Part of me is praying that SEGA will wake up one day and get a bee in their bonnet to remake Phantasy Star I-IV. I will then know that it is end times and nothing in life could improve. Anyway, the dream lives on, so Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake must do. And don’t mistake that last sentence as disappointment, not in the least.
The last few weeks that I have had the pleasure of playing DQIII HD-2D have reminded me how much love I have for old-school RPGs from the early 90s. There is something pure and beautiful about this period of time, where RPGs were just finding what works and what doesn’t, and series were setting their flags on the ground as permanent fixtures in the gaming industry. It was a beautiful time and Dragon Quest was very much a hefty part of that RPG exploration and experience.
Now, developer Artdink and publisher Square Enix set out to remake Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake from the 1992 classic (1988 if you lived in Japan or had it imported), which most consider to be one of the best in the series, if not the best. Instead of throwing out the entire old-school concept and visuals, Square decided to maintain the core gameplay, improve how the controls and UI work, and mix the world of 2D and 3D to create one of the most gorgeous RPG experiences I have had the pleasure of playing this year. There’s just something beautifully charming about turn-based RPGs from yesteryear with new school flavor.
So, sit back, wipe the dust off that old RPG brain of yours, and let’s get right into what makes this remake a strong contender for ‘Game of the Year’.
Simple story, big quest
If you’re not familiar with the tale of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, then let me catch you up. A great hero named Ortega left his family to go take down a nasty villain named Archfiend Baramos (love that name). Regretfully, Ortega didn’t make it and Baramos roamed freely wreaking havoc across the world. Some years later, Ortega’s only child is summoned to take up the quest of their father and take out Baramos before it’s too late.
As stories go, it’s structurally what you would find with early RPG experiences on a console during that period of time. A hero is sent out to overcome and vanquish a bad guy who is terrorizing the land, and who will eventually take it over if they aren’t stopped. Along the way, the hero finds a band of brethren who want to help for unknown reasons and everyone gives it their all with grinding and leveling in hopes of taking out the main bad guy. It’s a typical good versus evil narrative, where the story feels intense and timely but at the same time not too involving and over-blown with narrative drama. Sometimes you just don’t need a movie to get people in the mood to take down a bad guy. The story is simple and purposeful, and I wish more RPG developers did this nowadays.
Old school at its finest.
A revolving door of gameplay
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake’s core gameplay is a basic turn-based RPG construct from the early 90s. You go out, randomly run into enemies on a large map, grind repeatedly, and level up, then go face bosses and complete dungeons. That’s the core of this game and it’s something that was part of the original gameplay from 1992. This is everything that you would expect from that period of time, and it works here, as Artdink and Square have not changed one core gameplay element that takes away from the game’s original intentions. I’m happy about that because sometimes when you try to re-tool what worked from the beginning, you generally end up taking away the essence of what fans loved. You can’t do that, especially with a game like Dragon Quest III.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the game hasn’t been re-tooled in other areas to make what worked even smoother in its process. While we will certainly get into visuals in the next section, the first big items of change for this game are how the UI has sharpened, and how automation has become a strong option.
Perfected UI
Starting with the UI, it’s certainly a lot cleaner, it’s more precise with how it functions. The structure of it makes sense and it’s easy to navigate. That may not be a huge deal to some gamers who never experienced this title before in their life, but for us oldies, it’s nice to know that Artdink and Square Enix have put some time into streamlining the UI and making it more modernized and more familiar to a wider audience.
What does that mean? It’s easy to get into a scrum or easy to flee. It’s easy to choose tactics, and it’s easy to pick how each player is going to fight. It’s easy to plan a strategy for each character and execute it seamlessly. The HCI is thick and understood, as it makes sense quickly when you get into it. It certainly doesn’t feel like a chore to choose how actions will go when battles begin.
In addition, there is an easy-to-use control scheme that allows quick access to menu options. If you want to get into player attributes and options, you hit the triangle button at any point outside of battle. If you want to pull up a map, you can hit the square button. Navigating between points and having locations organized and easily locatable takes a lot of mental chores away from the player, which shows how much thought was put into improving the user experience. All these things might seem simple and not relevant to the actual gameplay, but these are improvements that enhance the underbelly of the game and make focusing on the actual gameplay a lot easier and unimpeded.
Battle System
When the action begins, the new battle system in the game shows its face. One of the biggest improvements to Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is how organized battling baddies can be. Retooling how battling works turned out to be a huge plus for this release.
The game allows you to easily choose between types of fighting depending on the characters. For me, I had a group full of warriors (straight-up warriors who were hellbent on knocking people around) who were ready to fight. When battles began, the game would allow for quick options that had color-coded meaning to them. For regular fighting, you just hit attack and go from there. There was no real separation from how that was executed. Whatever weapon my warrior wielded was the weapon that took out the baddies. Nothing too complicated.
When spells were involved, complication began, and color-coding spell type was necessary. Green spells were for healing, purple spells were to block out magic cast by enemies, and red spells were meant to do damage. Each spell had a great explanation for what it did, and it was easy to find favorites and get into juggling strategies on how my warriors were going to use their magic points up during a fight. Having all the spell information color-coded helped me to think through a battle, especially when it came to boss battles (and there are plenty).
The game’s battle system became even better when automation and tactics were reshaped. The automation is new to the series and one that I didn’t think I needed until executed multiple times. You can choose whether to have the computer take over your battles and turn you into a Total War-type player. When the ‘tactics’ option appears during battle instances, you can choose the computer to fight for you in different ways. For example, if you want a more offense-heavy attack, you can tell the computer to go all-out with less defense. If you want the computer to mix between defensive and offensive moves, you can tell it to fight wisely. You can even choose a more defensive strategy and go from there.
Now, you might be thinking, that’s not a big deal, but you can individually do this for every character in your party. You can control one character and tell the computer to decide on moves for other characters based on what you choose as battle type for those other characters. That’s an amazing amount of control over battles and it offers a richer, more intriguing amount of fighting depth. There are so many strategic ways you can battle bad guys, and this option for automation is a lot more satisfying than typical RPGs of this type.
Saving Grace
As any good PC elitist will brag repeatedly, having save points in an RPG is essential to enjoyment and trust. The latter of which is necessary because you want to make sure that large amounts of progress aren’t lost when you leave a game. PC folks will just take snapshots of their games, which are wonderful save points. Console folks will pray that the ‘unsaved data will be lost’ message doesn’t mean that everything you did for the last hour is going to be gone upon reboot of the game because you can’t make it to a save point. Finding save points in a game, especially one that is 32+ years old, isn’t an easy thing at all. Thankfully, that has been sharpened without losing the personality of the old-school game construct.
The game autosaves every single time you change levels or go into a boss fight. It happens quite a bit so there is no huge worry about data loss during the process. Now, this isn’t to say that didn’t occur once or twice during my 30+ hours of gameplay, as it did during one important part where I had to go back and retrieve an item again to progress to a boss fight. It was mildly inconvenient but easily rectified after about 20 minutes of returning to the location, going to get said mysterious item, then making it back to a village and doing a manual save at a church (the usual place to save the game).
Outside of that one hiccup, the game save improvements were as advertised, and the boss battles were nice, especially when I lost. Yes, you read that right, it was nice losing a boss battle. While not emotionally nice, as the strategy developed to take down said boss did not work, the confidence of knowing that I would have a trio of options on how to start again made defeat comforting. Those options included an immediate rematch of the boss, which allowed me to jump back into the scrum and find a new strategy to implement. There was also an autosave option that allowed me to go back into the boss scene without triggering the instance, so if I needed to back out and go get material or just take a different grinding route before fighting again, then I could. The last option was just loading the game from my last manual save point, which could send me back to a town where I could start fresh grinding or get gear/items before going back into the boss fray again.
The game did its best to make saving easier and less burdensome, which made the overall experience smoother. It’s a simple change but one that keeps the player rolling with confidence, even amid defeat. It’s insane how simple and effective changing this system was and what it meant for the overall gameplay experience.
Gameplay Rules the Roost
All these new additions and adjustments to the core gameplay only helped to improve the overall experience of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and did not at all hurt what it was or how it acted years ago. Being able to effectively change and adjust elements of the gameplay without touching the essence of it is impressive. Sometimes publishers and developers completely revamp a game that was already solid and throw off the core which made it a classic. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is still a classic but works far better than it originally did. That’s great planning and executing with a tad bit of tiptoeing without tampering.
Now, it should be noted that the game isn’t an easy experience. While you’re not going into a Souls situation of difficulty where it is purposely frustrating for the sake of driving you nuts, the game doesn’t pull its punches with bosses and common fights. If you traverse into the wrong area too early, then you’re more than likely going to get your ass handed to you quickly. If you go into a boss fight unprepared, then the fight will be short and push back for you to go get good through more grinding. The game still totes that old-school style of a schoolyard bully who wants you to come prepared or go home crying. It’s not as friendly as Final Fantasy XVI or any other modern RPG. Role-playing game standards back in the day put players to the test and games were meant for longevity and not ease-of-use. Again, it’s old school but worth the journey.
Staying with old school, you’ll certainly experience a lot of back and forth in the game, which was also a gameplay element of RPGs during this time period. You will travel across large maps, bump into countless enemies, achieve what you need to achieve in town A, and then have to return to Town B, only to go back to A. It’s a ping-pong journey of epic proportions that includes lots of walking around to and from locations. The game does a good job of splitting that time up by including a ship to sail around the lands, opening exploration and new opportunities, but you will feel the mileage. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is something that modern gamers aren’t used to doing as fast travel helps to alleviate some of that in present gaming experiences. It should be noted that the game does feature ways to fast travel but only if you have the money to access them. Ain’t nothing free in life.
Anyway, as I stated at the beginning of this section, the game is still at its core a great turn-based RPG experience. It has a good, compelling story, and a wonderful backbone that will certainly rekindle love for the series, as well as the RPG time period it was born within. You’re going to get a ton of good hours out of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, and it will make the hope for the next set of DQ remakes something to be excited about.
Stunning visuals
Saving the best for last, let’s talk about the visuals. While boring me is in love with the improvements to the gameplay structure, the easily excitable part of me that laughs at keys jingling in front of them was blown away at the graphical decisions made for Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake. You’ll be happy with those jingling keys as well.
While still maintaining the player/characters/bosses’ pixelated personalities onscreen, though also improving and sharpening their visuals, the big addition to this game is the environments. Using a shallow depth of field, crisp models, and 3D structures that just pop out on screen, the visuals in this game fit nicely with the old-school 2D. The colors, effects, textures, lighting (my GOD, the lighting), and everything in between look positively stunning in this release. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake sets a new standard with visuals that maintain the personality of its origin while also bringing to life new freshness that is incredibly appealing to see in motion.
In short, this game is freaking gorgeous. When you have a game that looks good, plays well, and feels like a new experience without really taking the old goodness away, then you’re in for a treat. Add a beautifully orchestrated soundtrack to the mix and you have one of the most perfect games to play in 2024.
This is everything you expected.
On that note, let’s wrap this long review up.
Conclusion
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake from developer Artdink and publisher Square Enix has set a new standard with how remakes of old RPGs are done. The release improves and tweaks elements of gameplay while maintaining the core structure that made the original release great. Add in a creative visual comprise between old and new school with a gorgeous soundtrack underneath, and you have yourself one of the better remakes in 2024.
