Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Review: History Repeats

You really can’t understate how historically important Dragon Quest III is. This is not just any JRPG–to players in Japan, it’s the defining JRPG, a game that set sales records and truly made Dragon Quest an inextricable part of Japanese pop culture. To this day, it’s recognized and referenced in all manner of media, and its wild success is the subject of both nostalgic fascination and urban legends.

With such a pedigree behind it, it’s no surprise that Square Enix has seen fit to re-release Dragon Quest III numerous times, with this HD-2D Remake edition being the latest–and also the most lavish–to date. Logic dictates that a game like this deserves a red-carpet treatment. But unlike Final Fantasy, which is no stranger to changing things up in its recent sequels and remakes, the old-fashioned elements of Dragon Quest’s gameplay remain untouched no matter what.

Of course, the biggest deal about this remake–which its very title proudly proclaims–is the use of Square Enix’s HD-2D visual style. Previous HD-2D games like Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, and the Live A Live remake have established a strong visual identity, using 2D sprites, 3D backgrounds, and scrolling and perspective tricks to create an ornate and cinematic style that makes them stand out.

Dragon Quest III uses these visuals to bring its established locales to life. The cities and palaces are filled with details that mirror their real-world inspirations. Dungeons and caves are filled with musty corridors, scurrying critters, and shining torchlights. Shrines are covered with ornate decorations that hint at long-forgotten secrets. Despite all of this, however, the visuals do disappoint in some ways: Sprite animation is limited outside of the enemies you face in combat, the camera can glitch out in spots, and on the Switch version, some more graphically intense locations can make the game’s framerate start to chug. Still, it’d be very difficult to argue that Dragon Quest III has ever looked better than this.

The plot is largely unchanged from DQIII’s original release: It’s the sort of simple yarn that many early RPGs spun, complete with an evil overlord, a destined hero, and his/her scrappy, custom-built party. It’s pretty by-the-numbers stuff, with most plot developments being glorified fetch quests that allow you to move on to the next key location. This remake does add some extra flair to the story, though, not only through lively, humorous localization but also new flashbacks showing the journey of the hero-character’s father, the warrior Ortega. It’s pretty cliched by modern standards, sure, but at least it’s fun to read–and there’s still the one big twist that was mindblowing when the game first released for first-time players to look forward to.

While the various re-releases of Dragon Quest III have added lots of improvements and extras over the years–and this remake carries quite a few of those over–the core gameplay has largely remained the same too. You’ve still got all of the hallmarks of classic Dragon Quest: turn-based battles, rigid character classes that learn skills at set levels, careful item management, and hazardous treks over the world map between locations. (Thankfully, more convenient fast travel with Chimaera Wings and Zoom is one of the small quality-of-life improvements.)

So what are the major enhancements to gameplay? Perhaps the biggest is the addition of a new character class. Aside from your usual Warriors, Priests, Merchants, and Gadabouts (who are still intentionally terrible), you’ve got the new Monster Wrangler class that uses a variety of offensive, defensive, and support skills they’ve learned from monsters. They also supplement another big addition: finding and recruiting monsters to use in monster-battle arenas for money and prizes. Not only does the Monster Wrangler have a much easier time obtaining these critters; they also get strength and ability boosts based on how many they’ve managed to get to join.

Another noteworthy addition is spots on the overworld map that contain items and hidden locations. Places of interest in the world of DQIII tend to be spread pretty far apart, so normally there’s not a good reason to go meandering unless you want to grind for levels. The remake adds more incentive to get out and explore the world by spreading lots of little secrets and goodies all over the place. See some little sparkly spots on the map? If you go to inspect them, you’re bound to find some items–usually consumables and old gear to pawn for cash, but sometimes you’ll find some amazing weapons and armor that seem levels beyond what you should have. Conspicuously odd-looking spots on the overworld map might reveal an enclave with treasure chests, recruitable monsters, and maybe even a friendly NPC. Not only do these additions make walking through the overworld more enjoyable, but they also help you level up without grinding, since you’re more naturally going to be hitting enemy encounters along the way.

There are plenty of other welcome changes–quest markers making your next goal more obvious, auto-heals on leveling up, more unique abilities for otherwise straightforward classes like Warrior, and so on. These sorts of additions take a different approach from other remakes like the recent Romancing SaGa 2: They build on the foundation of Dragon Quest III rather than trying to change and modernize key gameplay elements. From the standpoint of keeping traditional Dragon Quest elements faithful, it does a good job, but there are downsides, particularly in combat. You won’t be seeing some of the fun elements of later Dragon Quests, like the tension meter, in DQIII Remake. True to its 8-bit roots, it’s about as basic as turn-based combat can get. And at points, that simplicity can make things drag. Unless you’ve got a particularly weird party composition (or you upped the difficulty), you can use AI autobattle settings for a good chunk of the early to mid game and mostly cruise along. Since class growth and skills are predetermined, there’s not much to experiment with for characters, either–until roughly the halfway point, when you get the ability to change classes (augmenting your existing skills with those of a different class) and enemy attack patterns get significantly trickier.

That’s not to say that there’s no customizability in character-building: besides the aforementioned class-changing and stat-boost seeds to munch on, there’s a personality system that affects each character’s stat growth. You can change personality types by reading books or equipping special accessories. This element has existed since the original release, and it’s still a mess even now: A lot of the personality types actually slow overall stat growth, reducing many stat gains in favor of a small boost to one or two areas. You also can’t easily see what a personality type actually affects without either wading through a bunch of menus to your info handbook or looking it up online, making it difficult to know at a glance if the personality fits the character you’re trying to build. And a lot of the personality stat adjustments just don’t make sense–why does a Narcissist get an agility boost while an Idealist’s luck growth is really bad? I’ve never liked this system, and I think that this would have been a good opportunity to overhaul it, but alas.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D isn’t trying to fundamentally reinvent itself: It wants to present a genre-defining classic to the world in a great-looking modern package, to both inspire nostalgia in fans and show the world why this game is beloved. And it succeeds at that pretty well: It looks great, it’s faithful to the original’s gameplay (with some nice little quality-of-life enhancements), and the new additions add a bit of extra flavor. Its stubborn clinging to tradition means some flaws carry over, but when the overall package is this pretty, polished, and pleasant, it’s hard to hold those against it for long.