“Grandma, I can’t beat these monsters. Can you help?” I stare up, wide-eyed, as I clumsily hand her the controller.
As she pushes the controller back into my hand, she whispers, “Oh, you don’t have anyone else in your party, kiddo. Did you go pick up more party members? Be sure to get a healer.”
I look back at her a few moments later, dumbfounded. “How do I pick my party members?”
She looks at me with a gentle smile, finally picking up the controller: “Here, let me show you.”
I never did finish that playthrough of Dragon Warrior III (it was just a little too much for my seven-year-old brain), but my grandparents helped me conquer the Dragonlord, Malroth, and countless other baddies as I grew up, both in RPGs and in my own life. It is always Dragon Quest (as we call it now) that I most associate with those halcyon days of sitting next to them, staring up at the CRT in their tiny living room.
They both died in the last couple of years, and while I didn’t take much, when my Grandpa handed me copies of the first three Dragon Warrior games on the NES shortly before his death, in their plastic cases with the names written in faded pen on the spine, it felt right. That is the piece of them I needed.
You can imagine, then, that when I got my hands on Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, I was flooded with emotions. I wanted to share this experience with my grandparents when it came out. I wanted to watch them pass the controller back and forth while my grandpa told my grandma where to go as they grinded for levels far more than they needed. It took all the simplicity, all the purity of Dragon Quest III and maintained it while adding a layer of beautiful graphics, a soaring symphonic arrangement of the soundtrack, and enough quality-of-life updates that probably could have helped me keep up with the original all those years ago.
I knew in the early hours that Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake was a triumph, and after spending over 50 hours with the game and exploring every nook and cranny of the world, I’m convinced that not only is it brilliant, but it might be the best new entry point to the series.
The simplicity of Dragon Quest III is probably best communicated in its story, which is both straightforward and filled with some nice surprises. You play as the son of Ortega, a hero of yore who left home to take down the evil Archfiend Baramos wreaking havoc throughout the land but never returned. Your mom wakes you up on your 16th birthday to go meet the king to get his blessing and embark on your own quest to take down Baramos, and maybe even find your father. And then you’re off to save the world!
In terms of the basic plot structure, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is familiar if you’ve played any games in the series. Go to a town, get a feel for their culture and their problems, and then help them out. It’s a tried-and-true formula, and it never gets old to me. The additional voice acting sure helps, too. Add the fun twists, turns, and callbacks that Dragon Quest III throws at you in the final hours, and we get a classic formula done right.
Additions to the storytelling like flashback scenes help add color to the world and the characters, notably Ortega and your mother. For example, before you’re even woken up, we get sepia-filtered scenes with your mom, struggling with the knowledge that she might lose her son soon, too. As you explore the world, you run into various people who knew Ortega, and you get flashbacks that show little bits of his adventure, too. It’s all surprisingly affecting, elevating the emotional weight of your quest to save the world, and it makes some of the latter moments of the story land even better than they did originally.
Of course, Dragon Quest III isn’t held aloft because of its narrative, lovely and revolutionary as it is. No, it’s the combat and the class (or vocation) system. Combat is still a pure Dragon Quest affair, with first-person, turn-based battles where you select all the actions at the beginning of the turn, and then the round happens. You still want to keep an eye on buffs, debuffs, and status effects; if you’re at all familiar with the series, you’ll feel right at home here, and if you’re like me, the simple rhythms of combat remain comforting in all their throwback simplicity.
Unless you want to try soloing those fights like me as a little kid, you should listen to my grandma and recruit a party to help you out, which is where vocations come in. At the outset of your journey, you go to the local tavern and grab three additional party members, each with their own “job.” Later in your adventure, you can stop by Alltrades Abbey and change your party members’ vocation if they’ve reached level 20, pushing them back to level 1, but maintaining half of their original stats along with all their abilities and spells. So, you can get a Warrior with some healing spells from a Healer, or a high agility Mage after changing them from a Thief.
I know that probably doesn’t sound like a lot, but for the time, the vocation system was revolutionary. For good or ill, it’s almost exactly the same as previous versions, including personalities you can adjust that help determine stat growth when you’re leveling up, even down to the somewhat frustrating requirements to get the powerful Sage class. Martial Artist still hits like a truck and Warrior’s damage is still a little wanting even if their defense makes up for it. But, now each vocation gets some abilities even if they didn’t have them in previous iterations, like an auto-critical hit ability that the Martial Artist gets pretty late, or vocations that already had a number of spells and skills like the Hero getting a few more tools in their arsenal.
It felt like there were one or two party combinations that were clearly the best in previous iterations of Dragon Quest III, and that’s still essentially my experience here, but even the Gadabout (or clown) has a few moves that could prove useful in your adventures. While my experience with earlier iterations of the game guided me well here, I loved experimenting with all the vocations to see what I could come up with while appreciating that Square Enix maintained the core of the original system.
There is one new addition to the vocation system, Monster Wrangler, which gives you access to different monster abilities and has a move that gets powered up as you recruit monsters. I’ve already talked about this at length in my preview of the opening hours, so I won’t spend much time on it here. But let me tell you, folks: it’s a powerhouse. I struggled with a particular post-game challenge, and to cure my ills I turned my entire party, outside of the Hero, into Monster Wranglers. Problem solved. While I don’t think it would be very fun, I’m convinced you could easily beat the game with the same party from the jump, so I’d encourage you to pop at least one of these monsters (heh, get it) in your party. Plus, they can help gather Slimes and Golems to engage in the super fun new Monster Arena battles.
That’s not all that’s new, though. In addition to the many quality-of-life features that I covered in that preview, there are quest markers, difficulty settings, battle speed adjustments, and the ability to fast travel within dungeons. You can even “retry” battles without getting sent back to the priest with half your gold gone. And if you want a more pure experience? Not to worry; you can always turn these features off. I played with them on, and early on, I worried that it would make the game feel a little more “linear.” To some degree, it does. However, in the middle portions of the game, the world opens up, and you still have to explore, listen to different NPCs, and maybe even make sure the time of day is right to figure out how to access certain towns or get the item you need to progress.
Even with quest markers, you still need to pay attention and explore, just like always. There are still side quests littered throughout that aren’t “required,” new secret spots filled with treasure and recruitable monsters, and sparkling item points encouraging you to poke around, anyway. There’s already plenty to make this a more pure Dragon Quest experience, too, including the need to go back to a church to revive fallen party members or save your progress. For me, it still felt like Dragon Quest III even with the additional help turned on, and it will certainly lower the barrier of entry for those who don’t have their grandma sitting next to them to figure out how to progress.
The most notable addition (of course) is the look, which I’ve already heaped praise on in my previous pieces about Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake. Interestingly, one thing that increasingly struck me as I played is that this isn’t HD-2D in exactly the same sense as Octopath Traveler or Triangle Strategy. Sure, the Toriyama character and monster designs (which look amazing) are still rendered with pixel art, but instead of utilizing the almost “motion blur” 3D environments, creating a unique depth of field effect, things look universally crisper and brighter. It’s not just another step up in the style, but rather a slightly different direction, and it absolutely works for Dragon Quest. Seriously, go look at images of early dungeons in the NES original, or even the previous remakes, and compare them to this one. It’s clear how much care, attention to detail, and beauty were put into the presentation while maintaining the way those original locations “felt.”
Another thing I realized in the midst of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is that the music isn’t actually re-orchestrated. Instead, the tracks here are re-recorded versions of the same arrangements in the “Dragon Quest III Symphonic Suite” performed back in 2005 and conducted by original composer Koichi Sugiyama. It sounds a little crisper, with some very minor variations, but otherwise, it’s just that music. I’m okay with that, though. I came to be disappointed by Sugiyama both as a composer and as a person later in his life, but I still adore early Dragon Quest music, and the Symphonic Suite is an excellent choice for this version.
When I finally beat the superboss, when I finally finished doing everything I wanted to in Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, I hesitated to turn it off. I walked around. I grinded. I tried to picture my grandparents playing through it, tried to replicate how they’d play it. I couldn’t, of course. They are gone. But what a treasure it is to remember them with this lovingly crafted, faithful, and pure remake of a game in a series we cherish so much. Square Enix got it right, and I’m excited for the families who get to share this experience for the first time.
Just to listen to grandma and make sure the little ones pick up that healer before they venture forth.
