Playing this game again when I was a game design student and learning how to program made me realize how artful every small aspect of this game is; its journey, its dialogue, the battles, the world design, and graphics, everything just clicks in favor of a singular vision and message.
While I couldn't appreciate it until years after I loved its sequel, the prequel still managed to be a formative experience for me.
I love that magicant becomes a place you visit multiple times as a home world in the pink clouds of fantasy creatures, cloud swimming cats, and just strange people, living beneath a sad queen. The armor shops in this place have multiple tiers and variations of equipment that can be useful all game, and the tons of stuff in the treasury in the queens castle combined with the limited inventory makes it so you have incentive to come back and return to this place, to relax from the real world of physical objects and people that might want to harm you while you search for the eight things that will sing you a portion of a melody to save the world.
I won't forget the dance sequence, the singing cactus, driving a tank, taking the train across the world and through the most dangerous tunnel, running from giant creatures and machines in the endgame, teaming up with a gangster that became bedridden from injury he took by helping me, having to deal with asthma, catching a cold from an npc, the list goes on.
This game might live in the shadow of its superior sequel, but it's a totally different and fantastic experience on its own, despite sharing a lot of similar flavors and ideas.
Also, after playing other rpg's from this era, the crit SMAAASH system in this game adds so much needed unpredictability to battles that it keeps them from getting stale. You can always crit an enemy for a ton of damage, or they can crit you and you have to make do with the turn-around. Having to deal with unexpected situations are what rpg's are all about.

I tried playing the game again after my last negative review, this time with the hintbook with the dungeon maps it came with. I understand the dungeons were made by a junior designer who wasn't that experienced yet, and they chose to go with his designs despite realizing they were too big and mazelike for almost anyone to really play, and the hintbook was their compromise. Even with the hintbook, they're still hard to navigate, but I'm glad it doesn't completely remove challenge to play this way. In fact, it became kind of interesting, because at the start, the characters are doing a job, not a quest, so the "turn at the next corner" sense you get following the maps fits the feeling, and the fact that the combat is so much more zone-out inducing than the previous game makes it feel more like paid work these characters do with less speed and chaos of the previous game, which felt a lot more like a quest of rebellion. I may return to explore more of its unique art and story ideas, but the battles, pacing, difficulty curve, and dungeons are still pretty sloppy

An extremely misunderstood game, way ahead of it's time. I love the leveling system in this game, it makes you prioritize what you have and decide how to build your characters by making them capable at everything but grow to master specific weapons and spells, so it feels like the classes are naturally evolved into. My firion was a fierce dual-wielding rogue, a stalwart sword and shield knight, and a capable white mage with fire magic. Maria a bow and staff black mage, and Guy a two-handed axe berserker white mage.

It tells a lot of story with just stats of guest characters, short but memorable scenes, and a keyword system.

The dungeons are a bit lengthy, but the real issue is a lack of variety in both music tracks and enemy design. Too many designs get repeated over the encounters, and they're spread rather thin. There's also not enough downtime between dungeons. Towns are small (although a huge step-up in dialogue and flavor from the previous game), and as a result the gameplay is a little bit too tense too long with few breaks.

This is still my favorite of the original trilogy

I really like the art and world design, the music, protagonist, and the brisk but weighty feel of the combat.

However, the dungeons make me feel kinda motion sick, the writing is difficult to follow, the story is rather weak, and there's not enough goals and places to visit and explore to in ratio to the amount of battles fought and money to be made to get there, so the pacing is just off. And that's WITH the ages version's lower encounters and higher experience. It generally feels sloppy even though it does so much new and interesting stuff with setting.
Looking forward to the sequel.

Also I think this game predicted the clone trooper design

As someone who went through each game on a grand dragon quest adventure and ended up loving each one, this one always ranked lowest for me and I always wondered why since so many love it so much.

I think I've pinpointed it to a few things. I guess it feels really vanilla compared to the other games in the series. It plays like a really well polished adventure-exploration simulator. But it feels less funny than other games, less unique than say 4, less heartwrenching than 5, less expansive than 6 or 2, and less timeless than 1.

For one, I hate that the battles have a terribly low run rate. It gets easier to run in a single battle the more times you attempt but the first attempt almost always fails, so you just get hit a lot. The encounter rate is almost as high as dq2, but that game let you run really easily from many encounters, so it feels really free wheeling. But this game makes encounters kind of a chore a lot of the time, especially if you don't have much choice of strategy in the early game.

The dialogue isn't as charming as 1 or 2, though not terrible. The earth-style world is cool, but not enough to buy me over.

The game is technically non-linear, but not as open as 2 or totally open to nonlinear travel as enemies are stronger in some areas and it's so hard to run, so it's near unsurvivable to encounter a strong foe. It felt more hintbased than 2. Not a bad thing but not as interesting for me.

The choices in this game are more plentiful than previous games but they feel kinda lackluster to me when if I can't fight a boss, I have no choice but to grind. I could swap a party member but that takes grinding too. Compare this to final fantasy 1, which came out a few months earlier, which gave you options of magic shops and builds changing between evasion and armor, even with rigid class choices are the start. Dragon quest 3s class change system allows for a few big choices but not frequent minute choices, and I guess I prefer the latter.

Dq3 is interesting as a declaration of the series for games that would be adventure simulators where adventure and exploration is the message, and the story heightens that, compared to final fantasy where adventure and exploration is a vehicle for a separate message, and the adventure aspects are tailored to heighten that message. The exploration is more linear in ff, where unlike dq3, the different paths available lead to the same destinations along a linear plotline. The two games build a divergence in the history of grand storytelling and narrative structure in games.