Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake review — Sowing the seeds of salvation

Dragon Quest isn’t a series that changes much, if ever. When you pick up a Dragon Quest game, you know exactly what you’re going to get: very traditional turn-based combat, an at times dark yet overall lighthearted fairy-tale style story, and an adorable menagerie of monsters. This makes the series very predictable, yet it’s also part of why it’s so appealing. Whatever happens in life, you can always expect Dragon Quest to remain the same. The series is like a selection of bedtime stories. Whatever happens in the middle, no matter how dark things get, the heroes will always come out on top. No other game bearing the Dragon Quest name epitomizes this better than Dragon Quest III. Dragon Quest III was the title where the series really came into its own, both in gameplay and story. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is the same game it always has been since 1988, and that’s part of why it’s so special.

In Dragon Quest III, you are the child of Ortega, a hero who set off shortly after your birth to defeat the Archfiend Baramos. Ortega never returned, and now, sixteen years later, it’s time to follow in his footsteps and set off on your own quest to save the world. In terms of overall plot, what you see here is what you get, at least until near the end of the game. This remake is all about fleshing out and tweaking the little details rather than overhauling the big picture like the Final Fantasy VII remake series. For example, the protagonist’s relationship with their mother feels much more tender and melancholy. She understands that you need to go off on your journey, but she also doesn’t want to lose you like she did her husband. There were hints of this in previous remakes of Dragon Quest III, but here it’s far more explicit.

The new voice acting really helps to accentuate moments like this. When the game needs the voice actors to give it their all, such as with the new Ortega flashbacks, they absolutely knock it out of the park. Unfortunately, the rest of the game didn’t quite get that memo, with most performances outside of those crucial, emotional moments ranging from serviceable to far too hammy. Too much ham feels like a weird thing to criticize a Dragon Quest game about, but when games in the series have voice acting they usually take themselves fairly seriously. More humorous scenes plant their tongue firmly in their cheeks, never going as far as being outright farcical. Even everything with Prince Charmles in Dragon Quest VIII was able to pivot from puns about an annoying character to a father being disappointed in his son for lying to him. This remake feels just a bit too jokey, which causes the more emotional moments to stick out awkwardly, even if they’re still great.

As with most Dragon Quest games, III has the player going from town to town solving individual problems which then connect back to the overall plot. For example, the hero/heroine and their companions visit an Eastern-style village which is under the thumb of an evil dragon. They defeat the dragon, and are rewarded with one of the six orbs most of the game has you searching for. The cycle of town to dungeon and back to town over and over again may sound repetitive on paper, but in practice, it’s always engaging thanks to the great combat, customization, and different contexts. You might be crossing continents simply to get a king some black pepper, but you’re really planning on how you want to build your team.

Upon starting the game, players are presented with a personality test which will determine the hero/heroine’s starting personality. Personalities determine which stats are more likely to increase and by how much upon level up; being a meathead means your strength and stamina will go up more often, while a genius will neglect those stats in favor of wisdom for spellcasting. There are a plethora of ways to change your characters’ personalities throughout the game, and the hero will always be incredibly strong regardless, so this mechanic remains fun rather than stressful.

Everyone aside from the protagonist (because, like it or not, you’re the Hero) can also select from one of nine different vocations: Warrior, Martial Artist, Mage, Priest, Merchant, Gadabout, Thief, Monster Wrangler, and Sage. You can pick from all of those except Sage when creating a party member at Patty’s Party Planning Place using the Premier Adventurer Listing Services, or PALS for short. A vocation determines what that character can equip and what actions they can take in battle; a warrior won’t learn spells because they’re focused on brute force and special abilities. However, when changing vocations at Alltrades Abbey, anything that character has learned will carry over into other vocations. Changing vocations resets a character back to level 1 and halves their current stats, but allows you to create a much more powerful character overall than if they were to stick with their original vocation.

My party member Ruth began as the new Monster Wrangler vocation, which had her learning monster abilities based on both the number of monsters we had recruited and her level. This is a great all-around class, but isn’t particularly good at anything and falls off pretty hard in the mid-game. So, I had her switch to the Mage vocation to learn powerful, offensive spells. After she learned a good amount of those, I had her become a Gadabout because, upon reaching level 20, Gadabouts can become Sages who are essentially the most powerful class in the game aside from the Hero. I followed a similar path with most of my characters, giving my healer some physical prowess with Martial Artist and my Warrior some utility with Thief, before ultimately making them all Sages. My party became so powerful that most random encounters ended in a single spell, though boss fights still thankfully posed a challenge. The vocation system can make every playthrough of the game feel unique and rewarding.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll choose this version of Dragon Quest III on every replay, however, as the random encounter rate can be frustratingly high. More often than not, this is one of those games where every few steps means another battle, sometimes causing you to forget where you were even going. This gets even worse at night, making it not really worth the hassle to travel after sunset, which is a shame because the lighting and visuals of this remake are most of the point of its existence. Obviously, this is something that could be added or tuned with a patch, or better yet a player slider in a menu, but that’s up to the developers at this point. On top of this, the series’ normally excellent auto-battle tactics feel weirdly stupid here. In other games where your characters would automatically use weapons in their inventory as items when appropriate to save MP, they’ll seemingly only use them if they have almost no MP left, and even then it’s basically a coin flip. The AI is still leagues better than most other RPGs, as you are intended to use these tactics in most random encounters, but it felt like a weird downgrade.

What does make me want to stick with this version, however, are the visuals and music. As with all of Square Enix’s HD-2D games, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (yes that’s the full title) is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The sprite work and lighting are top-notch, making even the most unremarkable locations, the hidden grottos you can find throughout the world map, absolutely stunning to witness. The use of tilt-shift and other camera movements adds a great deal of variety to the look of the game, and it’s used effectively throughout. You can see god rays peeking through the trees in forests and towns feel appropriately sleepy when the moon hangs overhead. Spritework feels like a lost art in the AAA space after the advent of 3D graphics, but the detail and animations on monsters shows that Square Enix has still got it even after all these years.

Koichi Suigiyama-san was not a paragon among men, to vastly understate his issues, but his compositions in every Dragon Quest game except for XI are still legendary. Their renditions here by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra are absolutely sublime, with little touches and flourishes that bring each tune to life in a new way. The town theme feels playful, the overworld music triumphant in the face of hardship, and the battle theme steady yet chaotic. III doesn’t have my favorite soundtrack in the series, but it’s still pretty dang good and this is by far the best rendition of it there has ever been.

I do have other problems with this remake too, like the Everbird (that’s the airship equivalent in the game) being agonizingly slow, or the weirdly low detailed draw distance, or the attempted connections to other games in the series I’m not entirely sold on yet, but this is still Dragon Quest III at its core, and Dragon Quest III is a masterpiece. I hope that, with this release, the series can finally become popular in the West. Not just because I still want Dragon Quest X and other spinoffs to be localized, but because the series deserves such recognition. It pioneered many aspects of RPGs and games in general that people take for granted today. With this trilogy of remakes, this is the perfect opportunity to give the franchise another shot after it failed to capture a massive audience on the NES. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is cozy and comfortable, and those are things I think people could really use right now.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: