Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Aaaahh, Dragon Quest III. What self-respecting Dragon Quest fan and RPG lover could ever dislike that game? This SNES remake not only ups the graphic and musical quality to better-than-DQVI levels, but all the monster attacks are animated, which looks super sweet! Small Medals were also added, as well as various Pachisi tracks scattered across the globe, and a bonus dungeon that you can access when you beat the game.

All that’s fine and good, but I still prefer my Gameboy Color remake of DQIII. You get all that new stuff (except the graphic/musical enhancements.. but since when was DQ about pretty pictures?), plus you can collect Monster Medals which can get you into another bonus dungeon! Pretty tasty!

Una maravillosa sorpresa y sin duda mi nuevo título preferido de la época de NES. Partiendo de la base de Dragon Quest I y II, Las Semillas de la Destrucción es un título que evoluciona en muchos aspectos, desde el aspecto jugable o la exploración más intuitiva del mundo abierto hasta la historia más completa junto con una ambientación muy acertada.
La única crítica que puedo hacerle al título es la misma que le haré a todos los RPGs de la época, se pierde mucho tiempo con tanto combate aleatorio.

UGHHHH THIS GAME IS SO GOOD THIS REMAKE IS SO GOOD I LOVED IT SO MUCH I WOULD PLAY THIS EVERY DAY UNTIL I DIE THESE PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO MAKE A GAME!!! There were so many times throughout this game that I was like "wow this was an NES game. How did they do this on an NES" So I will be playing the NES game soon to discover how they did that on an NES. Just gushing with that good dragon quest feel and with a twist that I shant go into more detail on but I shit inside my pants! The tieback to dq1 is insane. The whole game is insane. It's also just so genuinely well designed in terms of level curve and encounters and pacing, thoroughly impressed !! I really only had to grind at two points and they were both just before major bosses. The party system is extremely fun!! I think everyone in the world should play this game!!

Stats!!

Final Party:
Lvl 40 Hero
Lvl 38 Martial Artist
Lvl 40 Priest
Lvl 36 Sage

80/100 Mini Medals (i got REAL good at finding mini medals)

All Pachisi (or TnT boards? this was the fan translation) Boards cleared, along with all the chests

I had like 90,000 G idk thats all thank you bye

After playing DQ7, I still very much had the bug for more playing Dragon Quest, so I thought what better time to finally tackle the one DQ game between 1 and 7 that I’d yet to beat: DQ3. I’ve technically given this a slight attempt before many years ago on a Famicom copy, but as soon as I saw that the game auto-scrolls text until that particular text box is done (meaning especially with my poorer reading skills of the time, there was no way in hell I was reading anything), I immediately put it down and shelved my DQ3 ambitions indefinitely. Until now! It took me around 35~40 hours (once again we have a game that doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on emulated hardware using save states instead of saves (and for one or two things in particular that I’ll get to later).

DQ3 is a prequel to DQ1 and 2. Loto (or Erdrick), the legendary hero they bang on about all the time in those games? That’s the main character here! Your father goes off to slay the demon lord many years ago, he never comes back, and on your 16th birthday, your mother sends you to the king. He tells you to go slay the demon lord Baramos where your father failed, and that’s how your adventure begins! Though this is technically a remake from December 1996 (which does add a few things that I’ll get to later), the text part of things is largely unchanged from the Famicom original from 1988, so it’s a pretty simple story that does what it needs to. It’s still largely remarkably solid for 1988, though. A lot of the silly and fun aspects of miscellaneous character writing are very much here, and there were a few NPCs in particular who absolutely had me in stitches with the weird stuff they’d said x3. The narrative even has some cool twists I really didn’t see coming, which was an added bonus. It’s hardly anything thematically meaty to sink your teeth into (with an exception or two here and there), but it’s a simple and fun story that it’s pretty easy to see where the DNA of successor DQ games originated in.

The mechanics are for the most part pretty typical Dragon Quest of the time. First-person turn-based battles against several enemies; your four party members each get a turn and then things play out from there; you explore the world, dungeons, and town in that familiar over-head style: It’s nothing that will be unfamiliar to anyone who’s glanced at an older JRPG before. What’s quite novel for a JRPG from ’88 is the job system. Instead of the party being bespoke characters like most DQ games (not to mention DQ2 and 4), your first stop after meeting the king is going to the bar in town to recruit some generic party members to add to your merry band of heroes (i.e. just you). There are an assortment of classes to choose from, and you can change classes later in the game (similarly to DQ 6 and 7), but unlike later games, class isn’t an aspect of your character. It IS your character. Your main hero can’t job change, because it’d mean they stop being a hero, but any of your recruited guys can. Once they hit level 20, they can get a new job at the job changing temple, which will halve their current stats and set them back to level 1. This means that there’s a fair amount of replayability and experimentation in this game in terms of finding which parties work best, and if your current loadout seems bad, you can either job change your party members or just get whole new ones. You can even dump your whole party right before the final boss and regrind them up to more useful versions if you so chose, though it’d likely take quite a while. All it’ll take is your time to grind it up. I stuck with my same team of warrior, fighter, and priest (who became a fighter, warriors, and sage respectively later on, all at the advice of our resident Popo).

This remake (as well as all successive versions of DQ3) also add in a personality system, where at the start you take a personality test to determine your personality (and you even get to pick your gender, in a neat change from the Famicom original), and then for all of your other party members, they get assigned one based on their stats & job when they’re created. If you don’t like your personalities, you can always find skill books in the world that’ll permanently change them, or almost every accessory in the game also comes with the added feature of changing your personality as long as you have it equipped if you want a more temporary change. Nowhere in the game does it tell you the stat biases for which personality you have, so it’s well worth looking up a guide for that. I don’t really love the personality system, myself. This game isn’t super hard, but it’s not terribly easy either, and it just adds a lot of weird new min/max-ing to something that honestly has enough of that already. I don’t think it ruins this game, and depending on how you like your DQ, you might even quite like it, but I certainly don’t think any other DQ game is worse for lacking it.

Something else you’re likely going to want to use a guide for is actually completing your adventure as well. For the most part, the signposting is really good for a game of this era, but there are more than a few places where I was utterly stumped on how to progress, and the game really shows its age in just how arcane finding that path forward is. This game also adds in mini-medals for the first time, and the remake adds in even more of them. Between story-important items and all them mini-medals, investing in a thief early on so you can get their ability to help find treasure on the ground will likely be well worth it. Dungeon design is quite good and so is the encounter rate and design. It’s also an extra neat feature in just how few bosses this game has compared to a typical JRPG, which only adds to the charm of its simplicity in my eyes. Overall the difficulty curve was one I found just right, even if I had to put in a good 3 or 4 hours at least to grind to get tough enough to beat Baramos.

Aesthetically, the game is pretty darn good, as you’d expect from not only a DQ game, but also a late ’96 SFC title. The graphics are very pretty and the game has gotten a really nice face lift in both theatrics and animations. The remake the gave it via the DQ6 engine has really paid off, that’s for sure. That also extends to the music, which is very nice and very Dragon Quest in a way you’re no doubt already intimately familiar with if you have any prior experience with the series.

Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s one of my favorite RPGs ever, not even on the SFC, but it’s still a really fun time well worth playing. This SFC version has a fan translation, I believe, and the English-released Dragon Warrior III on GameBoy Color is this same game with little dashes of extra extra content here and there as well. If you’re curious on Dragon Quest, I’d much sooner recommend 4 or 5 if you wanted a retro one to start out on (or 8 or 11 if you wanted a newer one), but this game is still a very approachable and enjoyable entry if you’re looking for a JRPG experience that’s relatively short, simple, and still charming & fun~.

Mejoró enormemente a comparación de la primera entrega (la segunda no la jugué) me agrada que se pueda personalizar a tu party y esta interesante la mecánica de cambiar de clases, estoy emocionado por saber como lo mejoran en las siguientes entregas
mi party fue
Ladrona: Mary
Clérigo->Mago: Obus
Maga->Clériga: Dima

This is somehow a JRPG from 1988. It could easily pass as something from the 90s, I had in fact to constantly remind myself that I was NOT playing a SNES rpg, but a remake of a Famicom game.

Okay, that's not entirely true: its age shows occasionally. DQ3 is pretty good at giving directions (if you talk to every NPC!), but the open-ended nature means that every now and then I forgot something someone told me, and got a little lost.

And there was one time where I'm not sure how players were supposed to guess where a key item was. An NPC tells you "It's somewhere in the town!", but you'd never know it's in a completely arbitrary spot.

There were also three bosses that were major difficulty spikes, suddenly requiring quite some grinding (or just bruteforcing against the RNG in my case with Orochi lmao). The benefits of many items are also not entirely clear thanks to the archaic UI

But enough nitpicking, this is a must for anyone who's a fan of the genre. I don't know if I'd recommend it for newcomers, but veterans owe it to themselves to play it, and the visuals of this SNES remake are incredibly appealing.

This was the first DQ i've tried to play, and i didn't take too long to stop, due to being very grindy and i wasn't in the mood for that, and it seemed to me that it didn't have a proper story. After finishing DQV i've played the first and second games in the series, and playing these two sure helps to enjoy this one more

I don't think this game has much of a story, but it does have a lot of worldbuilding, the map being inspired by the real world is very cool, and the world feels very alive thanks to NPC talkings, and the original game was from 1988, this is clearly very ahead of it's time. I gotta say i love the immigrant town part, it was funny as hell seeing what happened to my dealer, whom i've named Darkson, because Darkson is a name funny as fuck. Also the plot twist by the ending is without a doubt amazing for 1988 and obviously inspired a lot of other JRPGs, so this game really is based as fuck

This was ahead of it's time in mechanics and exploration too, the class system is very well thought even with it's issues, you have a lot of freedom in the map but most of the time you don't get lost because the NPC clues are much better here than they were in DQI and II, you can also save these clues pressing y, and the openness you gain when you get the boat is much better than the mess DQII becomes after you also get this there. But well, it still isn't perfect, the problem with the non-linearity in this part is that you must find and use shrines to teleport to specific parts of the map, but a lot of them don't show up in the map after you visit them or spot them in the overworld, i really don't know why, so when you must revisit them if you don't remember or didn't take a screenshot, you will need a guide, and due to the very open nature of the game, finding what you want in a guide can take a while. Oh and you also can't use return to some specific towns, which sucks too, and the "forget" spell had a bug while i was playing, even having the most recent version of the translation patch.

As for the class system, i like how it can be very useful, but you can also ignore if you just want to finish the game. I've gone with the recommend group, a warrior, cleric and mage, and the only change i've made was mage to sage, because i've saw that the sage got a lot of useful skills. But i also would've made my cleric a fighter by the ending of the game, after learning revive, but i did a backup save, to return if i regretted, and i did regretted, because i've gained 11 or 12 levels with the now fighter, and i didn't gained any MP, and even if i wanted another unit for physical damage, the main purpose was still to heal. As for other classes like thief and dealer, they didn't seemed too useful to me compared to the most recommended ones, but maybe in the future i will replay this and go with a fighter instead of a warrior and turn him into a mage of something, or maybe do something with a thief too, but my issue is that it seems that if you want to make a mage a fighter or warrior late-game it won't go well, since it doesn't gain any MP.

This game like any good RPG rewards you well for exploration, but sometimes exploration in dungeons can be tedious, due to the high encounter rate and some of them being very annoying, especially the ones in the last part of the game with the floor gimmick, fuck this gimmick specifically, so like most old RPGs this works better with fast forward. Also i don't know why this and also the DS remakes don't got MP restore items. I don't find the OST to be as memorable as from other snes JRPGs like final fantasy 6, breath of fire 2 or earthbound, but the visuals are some of the best from the console

Experiência bem agradável e bonitinha pro meu primeiro Dragon Quest. DQ3 tem uma base muito sólida, um design de dungeons muito interessante, um sistema de combate muito polido e um leve senso de aventura que é construído pelos diálogos entre os NPCs (que também te dão dicas de como prosseguir com a jornada e o que fazer no jogo) e também é construído principalmente pela parte audiovisual que é INCRÍVEL. Um dos jogos mais bonitos do Super Nintendo até hoje e na moral, voar com o Ramia pela primeira vez SEMPRE vai ser uma experiência mágica!! A introdução com a batalha do Ortega é impressionante, e as animações de batalhas são MUITO detalhadas pro console. Também é legal lembrar que esse jogo influenciou a estrutura narrativa de vários RPGs posteriores, com um grande plot twist perto do ato final do jogo, foi um impacto gigante pro Japão na época.