RPG Diary

Dragon Quest III

Dragon Quest III is one of the more popular games in the series, especially in Japan. I think I've played the GameBoy Color remake, but I've definitely never played the original. Does this classic game still hold up decades later?

Title	Dragon Quest III (US Dragon Warrior III )
Year	1988 (US 1992 )
System	NES
Developer	Chunsoft
Publisher	Enix

The distinctive feature of Dragon Quest III is the party creation. The hero is the only required character (and only character relevant to the story), but you can create three more characters to fill out your party. Similar to Final Fantasy, there are several character classes to choose from which adds some variance and replayability to the game. After level 20, created characters can class change to any of the other jobs. This resets the character back to level 1, but they retain half their stats and all learned magic. Class changing is not necessary to beat the game, but it certainly makes things more interesting.

There are a few quality-of-life improvements over the previous games. The Return spell can now teleport to almost any town that you have previously visited. This is a very welcome change since it cuts down on the boring backtracking (and random encounters) across the world map in the mid-game. There's also a vault in the first town which has two purposes: storing extra items (including key items that are not currently useful) and storing gold safely without losing half of it in the event of a party wipe.

Dragon Quest III does have more story than the previous games, but it's still minimal by modern standards. There isn't much progress on the main storyline until the final quarter of the game, though there are some small self-contained stories in several of the towns across the map. The big reveal of Zoma and the dark world was a nice surprise but the brief reunion with Ortega was very underwhelming.

Unfortunately Dragon Quest III requires a fair amount of grinding, both for leveling and to get enough gold for upgrading equipment. The need for grinding is fairly constant throughout the game — I remember significant grinding around Romaly, after class changing, and before each of the last two bosses. The frequent grinding was my biggest complaint with the game and I think it — or at least this version — has aged poorly because of this. I did actually somewhat enjoy grinding after class changing though because it felt rewarding to level up those characters so quickly.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I generally enjoyed Dragon Quest III, but there was a little too much grinding for me. Although Final Fantasy II was less grindy, I think it was a little more frustrating to play (due to dungeon design and hidden mechanics), so I'll put Dragon Quest III above it.

Edit: Bumping this game up a bit since I was comparing it too much to just NES games. Despite the grinding, I enjoyed this game more than Final Fantasy VIII or Final Fantasy XIII.