vague and require careful attention to detail. However, it’s not a fully open world game despite its heavy emphasis on non-linearity. At several points you’ll be met with a guard blocking your way or a locked door that needs opening, and you’ll have to take several other steps elsewhere to progress. Other times you can happen upon an important location that guarantees story progress simply by exploring around.
I happened upon the town of Jipang and its infamous boss Orochi first during my hunt for several key items in the midgame. I’ve played older versions of Dragon Quest III before, so I knew what I was getting into by doing it first—but I was a glutton for punishment and slew Orochi before leaving. This added splash of nonlinearity and needing directions by heeding hints and sheer curiosity really makes the journey seem grand in spite of its retrospective simplicity. “Adventure” is the name of the world map theme, it really couldn’t be more apt.
A Fork in the Road
With a big world map to explore also comes several towns and dungeons to explore. This being an old school game, a large part of the challenge is keeping your team steady on resources as you scramble to the next town or dungeon exit. It’s what’s within these towns and dungeons that really grab my attention, though.
One of the key factors of Dragon Quest that has always resonated with me is how the level design tries to convey locations as actual places. Shops are always built out of houses, castles always have rooms where their leaders sleep, and towns always have some fields where animals or crops grow. You get the sense that there are actually people living there, despite the abstraction in some places. Exploring this is its own reward because I get to learn more about the setting, but it helps that the game actively rewards you for doing so.
Playing kleptomaniac and taking stuff from every pot, drawer, dresser, and barrel is rewarding. Sure, I’m technically a thief for raiding a castle’s locked treasury or stealing a hidden heirloom, but it’s fun to do so. It helps too that the townsfolk always have something interesting or funny to say beyond their progression hints.
This also extends to dungeons, which take on different kinds of design methods based on what you’re exploring. Towers are vertical and have many winding staircases, often asking you to jump off of ledges or tightropes to find the way forward. Meanwhile, caves and shrines are more spread out and have many branching pathways, leading to either treasure or dead ends. Encounters here tend to be much more brutal, so careful play and knowing when to recover at an inn is key.
Make Your Party and Fight Stuff
Dragon Quest has pretty much always leaned into the age old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. This naturally extends to the combat, which is a tried and true blend of simplicity and high difficulty. As a remake, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake couldn’t change a whole lot so as to not disrupt the old balancing. Having played both the Super Famicom and Game Boy Color versions in the past, I’m happy to say that this is easily the best iteration of its combat system yet. The new Draconian difficulty is excellent stuff and often had me improvising new strategies due to how punishing it can be.
Combat is played out using an old-fashioned turn-based combat system. You’ve got four characters active on the field and your objective is to beat the stuffing out of every enemy in front of you, gaining EXP, items, and so on along the way. While your player is locked to the Hero role (balancing offense, defense, and support), you’ve got total control over how the rest of your party is built. At the outset, you can create companion characters and assign them personalities that will affect their stat growth. More vitally, you can also choose their vocation, which is their starting class.
There are the usual suspects, such as the healing/support focused Priests, the physical offense oriented Warriors, and the Magic damage dealing Mages. Besides that there are also more unusual ones such as Merchants and Gadabouts (formerly known as Goof-Offs or Jesters), who are useless in damage-dealing but have great benefits outside that. Merchants can gather rare items with ease and they can make the game’s item economy far more forgiving, meanwhile Gadabouts can easily wade off status ailments. After reaching Alltrades Abbey, you can unlock the powerful Sage class, combining traits of both the Wizard and Priest.
Speaking of Alltrades Abbey, it’s also there where you can change a character’s vocation into something else. Not just that, any old Abilities or Magic they knew will carry over into that new vocation, allowing for lots of mixing and matching. A Monk that was once a Priest can provide high speed healing support, but there’s also a massive drop off in MP to consider too. You’re additionally forced to start back at Lv. 1 so there are some drawbacks and considerations to make before doing so.
When all’s said and done, I really like the combat of Dragon Quest III HD-2D. There are some things I’ll mention later that let the combat truly shine, but for now I’ll say that they did a great job bringing up the old system into something classic, yet modern.
The New Stuff
With this new iteration of Dragon Quest III comes new changes and additions. While also carrying over most of the changes from past versions, HD-2D Remake adds in things like new vocations from Dragon Quest IX, postgame content, story changes, boss battles, and additions from later games. There are also several new quality of life features for players who may need a helping hand.
The first new feature that has a big impact is the new Recall feature, allowing you to record any string of dialogue or take pictures of unusual places. As mentioned earlier, Dragon Quest III is a game that very heavily relies on NPCs and hints to make progress, and for some this can be rather overwhelming. Recall acts to mitigate this by being a handy note taker that the player can activate with the press of a button. So if you forgot things like directions, what monsters to watch out for, or how to deal with a puzzle, you can use Recall to put yourself back on the right track. It’s a very sensible and elegant addition.
If you’d prefer to focus on the story, there is also an option to enable things like quest markers and objectives, as well as an Easy Mode for more casual play. I never used these personally, but they are a win for accessibility. You also get more options upon being defeated in battle, such as rematches for bosses or returning to an autosave after death.
As for new content, there are new surprise bosses peppered throughout the main story. A few of them are placed in areas that originally had nothing in them. I won’t spoil when and where these bosses occur, but suffice it to say that the developers picked wisely to make difficult dungeons all the more brutal. Many bosses have also been adjusted to be even more difficult than before, employing new strategies with new attacks. These aren’t huge differences, but they add up to make the experience more distinct.
HD-2D Goodness
The new HD-2D style of games has become quite popular in the wake of its debut in Octopath Traveler. Combining conventional 2D sprite artwork with luscious 3D environments packed with complex lighting, effects, and detail has so far proven successful amongst audiences. I’m somewhat more mixed on the style, but with each passing game featuring it, it’s seen steady improvement with more inspired artwork and considered application of advanced effects. Despite this, I was apprehensive about the idea of Dragon Quest III being remade in this style.
Those worries were for naught, however, as Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is absolutely gorgeous. It completely redeems whatever faults I may have had with the style in the past. It’s incredibly colorful whilst still maintaining the important mood of the original, and areas are remade in ways that add lots of depth and character to the environments. One of the things I worried about was that, due to the high number of areas present, they would wind up reusing assets in a way that was easy to notice. This never occurred even once, as every single area, be it town or dungeon, is distinct.
Towers have unique architecture that hint at the culture and time period it was built in, as do the shrines. Caves are more naturalistic, but you still get a sense of how natural forces have whittled down these narrow walkways over time. Towns have different houses depending on the culture and weather, and they usually have things like different kinds of crops growing. While one town may be growing vegetables, another may be growing rice. These are small touches, but they really add up and give the sense that you’re traveling far from home.
This is made even better by the revised translation, giving each town a distinct speaking style. Some towns may have the likes of Spanish, German, or an Indian language inserted into their scripts, while others may be more unusual. One town’s population may speak in broken English because everyone is an immigrant, while another may speak in entirely haikus because of their culture. Thanks to Dragon Quest’s typically fantastic translations, all of this is conveyed clearly and with lots of character. It’s only elevated further by the addition of English voice acting, done in the same style as Dragon Quests VIII and XI.
Verdict
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is the best version of a quintessential RPG. Not only does it respect and uphold what the original game stood for, but in many ways it offers up even more depth than it held originally. The story is made grander and more emotional thanks to changes that are so natural, I’d have believed you if you told me they always existed. Combat is made better thanks to new vocations to spice up already strong replay value, the addition of challenging new bosses, and higher difficulties making it the toughest version available. The gorgeous artistic overhaul it received is also among the best I’ve seen for remakes in general.
Dragon Quest III isn’t my favorite or even my second favorite game in this series, but it says a lot that I still think it’s among the very best of RPGs that I’ve played. My already glowing thoughts on it grow ever brighter with this version, and I was skeptical that such a thing was even possible. Even after receiving several remakes that I already thought were great, they somehow found a way to make it even better. 1988 was a long time ago now, but some legends truly never fade.
DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D REMAKE IS A MUST BUY
If you are looking for another JRPG, you should check out our review of Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Thanks to Square Enix for providing a Nintendo Switch review code for Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
