Dragon Quest III

At last, I have played (or watched in the case of II) all of the main Dragon Quest games. Overall, Dragon Quest has grown on me tons over the years, and it’s definitely one of my favorite game series.  These games are RPGs at their most intuitive and engaging level. There are flaws along the way, but obviously that applies to everything.  While I’d still rank IV, V, VII and VIII above it, I think Dragon Quest III is a wonderful game, and the most successful at being a great NES-style RPG.  After this game, the series took a more story-oriented approach, which I also loved, but I think one reason Yuji Hori went down that path was because he couldn't top III by repeating its concept anymore.

Dragon Quest III is a game with player interaction at its core.  The challenge, enjoyment and satisfaction that the player gets depends entirely on his own actions and choices.   This is most clearly evidenced by III’s initial team recruitment.  You are given a choice of six classes (Soldier, Mage, Cleric, Jester, Fighter and Merchant; Thief in the remakes) and told one can change to a Sage later on.  That’s all the tutorial you get, but it’s enough to make logical decisions.  Players who take the game lightly and pick the joke classes will endure many hardships; players who plan well are rewarded.

Exploration is the second critical factor of the game, and it is again tied to the player’s choices and motivations.  Only rudimentary instructions guide you; filling in the map and learning how to take down enemies is your responsibility.  The game sets traps for players who don’t prepare themselves as well.  One memorable trap is the pyramid, which I explored instead of visiting the nearby town first despite an NPC’s advice.  In the pyramid, I fell to the bottom floor through a hole and landed in a room where, to my surprise, magic was unusable and the enemies were stronger than what I had faced so far.  Needless to say, I barely escaped alive.  DQIII pulls few punches: it trusts you to overcome challenges and think ahead.

There are some challenging bosses to deal with, particularly the final bosses of the game’s two halves.  In both cases, leveling up was not the solution I used.  I was able to defeat these enemies by switching strategies, focusing on different status magic and shifting my characters’ inventories and equipment setups.  People who say these games are all grinding have no idea what they’re talking about.  A player who takes a few minutes and thinks has no need to waste time walking in circles and farming metal slimes.  Other strong enemies in the game simply required further exploration of the map.  One, a snake beast named Orochi, was easily dealt with on a second attempt after I held off on fighting it for another dungeon. I think what the game throws at you is entirely fair: you just have to do a little work to get past things sometimes.  That’s the genius of Dragon Quest III’s design in a nutshell, and this aspect of challenge was something  sorely lacking in RPGs during the SNES and Playstation eras.

Of course, the game is not without problems.  Many of these are fixed in the remakes, but some aren’t.  The walking and ship speeds are unbearably slow, which was common in these games until the DS remakes.  I don’t know why nobody complained about how slow vehicles were during testing, but when exploring the globe takes a lot of sailing, you’ll curse that speed.  Encounter rates are much too high in some places (like sailing) , as is common in NES RPGs.  It’s hard to complain about an older game’s story, but I do think a few of the tips could have been clearer, especially in the final sections of the game; even in the Japanese version you’re sometimes at a loss about what to do without a guide.  The game gives you a memo pad type feature to help remember things with, but I could not get this to work on dialogue that I really needed.  I’ll just assume that was my own error and give the game the benefit of a doubt.

Dragon Quest III is in many ways the ultimate RPG of its time.  It blows the first two games out of the water both in scope and overall design.  It’s the standard by which future games in the series should be judged, and it makes Dragon Quest IX look completely pathetic.  No amount of tinkering with the job system is going to help if your core quest isn’t exciting, and it’s sad that a game from 1988 has cooler maps and better pacing than a game from 2009.  I highly recommend this title to anyone who loves RPGs and wants to play a pivotal game in their development as a genre.

7.5