My very, very first JRPG was Dragon Warrior on the NES. It just… showed up at my house one day. And by that, I mean, it’s not like I asked for it, or even KNEW about it. It was just…there. I think it was maybe a promotional giveaway for subscribers of Nintendo Power. But anyway, that game just blew my little mind. I’d played a lot of video games by the time Dragon Warrior reached my house, and they all FELT like big, grand adventures. I mean, Mario was running through SO MANY LEVELS, the dude was covering a lot of ground. But nothing could prepare me for what Dragon Warrior was doing. This was truly EPIC. Towns, castles, forests, caves, mountains – it really felt like I was trekking across an entire world. Now, for whatever reason, I didn’t pick up another Dragon Warrior game in the NES era. At some point, in my teens, I think, I became vaguely aware that the series was known in Japan as Dragon Quest, and that it was possibly the most popular thing that had ever been created there. But it wasn’t until Dragon Quest XI that I really sat down and got back into this series, and I was absolutely blown away by it. It affected me strongly enough that I decided to go back and play the series from the beginning. So I played Dragon Quest 1, Dragon Quest 2, and… then I skipped Dragon Quest 3. I don’t exactly know why. Maybe the allure of the Dragon Quest 4 remake on the Nintendo DS was too strong. But I skipped Dragon Quest 3. So, until now, I have never played what many consider to be a favorite in the series. I tried to moderate my expectations going into the HD-2D remake – after all, I’m primarily a story-and-characters guy, and I didn’t expect Dragon Quest 3 would blow me away on that front. Did that assumption pan out?
Gameplay
Dragon Quest 3 is an old-school JRPG. There’s no use mincing words about it. That means this game will be ROUGH with you if you’re not prepared. You begin by taking essentially a personality test that will determine what sort of person you are – and the sort of person you are helps determine how your stats will increase as you level up. You can change your various characters’ personalities throughout the game with different books and accessories, too, so you’re never fully locked into a path you don’t want to be on. Speaking of characters, you’ll then need to put together a party of characters, and while I’d like to say there’s no wrong answer to the question of what characters you should have in an ideal party, I think… you probably want to at least start out with the basics. Your fighter, your mage, your healer. As the game progresses and as you get more comfortable with what the game asks of you, you can feel free to experiment with some of the more esoteric classes like Merchant or Goof-Off. Around maybe a third of the way into the game you’ll unlock the ability to change your characters’ classes – with the exception of the main character, unfortunately. This will essentially halve your stats and kick you back to level 1, but let you keep every ability you’ve learned in your original class. So you can put together a tank that has access to high level spells, or a mage that can sneak around and avoid enemies. It really opens up a lot of possibilities. Any new character you create will start at Level 1, which is a bit of a pain, but there are some well-publicized grinding locations that should get them up to speed pretty quickly, so it’s not as big of a hassle as I was afraid it would be.
Battles combine that old style text crawl from the original game with a more modern UI, which means there’s a decent amount of redundant information on the screen with every action, but hey, repeated information is better than not enough information. You begin a round by selecting the action for each party member, and then the round plays out, with your stats, the enemy stats, and I assume a decent amount of randomization playing into what the turn order ends up being. This means you might occasionally find yourself unpleasantly surprised when the character you were attempting to heal gets unceremoniously killed before your healer’s turn comes up, but que sara, sara. That’s old school for you, baby.
Oh, random aside: The default battle speed is so slow. I can’t imagine playing this game with the default battle speed. It’s like, it’s not even that actions happen slowly, it’s that there’s SUCH a long pause between actions. After one battle I switched the speed to Ultra Fast and never looked back, but your mileage may vary.
Like I said, this game will be rough on you if you’re not ready for it. Enemies hit HARD, and they often get more than one attack per turn. Equipment upgrades are SUPER expensive, and you get a piddly amount of money from each battle. This is a game that says, Oh, are you having a hard time? Well forget you, here’s an attack from a normal enemy that can insta-kill every party member. There are selectable difficulty levels, but I have a small issue with that. See, the normal difficulty is pretty dang hard, especially for me, a dummy who is bad at video games. At one point, I was grinding and feeling a bit frustrated that a character would die in combat, meaning I’d have to stop what I was doing, go back to town, and restore them, and then go back to my grinding spot and resume. So I decided to try lowering the difficulty level. Right away, I didn’t really notice anything obvious, like the enemies having fewer hit points or my attacks doing more damage. So I was confused for a while as to what was actually easier. And then I realized… You can’t die in the lowest difficulty mode. Yes, you literally cannot die. You’ll get reduced to 1 HP and just… stay there. Honestly, I mean… I felt like they were making fun of me. Like, I don’t want the game to be UNLOSABLE, I just wanted, like, more experience points or more attack power or something. I feel like there really should be an option to still make the game something I can lose while lowering the bar a bit in other areas. What I’ll say is, if you want to do some grinding and don’t want to worry about having to manage your HP, you can turn on the easy difficulty and just grind to your heart’s content, then switch it back when you’re ready to continue the game for real. Or just play on easy mode and vibe with it, that’s fine, I’m not your dad.
Aesthetics
All right, let’s talk about the graphics. Square Enix has been refining the HD-2D look for several years now, and this game is so much crisper and cleaner looking than some of the earlier titles that used this style. Sprites are sharply detailed, the soft focus effects are there but not as distracting as they were in previous games, and all in all it really does a great job of capturing that nostalgic FEEL while simultaneously being a beautiful presentation all on its own. Monster animations in battle are really cool, and as someone who grew up only with the static image of these creatures, it was very compelling to watch them fully come to life. Outside of battle, however, the animations are extremely lacking. I’ve reached a point where I just can’t accept that characters don’t have diagonal walking animations. There’s no excuse for it anymore. If I can walk in all directions, make my character face all directions. I’m not asking for the finest of fine detail here. I just want up, down, left, right, and the inbetween diagonals for all those directions. Please. Please please please. I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does, but it bothers me SO much. DQ3 is far from the only game to do this, but it’s the one I’m talking about now, so it gets to feel the heat of my frustration.
But anyway, I’m probably crazy for that, and most of you are thinking “Who cares?” And you know what, you’re right. Who cares? Only me.
Considering how relatively little time I’ve spent with Dragon Quest games, it’s astonishing how much the music is ingrained in me. Like, almost all of the songs in this game were at least somewhat familiar to me, and I think that speaks to how widespread the love is for the music in this series. Koichi Sugiyama passed away a few years ago, but obviously his musical legacy lives on. He leaves behind some very big shoes to fill, so I hope whoever’s working on Dragon Quest XII is up to the challenge. But yeah, the orchestrations of all these classic songs, from the Dragon Quest theme to the town music to some of the late-game tracks – which I won’t talk about, because even though this is a faithful adaptation of a 36-year-old game, I don’t want to spoil anything for newcomers – well, my point is, it’s just gorgeous music.
When you’re remaking a game from 1988 for the modern era, it pretty much goes without saying that you need to make some quality of life improvements. Dragon Quest 3 does a pretty admirable job of making this easier to play than an 80s NES game, making it much smoother to fast travel and manage your inventory. I feel like the quality of life stuff could have been taken a step further, though. For example, you can only change out your party at the starting town of Aliahan. Not a big deal, right? You can just Zoom back to Aliahan and do it. But that makes me wonder… why not just let me do it from anywhere? Save me that silly step of fast traveling for this one specific purpose. Or if I go to a church to revive dead party members, why make me listen to the resurrection music multiple times as I bring back each party member one by one? Why not give me an option to revive them all? Some of the quality of life features feel like half measures, and I mean, half is better than zero, but still. I think they could further smooth out some of these rough edges. And yes, I know tradition is very important in the Dragon Quest series, but who determines what gets changed in a remake vs. what needs to stay the same because of tradition? Oh, Yuji Horii does? Okay, that makes sense. It’s his game. Anyway.
Story
I want to talk about the story and characters, because like I said earlier, story and characters are kinda my THING. Strangely, though, this is maybe the first JRPG I’ve ever played that doesn’t really HAVE a story. Or characters. I’m not trying to sound dismissive with this, but it’s basically true. The story boils down to “There’s an evil fiend out there that wants to destroy the world. Your father went off to kill it and never came back, so now it’s your turn to go and try.” And that’s… pretty much it. Aside from a late-game twist that I’m sure delighted players of the game back when it was first released in the 80s, there isn’t much to say about the plot. Each region you visit has its own little story in a sense, but even those small stories don’t really have much within them to grip you. I saw glimmers of good storytelling in the Jipang sequence, and the story of the cruel king of Manoza, but even those didn’t do much, and anyway they were over so quickly that it didn’t really matter anyway.
As far as characters go, you have a silent protagonist who only occasionally gets to answer Yes or No in conversation, and your party is made up of characters you create yourself. They have basically no dialog throughout the course of the entire game (with the exception of the puff-puff scene. Yes, there is a puff-puff scene, and it’s the one time my other party members had anything to say). So there isn’t anything in the way of character development here.
You could argue that this is a product of its time. Right? Like, this was a game from the 80s, and despite the graphical upgrades and the quality of life improvements, it’s still that 80s game at its core. But the thing that’s strange to me is, Dragon Quest 2 had more of a story. It had characters that were unique and had their own personalities. Much like Final Fantasy III took a step away from Final Fantasy II’s story and character advances, Dragon Quest 3 took a step back from the changes of Dragon Quest 2. It’s just an interesting phenomenon, and I’m curious as to why that was.
So having said all that, you might be thinking that I hate this game. That’s actually not true, and I want to explain why.
The Coziest JRPG?
When I sat on my sofa in the basement with my big screen TV and my PlayStation 5 playing this game, I’ll admit, at times it felt a little lacking, at least compared to most of the other games I play. I wasn’t gripped by the story, and like I said, there weren’t even any entertaining character interactions to cling to. I mean, the game is funny – it’s got that quirky Dragon Quest charm that so many of us love. My favorite laugh-out-loud moment came when I visited the pirates den and was warned by a guy outside that they were wicked cutthroats and that I should stay away, only to go inside and find out they’re all just like the nicest guys, super friendly. That did get me, I’ll admit. But anyway, my point is, playing this game like I play all my JRPGs, it just wasn’t feeling… right.
Then, one evening, I was upstairs with my wife, and I grabbed my PlayStation Portal and turned it on. I just kicked back on the couch with my handheld, grinding battles, even making progress in the story, and it suddenly felt RIGHT. Like, this game has so much going for it that tickles my nostalgia bone, but playing it on the big screen was distracting me from that with the things it’s missing. Playing it handheld on the couch, away from my gaming setup, it was like the perfect cozy gaming experience.
Now, how can I say this game is cozy when I’ve spent so much time saying how HARD it is and how it’ll kick your butt if you’re not careful? It’s hard to explain, but I guess it’s literally my job to explain it so I’ll do my best. There was something about transporting myself out of the place where my gaming usually happens, being upstairs where it’s warmer and more comfortable, laying back and playing a game that, even though I don’t have nostalgia for it in particular, still FEELS extremely nostalgic. Like, even if I had just played Dragon Quest 1 and nothing else, I still think this game would have affected me in a similar way. I think that’s a big part of what so many people love about this series. There’s that sense of familiarity, of, even if you don’t know EXACTLY what’s going to happen, you have an implicit trust in the game that it’s going to give you a good time. I’ve never been a grinder in games, it was always a big turn off, but laying on the couch with the Portal and hunting down metal slimes was legitimately relaxing. Sure, the story didn’t MOVE me in some big emotional way, but it didn’t NEED to in that setting. It’s pure comfort food in game form. The music, the beautiful graphics, the charming voice acting, the huge variety of towns and caves and dungeons to explore. If any JRPG is deserving of the title of Cozy, then it’s this one.
So if you’re playing this game on the Switch, you’re already well-served in the handheld department. If you’re on another console, that makes it trickier to play it the way I’m recommending, but hey, you might very well find you connect with it perfectly well on the television. After all, this is Dragon Quest. The vast majority of people watching this video already know how they feel about Dragon Quest. So do I recommend this game? Well, it depends on who you are. If you already love Dragon Quest, you’re going to love the Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D remake. It’s everything Dragon Quest 3 was with SO much polish, it really makes the game come alive. If you have NO nostalgia for Dragon Quest, then I would just say – understand what you’re buying. There is not a compelling story here, nor interesting characters. It is an old school JRPG full of grinding and cheap deaths, and you’ll need to take your time and fully explore to get the most out of it. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, then by all means, this is the game for you. If you’re like me, and you fall somewhere in the middle of Hardcore Dragon Quest Fan vs. Apathetic Dragon Quest Player, then you have to do a bit more soul searching. There’s so much here to trigger your nostalgia, and as we age, there are few things that feel better than that. Playing it like I ended up doing, reclining with a handheld, worked super well for me. It somehow lessened the parts I was not as enthusiastic about and really emphasized the parts I loved. That closeness to the screen, the intimacy of being in my own little world with the game. It was great. I don’t know if that’s unique to me or if people are slapping their foreheads and saying No duh, Branden, that’s why we like handheld gaming. But regardless, playing Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D as a cozy experience worked really well for me. I hope it does for you, too, if that’s the sort of experience you’re looking to have.
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