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.