One of my favorite games and one that despite its simplicity, defined me as a player forever. Despite not being my top 1, I consider this to be the Dragon Quest game that had the most impact on my gaming history and the most important for that reason. This is not just another installment in the series, Dragon Quest III is THE Dragon Quest game. Although Dragon Quest I and II were the foundation of JRPGs almost entirely, it was Dragon Quest III that set the gold standard for the genre with a leap in quality and game design that takes it to a whole new level, it is directly one of the most important and influential games of all time. It was the game that finished shaping the classic DQ formula and to be honest, it's still a very solid and entertaining game despite being too "vanilla" by today's standards. Dragon Quest III is very special to me, and that's exactly why I want to do it a review that really does it justice.

While playing DQI and II, did you ever wonder what exactly Erdrick/Loto did to be worthy of the title hero of legend?, well, Dragon Quest III is the answer to that question. The story begins with an introductory cinematic that tells us how our father, the greatest hero of that time, once tried to stop the arch fiend but failed in the attempt, so as offspring of the great hero, our mission in the game is to finish what our father left unfinished. I won't go into spoilers (despite being a game over 35 years old), so I'll just say that, if you played Dragon Quest I, this game has a plot twist that makes it connect as a prequel to DQI and II in a pretty satisfying way, it's impressive that just in the third game alone this kind of homage to the first game has already been made and it's something I loved very much at the time. Although if you think about it, the premise is just as simple as the previous games, a simple "go and collect the 6 magic items and save the world from this villain", but I think that what this game lacks in story it makes up for with adventure and a simple but solid gameplay.

Many of the elements that make this game great first appeared in DQ2, however, it was in this game where they really made use of them properly, which as insignificant as this may seem, make a big difference between being just a good game and being a great game.

For starters, the battles are better balanced and more entertaining by far. The fact that the game allows you to recruit and customize your party as you choose, with a variety of 7 classes for 3 of your party members, gives you total freedom to build and customize your play style, and it's quite entertaining to experiment with different combinations, because even though there can be difficult places because of having (for example) pure warriors and a mage, the game is built so that having a solid strategy, enough wits and a decent equipment is enough to overcome adversities, and all this expands further once you get to the place where you can change classes. Dragon Quest III is the first game in the series where you actually need to strategize to overcome battles instead of just overcoming them by brute force as in the previous games.

Each class levels up and grows in a very satisfying way, which for example with mages and priests, not only makes them more useful in battle by expanding their arsenal of spells, but they learn magic skills that are useful even outside of battles and make exploration more comfortable. Something that I also really like is that Dragon Quest puts a lot of emphasis on using status altering magic to overcome battles, for example, it is of vital importance to lower the defense of enemies that are damage sponges to defeat them or, on the contrary, when there is an enemy that with two hits could knock you out, raising your defense several times makes them not even have a chance to scratch you, not to mention that you would be surprised by the number of enemies that are vulnerable to the "sleep" state. Something that highlights the difference between DQ2 and DQ3 despite having the same combat system, is the final battle, where one will require a simple strategy and the other will require you to be really careful and act with caution if you want to have a chance to be victorious.

And another thing I love about the battles is how many monsters have a "personality", which you can tell by the way they fight. For example, there are monsters that may look very scary, but they are very dumb and will try to use spells even when they have no MP, while others are smart enough to steal MP from you once they run out of MP and are able to cast very nefarious magics on you. There are others who will try to summon other monsters to help them in battle, while others will be cruel and use ruthless tactics to try to defeat you. These are small details, but they give a lot of personality and charisma to this game and make the progression and the very act of playing very fun and entertaining because of the amount of options there are. It is simple, but very effective.

The world is gigantic, full of kingdoms, villages, shrines, towers and dungeons to discover, and although your mission is simply to stop the bad guy on duty, you must travel the world in search of the path that will allow you to reach your ultimate goal. From the very beginning the game is very open, you can go explore at your leisure and get to know the world at your own pace, you can go mostly in the order you want, even presenting you with many problems and places that are completely optional, such as awakening the sleeping village or returning the crown to the king in the second kingdom, and once you get the ship the world opens up even more and allows you to progress in the order you want, similar to an open world. I especially like how the 6 magic orbs are not obtained simply by overcoming a dungeon and that's it, but there are some that have very particular situations and are quite memorable.

Exploring villages is usually something fundamental, and Dragon Quest always makes it entertaining thanks to the NPCs that always have something useful, something interesting or even something silly and funny to say. Something I love about this game is the day and night cycle, which basically makes all the villages have two faces and there are certain changes accordingly, this is also a main mechanic, because many times in order to advance we will have to wait for nightfall, because that way you get variations in the villagers' dialogues and with that different clues, or simply because different things happen in some cases.

And something that I really love about this game is how it always rewards your curiosity, which encourages you to continue being curious and keep exploring or returning to places you had already explored to be able to access and discover places that were previously blocked and get a small reward. One of my favorite things and one that I am quite thankful to have is the "Zoom" spell, which allows you to instantly travel to any town you have previously visited, and it is to be admired that since this game there is the option of fast travel, something that other video game franchises took years and even decades to implement. Although a negative aspect of this game is that it has one of the worst flaws of the games of that era, as there are many things that are a bit ambiguous in their method of obtaining, such as the strongest sword in the game, which is obtained in a very particular way, even so, it is nothing that a guide can not solve, although I only recommend the use of this when you really are really stuck and do not know what to do. Dragon Quest III is simply a game that has a very good sense of adventure and that is about living that feeling of progress and exploration in its purest state.

Speaking of the OST, it's superb, if you like classical style music the tunes you'll find in this game will delight you. Koichi Sugiyama may have been a despicable person, but his work on the Dragon Quest series was vital in giving this series that heart and soul that we all love. The battle theme is simple, but it's entertaining and engaging unlike the first and second battle themes of the series which were a bit boring. The overworld theme is heroic, and conveys that feeling of being on an epic adventure very well. Strolling through the villages is always enjoyable when what's playing in the background is a sweet melody like this one. And there are other songs that I love, but I won't leave without mentioning my favorite song; the moment I heard Ramia's theme tears came out of my eyes from how beautiful and majestic it is, simply one of my favorite songs in the whole series.

The graphics are beautiful, they really enhance the immersion and are one of the highlights of the 16-bit era because of how colorful and well done the art is. I really like how the day and night cycle is very well portrayed, making the background of the battles match the time of day, the villages at night look very pretty. Each monster also has animations for each action they perform, which gives a little more life to the battles. And finally, Akira Toriyama's designs are still very nice to have, featuring many monsters and even characters that would become super iconic like the hero or the martial artist.

This version is inspired by Dragon Quest VI, which is noticeable in all its sections. It rebalances a lot the game without sacrificing completely its original difficulty curve, adds many quality of life improvements such as the bag and navigation in the menus more agile, renews and modernizes the graphics and adapts the songs to the Super Nintendo. And god, the result is incredible and makes the game a thousand times better. The soundtrack is expanded by adding new pieces to the game, the graphics are some of the best of the Super Nintendo with pixel art that still looks beautiful today and the range of random encounters was reduced to make exploration and the overall experience much more enjoyable.

Conclusion
Despite its age and simplicity, Dragon Quest III defines what a good RPG should be. It is able to offer a solid experience even today that generates an immaculate sense of adventure and a great feeling of accomplishment when you finish the game, thanks to its simple, yet solid design and gameplay mechanics that are still present in many games even today. Dragon Quest III defined an entire generation of players and much of the video game industry. If you plan to play it, don't play it with the mentality of wanting to get from it a revolutionary experience that will change your life, your way of thinking and will become your favorite game of a lifetime (although in my case it ended up turning out that way lol), play it with the mentality that you are trying an old game like Super Mario Bros. or the first Zelda, it's a game that came out just 2 months after the first Final Fantasy, don't expect from it the magnitude of a game like Persona 5 or something like that.

The Final Fantasy series was my first approach to RPGs, and although they are games that I still love, they are designed with a very different philosophy than Dragon Quest. While Final Fantasy makes you feel the adventure through dialogue and cinematics, Dragon Quest does it through its game mechanics and world design. This game taught me what a JRPG with an open world with places to discover and explore really is, it taught me what adventure really means in a game, it taught me that to defeat the strongest and most fearsome enemy you only need perseverance and a solid strategy, it taught me that videogames can have grace, a strong personality and atmosphere without the need of having a strong narrative or a cinematic style. It wasn't my first game in the genre as I mentioned above, but I consider Dragon Quest III to be the game that made me fall in love with RPGs and made me really appreciate them. I wouldn't be exaggerating if someday I consider this my true favorite video game of all time, because frankly for me this game is that important.

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A very good sweet, short platformer game of very good quality, with a Zelda (or Metroid/Castlevania) style structure. I don't have any problems with this game really, but I also don't have anything that I liked extremely or that I consider especially outstanding (except for the soundtrack, it's phenomenal), it's just a good game and that's it.

Well, yes I have a little problem, but it's my fault, and that is that this is my first game in this series, and unfortunately, the game assumes that you already played the previous ones and that you already know all the characters, their relationships and their past problems. And this was a minor annoyance I had during the game, because I feel like I would have liked it more if I had at least been introduced to their world, story and characters in some way or given a summary of the events of the previous games, I mean, it's not that hard, it's just putting a couple of dialogues or a plain text screen with said stories. Be that as it may, the story is very simple and easy to understand, it looks a lot like the story an episode of a children's cartoon would have, with colorful and charismatic characters, and simple problems that are sometimes solved in goofy and funny ways.

The game is like Zelda in many ways, at least in structure, as we have to explore several islands that we will unlock each time we defeat a boss, each island has a temple where there is a magic item that expands our movements and is what will allow us to access secret places, key objects, and defeat the boss of the dungeon, the typical. The things I like about this structure is that being divided into islands with different themes and not being all in one giant map, makes each area can be perfectly differentiated from the others by having different types of enemies, music and theme and makes it very difficult for us to get lost in the islands. I would also like to praise the good difficulty curve this game has, as there are no unexpected difficulty spikes and everything is built in a way that even the most novice gamer can learn and understand. Something that helps make the experience smoother are the consumable items, which range from healing items, items that increase your attack and items that serve as a force field, plus one quite useful that teleports us to the beginning of the map.

The music is something I also loved in every sense of the word, seriously, the soundtrack for some reason is unexpectedly excellent, and there is a very good variety of songs. It will definitely be an OST that I will listen to from time to time to enjoy it. The graphics are also very nice, it's pixel art of a quality similar to 2D PS1 and DS games, colorful, detailed and with good animations, it's quite well done, everything is very charismatic and charming, and some enemies explode as if you made them a fatality hahaha. The character designs are good, although almost everything is based on breasts and fan service.

Conclusion
As I have made clear, this game is quite good, frankly I had a very enjoyable time with it. However, I didn't feel any kind of "connection" with this game, I don't know how to explain it, but no aspect of it made me feel enough satisfaction or pleasure, and neither was there anything that I consider special or outstanding that makes this game unique against others in the genre, it's good enough in all its playable sections, but excellent in none.... Well, who knows, maybe in the future I'll look at this game fondly and raise it from a 7/10 to an 8/10, because even with everything, it left a good taste in my mouth, so I plan to play other games of this franchise in the future. (If you see that I raised the rating from 7 to 8 for this game, it was probably because it deserved it and/or because I became a fan).

I'm going to be totally honest, Kingdom Hearts Re:coded has all the elements to be one of the best spin-offs of the series, if not the best, but, let's not ignore the elephant in the room, the story is not just bad, it's terrible, how come a PAPER diary was hacked, I mean, HOW?, well, that's the story of the game, it's all about there's a virus in Jiminy Cricket's diary, so Mickey and his friends digitize it and create a virtual Sora and put him in the diary in order to remove the virus... yeah, that definitely made sense somehow in the mind of the person who wrote the plot of this game.

But well, it's not all bad, because the gameplay is extremely good and varied, imagine if you combined the combat system of KH1 + KH358/2 Days + KHBBS, well, the result is this game, and I don't know, it's probably not as great as it sounds, but I liked it a lot because of the good variety it has and because experimenting with different combinations of skills is very entertaining. This is probably the best action game in the entire DS catalog.

The graphics are also quite impressive, and it's simply mind-blowing how it is that even though it's pretty far from looking as good as the PS2 games, somehow Square Enix managed to translate that visual style to a console like the DS that has graphics similar to a console like PS1, this is basically a credit to KH358/2 Days, but that game sucks, so I better give that compliment to this game.

What I liked most about this game is its structure, and is that basically we have to go through the worlds of the first KH, but each world has a new gimmick that gives a little twist to things. I also like how the platforming of the first KH is retaken in a certain way. But without a doubt what I liked the most was that the boss of each world changes the genre of the game, sometimes it is a turn-based RPG, other times it can be a 2D platformer and in others a shoot 'em up, and although these sections of the game are not very elaborate and are barely decent, it is something that gives a lot of variety to the game and that made it very fun, I think that same structure, but better worked could be used to build a really brilliant game.

Conclusion
It was nice to play this KH1 remix. Even though this game has some pretty brilliant stuff, its story and content reuse pretty much overshadow the good experience this one could offer, because come on, nobody is excited to have to go back to Aladdin's world after visiting it in KH1, KHCoM, KH2 and KH 358/2 Days, I mean, we're all pretty sick of it already, and the story being so stupid doesn't help at all, it makes it even worse, that's the only reason why I didn't complete this game, because even though it's definitely a lot of fun and I was having a really nice time playing it, at a certain point I had already seen pretty much everything it was going to offer me, and the story I had already seen before. It would have been better if instead of being a recycling of worlds and music from the first KH, this game would have had completely original worlds and content, that would probably have made this a pretty unique and memorable game.