I gotta play the PS1 version someday but I just love this game man it means a lot to me.

If Dragon Quest already was a series about having fun simplified RPG adventures this is like, literally a playable One Piece (or Shonen anime) with big story intrigue, lovable filler to add variety, and a cast that changes and grows over time.

It’s evident DQ changed after Chrono Trigger and this title shows that the biggest lesson they learned is that time travel can absolutely make for stellar world building even for small locations while adding epic stakes.

I love this game

It's very easy to see how influential DQ3 was for RPGs and Japanese pop culture, which it entirely deserves. 

All the designs for the classes are immediately iconic, and the monsters are all memorable and expressive. This game is really good at signposting where you need to go next, until you get the boat, then it gets a little more shaky but still doable without using a guide. Combat is fairly simple but enjoyable, but you never really encounter something to challenge you due to there not being that many boss battles, with almost all of them backloaded.

I enjoyed the majority of this game, but I do feel that once you get to Alefgard, the game starts to drag, even if it is cool conceptually. Ultimately, you are stuck doing another fetch quest, which I did not find as enjoyable as looking for the orbs. At this point, I also started to find combat more tedious, with enemy encounters becoming more frequent and taking longer to deal with, especially in the final dungeon. It would have been nice to have MP restores outside of the limited rings and more types of healing herbs that do more than 30 HP.

Even with all that, it is still 100% worth playing. 

It continues to be very very humbling going back through this franchise. Not just this franchise but, it seems, all RPGs that descend from the philosophies and design ethics of Dragon Quest constantly remain in the orbit of this game. DQ3 takes the runaway phenomenon of the first two games and manages to make its closed-circuit adventure formula map to a much larger map. Chosing your party members within the job system provides ups and downs unique to your cast in the way any great job system should. The path through the world is delicately threaded with level checks carefully designed for the amount of grunt work you'll need to do to piece together your next steps. The echoes of your father's path and the repercussion of your own actions boom throughout the world as your team deals with your adventure strongly resembling the one that came before it. Dragon Quest 3 is a game about lineage and discovery in ways which I think wordier entries later in the series struggle to land. If you try to halfheartedly blaze through this with a guide or without optimizing your party, I could see a modern palette rubbing against the level checks, but I think this game is really an unavoidable and vital puzzle piece in the legacy of Video Games.