Edit 3 (Final thoughts)

I do want to give shoutouts to the dungeon designs here, which have a nice level of ambition. Seeing how far you can climb into the tower, or diving into the space base, or setting out into the parallel world universe dungeon. Or the setpiece of going to space, exploring the labyrinth of space to find a spaceship dungeon - all pretty cool! Just let down by the so-so action at the game's core.

Edit 2 (After clearing the MSX version)

Alright, so I'm mostly glad I stuck through to the end, but my overall judgment is this game definitely moves in more 'normal' directions . (As a note, the MSX version might have copy protection lol.. the final boss is unbeatable, at least in what I played)

- the world a series of huge reveals (Sky Castle! Secret crashed spaceship! Going into space! Fighting god at the end of time)
- The move to 'press button' combat
- The game world hiding hints to its obtuse puzzles

While I'm all for games that are 'solvable' within the bounds of the game, there is some level of magic lost by the game starting to feel like 'oh maybe i missed a puzzle clue somewhere' rather than 'well it's impossible anyways, so i'll wander and then look up the answer when i'm ready to move on'. Not to say puzzles are bad, but the arbitrariness of Hydlide 3's random puzzle design feels worse when you're sort of expected to solve them.

Ignoring the grind, I did enjoy the various reveals of the game's 'story', and enjoying the art in each. But with a longer game ALSO comes with the design wearing more thin - by the halfway point, you've found the best grinding spot in the game, so you end up ignoring all the enemies and casting the 'Revolve' spell to make them run away. Rather than fighting enemies being something you need or want to do a little, the last 3 or 4 dungeons feel like annoying hallways you want to get through to see the next area.

What's interesting is you can also feel modern ARPG feedback loops appearing in this game. To be sure, Hydlide 2 also had a bit of this with its final dungeon - but because of regenerating health and mp, grinding felt less 'copy and paste' because you would still need to balance safely regenerating with fighting.

In Hydlide 3, you'll set out in the morning, try to earn some EXP and gold, then return home to level up and rest, refill your health items. It kind of allows a game's core design to become "lazy" - where the thrill of leveling up or buying stuff overrides what, to me, should be the focus - enjoying exploration and good action. It's not like any of the Hydlide games did a great job at this, but I felt that there was a much bigger grinding/level barrier to success in 3 than the first 2.

This is a problem a lot of modern ARPGs never really fix. Their core gameplay is so simple and boring and it's all based around just getting better gear to get more fancy/flashy moves. Which has its appeal, but ultimately led to the wonderful genre of gacha games, lol. There's something to be said for Souls games which manage to balance that 'gearing up' with 'practicing/becoming more familiar' to a much better extent.

In any case, I'm still really interested in the successor, Rune Worth! I'll be playing that next..

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Edit 1 (The day after writing the original lol)
I've tentatively increased this to 3 as I plan to finish the MSX version (I found I could just go deeper into a dungeon and find higher EXP monsters with roughly the same danger...what a Hydlideism!)
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Original:

This is an MSX version review. I might try to track down the Windows version and play that instead...

Fun fact: the Genesis remake of this gave enemies 3x+ EXP over this one.
Funner fact: The windows remake gave enemies 16x EXP. With the same EXP tables (I think!)

I'm honestly baffled at how, 3 years after Hydlide 1, the developers were still incapable of making something resembling playable! 1 and 2 were janky, but doable with guides (though 2 requires cheating with money-making to be playable), and the 'bump' combat was charmingly minimal. You could have massive setbacks - or resets - in both, but the thing was that you would still learn some arcane knowledge to let you get around it. A better path of buying items. Grinding spots. How to get behind enemies. Etc.

My biggest surprise is Hydlide 3 became significantly less playable over 1 and 2 - you can't save anywhere, but enemies still tear you to shreds quickly (and from the start have ranged attacks, which 1 and 2 only saved for endgame dungeons).

The EXP curve in this game hates you: by the time any given enemy is safe to attack, you need to kill 100+ of it to level. And you'll have to constantly manage your weight and hunger (as you can become overencumbered via gold monsters drop). Unlike Hydlide 1 and 2 you have to be careful with every enemy as their ranged attacks are easy to hit you. If you want to play it safe, a level might take 400-800+ monsters... Japanese FAQs recommend 6-8 hours of gameplay to clear the first dungeon alone...

1 and 2 feature grinding, but with modern emulation speedups they're quite breezy, and at least you can stand to regenerate your health.

Hydlide 3 takes the simple gameplay of 1 and 2 and adds in systems that do nothing but add extra time running back and forth to town to heal and grind for gold. Each level gives you more carrying capacity, but it more or less just means you can maybe upgrade a weapon to slightly speed up a grind. Paying money to an inn to save, saving up EXP to level at a church, and preparing to go out by buying food - these factors wouldn't be too bad, maybe even charming or interesting - with a higher EXP rate, but... that's not present in the MSX version. The low EXP rate of Hydlide 3 means that any annoying idea will be repeated multiple times as you must go back and forth to replenish supplies.

The game also adds a 'attack' button, so now you have to mash A to attack. I imagine they were copying Zelda 1 at this point, but the attack button is just that - copied. Enemy difficulty goes up, but with none of the balance a more 'action' game requires - consideration to healing, the player's movement, etc.

If there is one thing, the art in this game is quite beautiful, with its small 8x8 tiles. The music finally seems to have been written by a musician, too. And there are some talking NPCs but the game still maintains some of that minimal "Hydlide"-y-ness, where we only get this very small glimpse of a large fantasy world - giant towers reaching into the sky, strange towns hidden underground.

It's a shame it's all hidden behind impassably sloggy EXP curves and a few weird systems! I'll go try the other versions next...