“Oh man, this is gonna be sweet! I’m gonna crush the new Dragon Warrior remake, really take it all in. Then I’ll get right on that keyboard, pound out a write-up, talk about all its features and flaws, new game review style. And most importantly, everything will go according to plan.”
Aaaaand then I got sick lmao. I did get through the whole game (minus a little bonus content) in a couple weeks, between work-work and such, before coming down with whatever bullshit was going around. And once I got over that, the holiday season was in full force, and some other stuff, and suddenly it was January and I was watching GDQ and I was still working on this. (Oh, and I definitely was not fucking off and playing RetroAchievements during that time, and don’t you dare check my profile to see if I was.)
But with all that going on, the writing part ended up taking a bit longer than I’d hoped. It’s a shame, too. I almost never play new games when they’re new, so I never have opportunities to do new game reviews. But I do have a lot to say about this labor-of-love remake of the beloved masterpiece that is Dragon Quest 3 – although it will always be “Dragon Warrior 3” in my heart. And I ain’t gonna let even a belated opportunity to do this pass me by.
Before I continue, most of the names for towns, spells, items, and characters have evolved through the various re-releases and re-re-releases. I didn’t even bother covering all those examples in my September write-up on DQ3’s release history, as there are just too many. Being the old fogey I am, I will use some antiquated names for these things, but hopefully everything will make sense. Oh, also, mucho-spoilerinos ahead, obviously.
With all of that said, I guess I should start at the beginning. There I was, counting down the days, until only one remained. I avoided the harder spoilers, relying mostly on official Squeenix announcements. But the evening before release, I saw a link to the PSN trophy list, and I was tempted to take a peek:
A-ha! They clearly added a few extra boss fights. This makes sense, as the original game was a bit lacking in that department, especially relative to the popular Final Fantasy releases coming down the pipe. The trophy list seemed chronological, so you could kinda guess where these additions would show up. You still fought Kandar twice – although now he goes by the name “Robbin’ ‘Ood” – but in between there was something called a Ripper of the Rift. That had to be either part of the Noaniels side quest, or in the Pyramid. I had a sneaking suspicion Chiromancer would be in the one-on-one Lancel cave, given the choice of enemy sprite was a call-back to the original one-on-one Dragon Quest. As for dungeons that stood out as candidates for bosses, the phantom ship seemed the most obvious of all, given how scary it’s made out to be relative to how quickly one can dart in and out with the progression-mandated goods. Also notable, it seemed all the new bosses were prior to Ramia, meaning they would all be in the main world and not Alefgard.
The days became hours. I don’t own a Switch or modern PlayStation, so my only choice was the Steam version. I watched the product page like a hawk. Steam did this thing where it said there were two hours left, and then one hour left. But it would say the same thing continuously for a whole hour, so at the half-hour mark, I didn’t know if “one hour” meant thirty minutes or ninety minutes. I figured it would be the latter, since pretty much everything else I’ve seen count down in this fashion goes from “one hour” to counting down the minutes.
But no, in this case, it went from “one hour” right to “Holy shit, it’s here, I can download it right now!”
I got it downloaded, fired it up, aaaaaand….
Insert unwanted Windows noise here. This game just refused to play on my main computer. No “You need a better graphics card”, no “You don’t have enough whatcha-RAMs in your giga-box.” Just a big pop-up of “Fuck if we know”. Honestly, this stuff is why I’ve always been a console guy. You can just put a disc or a cartridge in your system, and there’s a general expectation it will just work.
That said, I was kind of expecting this outcome. Granted, my computer is a few years old now, but it struggled to play a different Square-Enix game right out of the box (which was the last time I tried playing a new game on release day). However, here in the future, I also have a laptop, acquired around the time I visited Bill Bastable in Florida. And this laptop saved the day!!
My first big option to make was difficulty. I grew up old-school, so I tend toward harder difficulties, but I wanted to breeze through this first playthrough for review purposes. So to start out I picked the easier “Dracky Quest” – a reference to a more recent translation, which you long-timers may recognize better as “Drakee Quest”.
And with all the opening menu bullshit out of the way, my newest Dragon (or Dracky) Quest could begin!
Or it would, except for one pastel pink elephant in the room.
GENDER AFLUIDITY
While I never apologize for my politics, I do apologize for diving into those politics right out of the gate, on what ought to be a fun romp through a sweet remake of a beloved classic. However, it’s a bit unavoidable here. And no, I’m not referring to Square-Enix’s NFT bullshit, or the manufactured outrage over the company’s anti-harassment policy.
You see, there was one other choice to make before I could begin – that of which “gender” I wanted my hero(ine) to be. Every version of Dragon Quest 3 has had clear gender delineation, with all player characters being strictly male or female. Even the original NES/Famicom game had special equipment only women could use, such as the Sword of Illusion and Magic Bikini. (Yes, that was a thing.) And while the character dialogue in that original version tended to assume your main character was a man (sometimes to humorous effect), the game at least nominally gave you the option for a female lead, at least on paper. This gender disparity was made more pronounced in the remakes, which introduced stat-modifying personalities for player characters, some of which were specific to either gender. (Only a male character could have “Lucky” personality, only a female could be “Amazon”, etc.) But hey, at least in those versions a female hero was given a different sprite.
This gender contrast is retained in the HD-2D Remake, except… They don’t call it “gender” anymore. Now, when creating any character, you are asked to choose between what the game calls “Appearance A” and “Appearance B”:
But don’t be confused, it’s literally just “male” and “female”, with different words. All the old differentiations still apply. The gender-specific personalities are still restricted. The old female-only equipment can only be used by characters of “Appearance B”, while the later-introduced male-only equipment is only for “Appearance A”. Some dialogue even retains references to “men” and “women”, suggesting some of this special terminology may have been a late revision. And while you do have the opportunity later in the game to change the appearance of a character (hair color, etc.), their capital-A “Appearance” is immutable within the game.
Apparently, it was very important to some people that it be this way:
Joke’s on this guy, though. My hero is canonically AFAB, but he identifies as male, and that’s why he doesn’t wear dresses.
I don’t want to get on too high a horse here, given how I’m obviously paying just as much attention to politically charged portrayals as these jokers are. But A) I’m not a fucking transphobe, B) While I do play video games with an eye for how they relate to the political world we live in, I don’t do so while simultaneously complaining that said real-world considerations are reflected in said media I’m choosing to analyze, and C) I’m not… you know, weird about it.
Remember kids, it’s only real Dragon Quest if it retains all the original swastikas.
Anyway, this rabbit hole actually gets a bit deeper than at first blush. For the first time, this edition of Dragon Quest 3 includes voice acting! Not every random line from every NPC is spoken aloud of course, but all the important story dialogue is. And each of your characters are given voices of your choice as well. You can choose from a list of eighteen voice styles, with names like “Determined”, “Cool-Headed”, and “Cowardly”. They don’t have many proper lines to say in the course of the story, but you will hear a lot from them during combat, from simple grunts all the way up to calling out the names of spells being cast, or other declarations like shouting “Time to heal!”
Once I got a bit comfortable with the game, I played around with character creation a bit more. I swear, I wasn’t even looking for any of this. I was just trying to determine the maximum number of characters you could register, before the game tells you to delete someone you’ve already created. (That number is 25 by the way, not counting your Hero.) And after a while of creating dummy characters, I realized that every time I registered someone of “Appearance A” (male), the default voice option was “Earnest”, while a character of “Appearance B” (female) defaulted to “Childish”:
At first I was like “WTF is this shit? Women are defaulted to ‘Childish’?” That’s a little creepy. But as I explored this further, and used that “Tab” feature to try samples of each voice style, I realized the left column are the male-intended voices, and the right column are the female-intended voices, and the game simply defaults to the top option in either case. Yes, it’s still a bit unfortunate to have “Childish” as the top (and therefore default) option for women, but that’s why it was coming up that way.
More importantly, there’s no limit on which voice style you can choose. You can have a hulking male axe warrior who cheeps like a little schoolgirl, or you can make your dainty lady priest grunt like an NFL linebacker. And it’s not limited to the sample noises or grunts, either. It literally doesn’t matter what your character looks like or what their “Appearance” is, you can assign their vocal combat declarations like “Take this!” on a sliding scale from Shirley Temple’s birthday party all the way to Randy Savage on a typical Wednesday’s worth of cocaine. And yes, once you reach a certain point in the game, these voices can also be changed at will. Because your party members should be who they want to be.
I’ll wrap up this conversation with a bit of soapboxing. I’m writing to you, my intelligent readers, on the premise that you agree with me that misogyny sucks, and that this includes things like objectification and marginalization. I’m not against things like pornography; if you want to see naked tits, bro, you know where to find them, both online and in the real world. I do very much dislike when creepy pseudo-porn seeps into general media ostensibly intended for everyone, because doing so carries with it the message that these media aren’t for everyone. Quality games like these should be for audiences beyond just horny dudes who think of women as play objects, and who are selfishly unhappy if major media aren’t catering to them exclusively. And for those reasons, I’m not a fan of these games having Magic Bikinis and skimpy sprites and “Puff-Puff” dances. That said, while I don’t want to dismiss misogyny (fringe or otherwise), contrary to how some trolls and idiots out there may want to frame these few observations I’ve noted so far, I don’t think any of this constitutes an endorsement of any bigoted worldview. If anything, I’d say the change in terminology from “gender” to “Appearance” is a sign that the developers understand public sentiments are changing (especially among the gamer playerbase at large), and that it’s worth at least making an attempt to move in that direction – one which was not required of them in the first place. I don’t wish to get any more deep into this topic than I already am, if for no other reason than because I’m not particularly qualified to dissect misogyny in Japanese media. However, as it pertains to the question of transgender acceptance, I certainly don’t see this game’s “gender” paradigm as expressive of any transphobic bent whatsoever. Rather, through the course of this game, we’ll see a few contrary examples, which I’ll be more than happy to point out as we go along. Given the game’s Japanese origins, and my admitted lack of qualifications, I’m content to chalk up these transgender portrayals to what I’ll simply call “cultural silliness”.
Okay, we got that out of the way. On to the fun stuff.
ON WITH THE SHOW
Right away, as someone who has played countless hours of this remake’s predecessors on NES and GBC, the visual upgrades were awe-inspiring… but we’ll get to that a bit later. After all, at the end of the day, a game is only as fun as it plays, right?
As shown several paragraphs ago, you start out in a forest glade, leading to a precipice where a disembodied voice starts playing armchair psychiatrist. If you’ve never played any of the previous remakes, this all would seem very strange and confusing, but this is now a standard part of the game, the purpose of which is determining a personality for your Hero by way of something other than an arbitrary RNG roll. Following, that, it’s the same deal as before; sixteenth birthday, going to see the king, etc. There are a few flashback scenes relating to your father Ortega, which in some previous versions were collected into a title screen montage (much like the dragon fight on the NES version), but which are now incorporated into the game itself.
After getting a little gold and some throwaway weapons from the king, which I guess is all he could spare for saving the world, I was left to my own devices. I began poking around town, just sort of taking it all in. Thankfully, the game gives you little indicators any time you’re facing an object of interest, or else I’d be obsessively spamming the “Do something” button in the direction of every little pot, barrel, bucket, chair, stool, plant, sack, painting, fixture, decorative shield, and candelabra I could see.
The other special action button the game directs your attention to is the “V” button, which I guess stands for “Verily, I must remember what this NPC just told me”. (Or as seen above, “Verily, I must hide these objectives from my screen”. You could say that button is quite versatile.) This ability ties into a “Recall” feature, which they’ve cleverly hidden as a top level menu option, so idiots like me will go rooting through all the miscellaneous sub-menus failing to find it.
I forgot this recall feature existed for most of my run (since I basically know where everything is anyway), but it does have some interesting quirks. It’s not exactly a new feature; On GBA, it was operated through your Hero’s spell/ability menu, and was even used to impart flashback memories of Ortega. This time, it starts as a blank slate with no default “memories”. Curiously, the game seems to manually save an NPC’s text, location, and appearance each time you use it, rather than drawing these things from a database. You can keep talking to the same Chancellor, and keep saving their same dialogue, and the game treats each instance as unique, with the saved image perhaps changing slightly as on-screen characters move around. It also saves ancillary text, such as whole conversations or declarations, i.e. “The king gives your character a cheap nerf sword”, in case you needed to remember what a spendthrift that bastard was. For some dialogue, like shopkeeper stuff, the game tells you you’ve already memorized it, even though that’s a total lie. Once you save thirty such quotes, the game is basically like “Your brain is full”, and you have to choose some old quote to forget.
As I was exploring, I found my way to the second floor of Patty’s Party Planning Place (the tavern where you recruit friends to join you on your quest), where I got… softlocked? I found myself in the spot seen above, utterly unable to move. I could make my character face different directions, but I couldn’t leave that spot. Did they not test this game? Was this an omen of things to come? Or was I an idiot and pressing the wrong buttons? I wish this had come up later, when I knew for sure what I was doing. As it was, the only way to avoid resetting my first bit of progress on my very first playthrough of DQ3 Remake was to use the single Chimaera Wing I’d found in some barrel somewhere to warp to the entrance of town, lol. Thankfully, this never came up again, so it probably was just me still figuring out my game legs.
Soon it was time to recruit a party. The game always offers you three default characters, representing the strongest three classes to take: Warrior, Priest, and Mage. On the NES/Famicom, these three were always male. However, in the various remakes, the game has featured a mixture of male and female defaults, though as always you can go upstairs and fashion custom characters with names and identities to your liking. My three default characters happened to be “Appearance A”, but a perusal of playthroughs online show that was just luck of the draw. At any rate, I was intent on trying out that new Monster Wrangler class, so it made sense to register her as the only woman – excuse me, “Appearance B” – in my party.
I didn’t notice this for quite a while, but there are actually six base stats in the game now, up from the previous five. Strength, Agility, Luck, and Wisdom (previously “Intelligence”) are retained, but it seems “Vitality” has been split off into “Resilience” and “Stamina”. I assume the former represents a character’s base defense and the latter affects HP gains? In that case, I suppose it’s actually “Agility” (which used to serve as both speed and defense stats) that got split off into Agility and Resilience. You’ll have to ask some code guru how that all works exactly. All I can say is: Somethin’ different.
As a reward for pre-ordering the game, there was a spangly bonus treasure chest at Patty’s, containing a bunch of stat-boosting seeds and a pair of “Elevating Shoes”. Known in the original as “Shoes of Happiness”, these used to be a super-special late-game item, obtainable only as a rare drop from Metal Babbles. And here they just give them to you in the first town! They’re not totally game-breaking, or anything – they just give a character one experience point for every step you take. But it was cool to try them out early on, when they can actually make a difference, as opposed to the endgame when a single experience point is relatively meaningless.
I went to slap them on Gwaelin, hoping I might get advanced Monster Hunter abilities early, when I came across the next exciting upgrade: You can equip two accessories on any character at the same time!! Holy hell, is this awesome! Granted, in the original game, accessories are treated as equippable items with no limitations, so you could have one character bearing Shoes of Happiness, Meteorite Armband, Ring of Life, and Sacred Amulet all at once. But later remakes gave these a specific “accessory” designation, and restricted them to one-per-person. Allowing two at a time opens these up so much. Your late game Hero will be able to wear something variable without having to drop the Sacred Amulet. You can wear a personality-changing accessory as “Main Accessory” along with something you actually want. A bunch of useful stuff will actually get screen time, rather than languishing away in the bag.
Speaking of bags, you know those are back. An early NPC poked some fun at the good ol’ days, when every item had to be kept in individual characters’ inventories:
Truly, I don’t know.
We’ve seen bags before, so that’s NBD. But you’ve never seen this!
That’s right, there are three different bags!!! There’s one for general use items, one for equipment, and one for story items. If you want to throw something in its relevant bag, you just choose “Bag it, motherfucker!” Even better, when you go around peeking in all those barrels and opening all those treasure chests, the game automatically sorts your new items into those bags!! They don’t just fill up your character inventories first, and thus you don’t have to occasionally stop and clear them out. Why did we not do it this way all along!?
Oh, and it gets better! Did you see that bit in the bottom left corner there? Those are the Mini Medals that one guy collects – the ones that used to barf up your inventory. Better than being individual “Items” in the “Item Bag”, they don’t even appear at all! They’re literally just their own number in their own spot. I mean, why not? They don’t have any other use. I know, next time I go back to the GBC version, I’m gonna be extra-annoyed that I have to swap those individual medals around in my inventory.
Speaking of Mini Medals, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to get this out of the way. Recall in my September write-up how, in the previous mobile version, a perusal of the medal-prize list gave away that no Pachisi tracks would be forthcoming. Well, in the HD-2D Remake, a quick visit to the medal guy once again offers some interesting insight.
Once again, no Gold Pass, which means no Pachisi. But whereas the top prize used to go for 100 medals, this time, the goodies go up to 110. (And yes, 110 is still the maximum number of medals.) They also seem to have incorporated more of the bonus gear as prizes in this way. To me, this reinforces the theory that Pachisi was a late scrap from the mobile version, and that this game was designed knowing from the onset there would be no Pachisi minigames.
Back to basic matters, yes, there’s still a bank where the old item vault used to be on the NES. But this bank has been changed as well; it now accepts deposits of gold in hundreds instead of thousands. Even though my dear old mum still lets me freely stay the night in my old room, I spoke to the innkeeper and discovered that, in addition to the basic “Stay Overnight” plan, he offers a new bonus option called “Rest Awhile”. This allows you to restore your HP and MP while choosing a specific time of day (Dawn, Noon, Dusk, or Night) to end your stay. Sounds like searching different towns at different times isn’t going to be as much of a pain in the arse anymore?
Even something as fundamental as saving your game has also been changed. You used to have to seek out the king or queen for this, with only the occasional other dignitary (such as the guy standing outside Dhama) having this ability. But now, just about every priest and nun you find, in or out of a proper church, can save your game for you. As a side note, this does have the effect of you needing to speak to kings much less frequently, which all things considered is probably good for one’s health.
In addition to “Confession” (the save function) and the standard three House of Healing options, there’s a separate “Divination” function. This is just the thing the king or queen always used to do, where they tell you how many experience points you need for the next level, which now you can see in your status menu anyway. Nice of them to split this off as its own thing, so you don’t have to spam through that text every time you want to save. Note that, as seen above, Gwaelin – my bearer of Elevating Shoes – got a special message. And this was before I’d even left town for the first time. As I was able to confirm, this is basically the equivalent of the “You’ve gained experience in a strange manner” text that was included in old versions as a failsafe, so the NPC doesn’t end up saying “You need negative three experience to reach the next level” or something stupid like that.
In practical terms, this meant two things: First, the Elevating Shoes work inside town. In the past, they’ve only functioned on the overworld, where you have to contend with enemy encounters. One might ask what’s stopping a player from wandering around town limitlessly gaining levels – aside from the fact that this would be tediously slow for later levels requiring tens of thousands of experience. But that’s where the second revelation comes in: As I was able to confirm, the Shoes don’t gain you experience beyond the need of your current level. In other words, if you need 40 experience to go up a level, the Shoes will stop at 40 until you fight a traditional battle, and level up that way. So hey, combat is still involved, somehow.
That’s all just the stuff I was able to observe before even setting foot outside town!
EXPLORING THE WORLD
I’ll be honest, I’m a facts and figures guy. I can dissect numbers and timelines all day. On the other hand, I tend to struggle when describing aesthetics. But as I will remind you throughout this write-up, Holy Hell, this game is gorgeous!!
The light reflections off the water are meticulous. The sunsets are convincing, both in and out of town. What used to be basic tile dungeons are now fully fleshed out worlds of their own. I actually feel trepidation walking near the ledges of towers, with the distant parallax countryside sprawled out below.
I’m sure all these new triple-A games look like this, but as an old timer still stuck in the ’90s, I was in awe of how much attention was paid to aesthetic detail in this remake. I wasn’t able to adequately screencap this, but while walking through Aliahan, I was taken aback by a flurry of… something in my path. They were birds! A small flock of birds had collected at some point, scavenging someone’s pretend food dropped in the town center, and they scattered as I approached. This was totally unnecessary, and yet the devs took the time to add this little bit of immersion, in town after town.
The village layouts themselves are mostly unchanged. Previous remakes had already introduced an angled perspective, which at the time necessitated a removal of sideways doors seen in the fully top-down original. The enhanced isometric view of the HD-2D Remake allows for a return of some of those lateral entrances.
However, one thing you notice early on is that you enter towns from different directions than you did before. At first, it seems like a hard shift – You enter Reeve from the south rather than the west. But after some experimentation, I discovered you can still enter Reeve from the west. In fact, in another example of attention to detail, you actually spawn in each town from the direction you approached it while on the overworld! That’s so cool! And if a town’s traditional layout doesn’t allow entrance from that direction, it’s either been modified to do so, or the overworld landmark bears a wall or other obstacle along that side, forcing you to go around it and use a viable entrance. I know, me trying to explain it makes it sound very complicated. Once you get used to it, it’s not confusing, but it does at times make you have to remember where you are.
Oh, and obviously the day/night mechanic is back, although that’s changed a little as well. Now, as long as you’re outside of town, time passes even when you’re just standing still. So instead of fighting enemy encounters as if they’re physically standing between you and daylight, you can just get up and refill your coffee.
I’ll get into combat more in a moment. After the first bit of story sequence, I was excited to see what the travel portal at the bottom of the Cave of Enticement would look like:
Thank goodness for that little exclamation marker. I would’ve never known this giant shining blue light at the end of this last available cave was somehow important.
In exiting the far end of the portal, I found an unavoidable encounter with a friendly slime, and some chap named Monty.
Monty ends up being your tutor in the newly overhauled monster arenas, and that slime your first recruit. Oh, and they are definitely “arenas” and not anything else, as the bunny-ear-wearing lady at the counter will impress on you:
This must be a reference to something I’m missing. Either that, or someone lost all their money and grumbled “This place is the pits!”
Obviously, this game was written for the Japanese audience first, which means new text like this required a fresh translation. However, much of the retained dialogue from the previous translation is carried over verbatim. The fact that this new monster arena is, from a bird’s eye view, not terribly dissimilar to the monster-betting fights of old allows much of the spectator dialogue to be directly reused as well.
However, some bits of translation have definitely changed. This one was revealed in preview trailers, but in Romaria you get your first in-game confirmation that the kingdom of “Isis” has been changed to “Ibis”:
Curiously, upon embarking north from Romaria, you discover the landscape has been slightly altered to force you into a narrow path – one which happens to be ripe for a brief story sequence:
In case you ignored all the denizen dialogue in Romaly, at this junction a bunch of soldiers impress on you how important it is to venture north. For those who don’t recall, the landscape allows you to skip some stuff by proceeding east, but the enemies there will murderate you unless you’ve gained a few levels first. Back in the day, we tended to learn these things the hard way. But, you know, that’s fair. They just wanna make sure you know where to go.
THE FIGHT IS ON
Speaking of enemies and gaining levels, this game has combat! I would have given this remake a playthrough even if they’d replaced the battle system with a strategy-action quasi-platforming Metroidvania puzzle fusion love story. But I am deeply glad they kept the core turn-based functionality of the original. Honestly, this alone guaranteed a few subsequent playthroughs beyond the one trial run.
But that’s not to say there weren’t surprises along the way. I set out on my quest, and one of the first things my Monster Wrangler did was… start licking things?
It turns out, even your non-mage classes get abilities, which also use MP. In this case, my Wrangler learned some weird ability that licks enemies to startle them, which to be fair could be pretty startling in unexpected contexts.
Abilities aren’t exactly new to Dragon Quest 3, of course. In the GBC version (the first remake to be localized in English), the Jester, Merchant, and Thief classes learned useful abilities like Whistle, YellHelp and MapMagic. But until now, these were all sorted alongside proper spells. Now, non-magic abilities are distinctly categorized. And the Warrior and Martial Artist classes get to learn abilities as well – which means they also get MP to use. Gone are the days of class changing to a fighter class knowing they’re forever stuck with the MP they have.
Skipping ahead quite a ways, this delineation between “spells” and “abilities” is actually rather meaningful. You can be locked out of your spell list with an enemy’s timely Stopspell, but you’ll still be able to rely on your non-spell special abilities. Also, abilities are allowed in areas where magic is suppressed (like the Pyramid basement), meaning you can still use MP to ravage groups of enemies with Gigaslash.
Between “spells” and “abilities”, most of the game’s classes will only learn one type of MP-using maneuver or the other, though obviously all spells and abilities are retained after a class change. (This does not include things like the Merchant’s “ability” to assess items, which is sort of a separate menu option and not something that shows up in their “ability” list.) So you can fashion a character with healing Priest spells and violent Martial Artist abilities. But interestingly, setting aside a single Thief “spell”, the only class that inherently learns full lists of both spells and abilities at the same time is the Hero.
Getting back to enemy encounters, they definitely didn’t just carry over the functionality of the original game straight away. One demonstration is that this remake includes enemy formations that used to be impossible, either due to having more than four distinct enemy groups, or for having more enemies than the original could handle on screen at a single time.
The redone enemy sprites are done very well. The core images are still the same Toriyama classics you know well. And yes, palette swaps are still a thing. However, much later in the game, you may notice that stronger enemies are actually rendered larger than their weaker same-sprite counterparts, which is a nice touch.
One subtle but useful change is how enemy damage is displayed. Previously, the game would just tell you a number, and you’d have to figure out for yourself through trial and error which attacks were strong or weak against given enemies or in a given area. Of course, without the excessive play time we had as kids in the NES era, it’d be dubious to think players are going to remember all these different weaknesses for all these enemy encounters today. Now, as long as you aren’t color-blind, the game just tells you. White-number damage means an attack was neutral against a given enemy. Blue-number damage means you’re attacking an enemy using their strength (i.e., attacking an ice monster with ice magic), resulting in low damage. What you want are the red numbers you get from attacking an enemy with its weakness. Gone are the days of wondering if your choice of spell is ill-suited to this particular monster, or if you just suck. Yellow numbers represent a melee critical hit, though other effects are happy to tell you that as well.
Most of the old frustrations with combat on the NES are also long gone. If an enemy group is wiped out, your characters will just switch to attacking or casting magic on another group, instead of beating dead bodies to a pulp. The previous remakes had already softened most of those edges, but there was one remaining oddity the HD2D Remake finally retired: You can no longer accidentally target yourself with attacks, because the self-targeting option has been totally eliminated. This actually presents some difficulties for the advanced player, who maybe wants to kill off certain party members so specific characters reap all the experience. The ability to hit your own allies out of confusion is also removed, although there is an item and an ability (the Gadabout’s “Sobering Slap”) which have the same effect.
Still though, combat remains both simple to execute and satisfying. And improved enemy animations mean you really get to experience the pain when you whack Kandar in the nuts.
And of course, battle tactics are back, having originally been incorporated into DQ3 in the mobile remake. As a default, I kept my Hero on “Follow orders” while leaving the rest of my party on the easier to maintain “Fight Wisely”. There were definitely times that the term “Wisely” was a bit relative, though. My Hero would be incapacitated, and my auto-pilot party on “Fight Wisely” would be focused on fully healing everyone each turn, rather than applying the pressure that would be needed to end the battle and get us out of danger. Yes, you can change tactics mid-battle between turns, but that sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? On the plus side, these auto-battlers changed attacks dynamically, and had a lot better insight into the state of the enemy than I did. Late game, it was amusing when someone would cast a weak beginner spell like Crack (Icebolt) for 10 or so damage and knock down a hulking behemoth who only had less than 10 HP left. Only a CPU character would know the exact damage to inflict.
While I stuck with “Fight Wisely” on my allies for random encounters, I granted myself full use of my party for boss battles. I was quite familiar with the first boss, “Robbin ‘Ood”, and his lackeys. But I not-so-surprisingly got my first taste of bonus boss battleage in the Pyramid, standing between myself and the Magic Key.
As I was putting this together, I noticed my Mage there is holding a boomerang, which is the actual weapon he had equipped at that time. Nice detail! Anyway, the Pyramid mostly functions as normal, with the original two-button puzzle (as indicated by the children’s rhyme at Ibis), and not the four-button variant from GBA. And following the acquisition of the Magic Key, the guarded treasures in the upper room now feature variable monster fights, instead of the repetitive four Mummy Men from before. But before that, when you attempt to enter the central chamber housing the Magic Key, a creature called Ripper of the Rift drops in on you, along with two eyeball buddies named Kylla. Honestly though, Ripper wasn’t too much to write home about. Just some silly disruption magic and reused sprites.
I began to think I was doing pretty well! I hadn’t party wiped yet. In fact, none of my characters had died at all. I hadn’t thought much about it, until I was playing around in the new Monster Arena, battling some critters I’d found with my Monster Wrangler, when I noticed something… odd.
When you enter the Arena, you basically wager some amount of gold, and must prevail in four fights to win your wager. You can choose a party of three from your available stock of captured critters, and you can set their battle tactics, but “Follow Orders” is not an option, so you have to just let them loose and hope they represent you well. There are eleven ranks, with the first two being available in Romaria. And each time you clear a rank for the first time, you get a set of prizes – some of which replace the prizes you would have found at Pachisi.
But on this occasion, I was a bit confused. I could have sworn I saw my Demon Anteater there get hit for more than lethal damage, and yet he stayed alive at 1 HP. I thought maybe there was something weird with the Arena itself.
But then it dawned on me… It was my difficulty setting!
I conducted a field test and, sure as shit, none of my party members could ever die, even if I just left them to get thrashed for several minutes. It turned out, that was an inherent aspect of the easiest difficulty setting I had chosen – “Dracky Quest”. Of course, I would have known that right away if I’d have checked all the help guides the game gives you, buried in your field menu. But who’s got time to read all that shit? Anyway, while I did want a relatively easy playthrough for my first time, not being able to die at all was obviously a bit too easy, so I had to bump back up to the medium difficulty “Dragon Quest” going forward.
After that, I started seeing the occasional trident coffin pop up in my party. But hey, it’s no biggie, right? I’ve got this.
Aaaaaand then I wiped to Kandar 2. Turns out that guy can be pretty strong! Curiously, unlike all previous versions, the game didn’t automatically revive me at the last place I’d saved. That was only one of four options, the others being to stay dead and choose a new file, or to continue from the game’s last auto-save, or to straight up retry the fight I died on. Being an old schooler, I chose the classic style “Continue from a Church” each time I wiped (with Churches having replaced kings as save points), along with the traditional loss of half my gold. But you know, these kids today need softer gaming options, I guess.
MAGIC MEDICINE
Did I mention this game is gorgeous?
As mentioned, much has been reconfigured. For one thing, the queendom of Isis/Ibis used to be hidden along an oasis, requiring the player to heed clues as to its location, whereas now (as seen in the bottom right panel) the whole thing is out in the open for anyone to find. And Ibis wasn’t the only locale to get such an upgrade. Later on, the landmark for the “New Town” is now a structure rather than an empty field, and its overworld appearance actually changes as the town grows!
A number of secrets and traps from the original don’t work the same way with the isometric viewpoint. The entrance to the Ibis basement is obvious, and the way through Kandar’s cave is much less mysterious. But this version foils us veterans in other ways. For one thing, the Mini Medals we English-speakers have been so familiar with since the Game Boy Color days seem to have mostly been shuffled around to new locations.
We’ve also been treated to these new sparkle spots on the map:
Yeah, there’s just free items laying around on the overworld. And these things are everywhere! They’re not renewable, at least not as far as I’ve seen yet. Some of them are junk, but some are quite valuable, giving you advanced equipment or just lots and lots of gold. It got to where I was always happy to venture toward any sparklies in the distance, just to see what I’d get.
In addition to those sparkle spots, there are a lot of small areas that, upon closer inspection, are incidental clearings you can visit. These are typically denoted by an odd tree or boulder, or later when you get the ship, some craggy rocks sticking up past the ocean surface or something. When you find one, chances are there’s some treasure, or a monster waiting to be wrangled, or both. The original NES game felt so massive in its day, with such a huge map and so many locations to visit. In a way, this increases the number of places to visit considerably, even if most of the new locations are nameless corners of the overworld.
Some basic items and spells have also been changed around. In the past, your only item-based option for recovering HP was the feeble Medicinal Herb. Now, they’ve added Strong Medicine for extra recovery, and if you’re a really good boy, you can even find some Special Medicine for even more.
There’s a whole collection of new items at your disposal. You can use Oomph Powder for the same effect as the Oomph spell (formerly “Bikill”). Just like how you always had items to cure poison and paralysis, now if one of your characters gets Stopspelled, you can throw some Unsealant on them to open their magic back up. There are now even single-use items to replenish MP, something which in every previous version could only be done using those elusive Prayer Rings (a.k.a. Wizard’s Rings) that can sometimes shatter.
With all of this, it shouldn’t be too surprising that those once-rare Rings carry a bit less prestige now. Whereas your first one used to be bestowed by the queen of Isis, now you can find one earlier in Kandar’s tower:
This immediately led me to wonder whether they would upgrade the prize from Queen Ibis. And they did! Instead of an old Wizard’s Ring, she now gives you a Recovery Ring.
It always felt weird that, in prior versions, they didn’t give you this “Ring of Life” until the very end of the game, when 1 HP per step is basically not worth it. (I occasionally make use of it in the Nailmark Cave, where non-magic healing is premium, but even then it’s pretty weak.) I won’t say it’s a gamebreaker to receive one this early, but it’s a hell of a lot more useful here than later, especially when you can wear two accessories on a single character.
Speaking of those accessories, you have so many more options in this version. A Rousing Ring prevents the user from falling asleep, a Full Moon Ring prevents paralysis, and a Ring of Clarity helps a character avoid becoming confused. The dubiously-sourced Asbestos Earrings reduce damage from fire attacks, while Aerofoil Earrings do the same for wind attacks. And since this world hasn’t invented horseless cars yet, they’re busy turning all this Anti-Freeze they’ve been mining into Anti-Freeze Earrings that reduce ice damage. (That’s how it works, right?)
And it’s not just items and equipment that have gotten the big upgrade – there are new spells! I wasn’t particularly expecting this, given how symmetrical the spell lists were in the previous versions. The original game had three panels for Wizard or Pilgrim spells, often with the same basic spell being repeated at three different potencies. Think Blaze -> Blazemore -> Blazemost, or Heal -> Healmore -> Healall.
So imagine my surprise when I’m barely past Romaria, and I learn a new spell called “Zin”.
Yes, in addition to “Kazing” (“Revive”), which always revives a fallen character to full HP, and “Zing” (“Vivify”), which sometimes revives someone to half HP, you get an even weaker version that occasionally revives a character to 1 HP. And you get this so early!
Previous remakes introduced a helpful menu option where you can quickly prompt your healers to restore everyone to max HP by whatever means they had at their disposal. That full-heal option remains, along with a new lighter version. If you enter your miscellaneous menu and choose “Handy Heal All”, your healers will restore everyone to more-or-less the general vicinity of full HP, through more efficient means. To that end, there’s also a new intermediary healing spell:
At about level 22 or so, your Priest will learn the spell “Moreheal”, which is not to be confused with the classic “Healmore”, which is now called “Midheal”. (Not confusing at all.) “Moreheal” costs 7 MP, and restores a bit more HP, whereas “Fullheal” (formerly “Healall”) is bumped up to a 9 MP cost. There’s also a new “Magic Barrier” spell that increases your magic defense the way “Kabuff”/”Increase” did for physical defense.
Granted, many of these spells and items and such are otherwise established Dragon Quest series stalwarts, having been introduced years ago in later games, which admittedly I’m way behind on. (In my youth, I stopped playing after the games stopped getting localized, for reasons I would think are obvious. And I just haven’t caught up since.) But as a longtime aficionado of this third installment in the series in particular, these are all new inclusions to me.
Even some of the old returning spells felt like new. (The pun, whether you know it or not, is always intended.) Both the Chimaera Wing and the “Zoom” spell still let you zip instantly to various world locations you’ve already visited. But a few aspects of this process have changed. First, whereas these effects used to always reset the in-game hour to the morning, now they retain whatever time of day it was when you used them. If you cast Zoom at night, you arrive at night.
But it’s no longer just towns you can return to. Casting Zoom brings up a map, with a list consisting of basically every noteworthy location you’ve visited in the entire world. The little secret spots are exempt, but every cave, tower, shrine, village, and burg with a name is now a place you can immediately Zoom to, provided you’ve already visited that location once before. The list includes icons indicating the amenities offered at each location, like you’re driving the Interstate and you need to know which exit has a Motel 6. The spell defaults to dropping you inside the town’s main entrance, but as shown above, you can opt into the classic mode of arriving just outside city limits.
Even better, you can cast Zoom from basically anywhere, even deep inside a dungeon. No more bonking your head on the ceiling! Oh, and it costs literally zero MP to use. One might wonder why the game even bothered to bring back the “Evac”/”Outside” spell. I guess, since your Mage still learns Outside first, you may still get a little momentary use out of it?
WORLD BUILDING
Hey, you know what’s not new to this remake?
Tridents. And lots of them.
As discussed previously, the original NES game was stripped of religious iconography during localization. Crosses returned for the Game Boy Color version, but later Square-Enix adopted the practice of using tridents in place of religious crosses, as if these people are all going around worshipping Neptune or something.
What’s also not new to this remake is the translation – or most of it, anyway. Obviously the dialogue relating to the game’s new content had to be fashioned for the first time. And some NPCs are given more fleshed out discourse than before, particularly in ways I’ll get to in a moment. But even then, you still see most of the same themes as before, with this world’s denizens referring to the “Goddess” as their deity of choice.
I know that’s supposed to be the Goddess version of “Godspeed”, but it always reads to me as “Goddess peed”.
As I said, where applicable, most of the translation is carried over from the mobile version. And yes, that includes the silly creature names.
I couldn’t tell you how much of the original Japanese dialogue was upgraded or modified – although if you do know Japanese, the Steam release allows you to swap to Japanese audio, as well as a number of languages worth of displayed text. But we can tell that much of the recurring English dialogue wasn’t subject to a new translation, given how it returns as previously seen exactly verbatim, including the added flourishes denoting real world accents. (See the faux-Italian arena fan earlier for one example.)
However, I did notice one interesting modification to some pre-existing dialogue…
Yes, they went in and softened this particular line of slime-speak. Were they concerned people wouldn’t understand? Or were both teams operating from a single non-slimified translation, and both applied manual slimification to their own levels of satisfaction?
(BTW, last time I briefly referenced the silly slime dialogue, which was introduced in the main series long after I stopped getting my localized NES games. But what I didn’t mention was, this sort of slime-speak doesn’t seem to have an official name. I would recommend either “Goospeak”, “Slimish”, “Klingoon”, or my personal favorite, “Esperantooze”.)
Oy, speaking of “real-world accents”…
For those who need their memory jogged, this game uses a world map based heavily on the real world, with the same continents (plus one extra) and many locations based on actual regions on Earth. The text above comes from a scene in the town of Baharata, which in the game is meant to represent real world India. (Pay no attention to the fact they use the same lily-white NPC sprites you see almost everywhere in the game.) I believe, as a departure from previous versions where you have to seek out these characters near the river, now this scene auto-plays as soon as you enter the town, though I didn’t put that in my notes, so don’t quote me on that.
But you know… I’ve read this exact text before, and I didn’t give it much thought. It wasn’t terribly distinct from the over-the-top Italian or Japanese dialogue you find elsewhere in the game. But this is a required story scene, which means for the first time, these lines were read aloud and recorded. To have the game actually recite this caricatured text, my laptop speakers emitting this broken dialogue into the air, in an exaggerated South-Asian accent to match the intent…
It’s waaay more cringy hearing it spoken than when you can just sort of gloss it over in your mind. Someone actually sat in a sound studio and read that dialogue aloud, managing to not break out in laughter (or vomit) long enough to get each line recorded. I’m not interested in identifying a voice actor for any of this crap and putting them on blast, especially since it does appear likely these lines in this accent were voiced by an actual person of South Asian descent. (In other words, it’s not like a Hank Azaria as Apu Nahasapeemapetilon situation.) Look, I get it, a job’s a job. You could be the best Shakespeare-trained Arab-American actor ever, but Hollywood will only call you when they need someone to hijack a plane or some shit. But I will add, given that these lines were carried over directly from the previous mobile remake (which lacked voice acting), it’s safe to say these actors were given no input whatsoever into the corny stereotypic ethnic dialogue they were asked to read, which you know, maybe possibly could’ve been toned down a wee bit.
Admittedly, this had my interest piqued for the fate of Soo / Persistence… but I had to get the ship before I could travel there. After party wiping to Kandar, I took a detour north to “Alltrades Abbey” (formerly “Dhama”), and then ventured even further on foot to the tiny arctic town of Mur. The locals there did the same shtick as before, recognizing my character as Ortega and calling him “Peredvizhnik”, except they added a lengthier flashback sequence of Ortega being injured and defending the town from monsters.
After getting pops’s old helmet, I returned to the Abbey and cleared out what used to be called Garuna Tower to the north. This of course would net me the “Words of Wisdom” (Book of Satori) I needed to make one of my characters a Sage. And hey, if I gained some levels along the way, so be it.
Meanwhile, I got to experience a different sort of world-building. The dungeons of this game aren’t just visually beautiful, they’re also immersive. Set aside the gorgeous vistas you see off in the distance, both above and underground. In towers like Garuna, the passageways are designed such that you really feel as though your party is traversing upward as they scale each floor on their way to the top.
Towers such as these used to be depicted as a series of flat floors connected by staircase tiles. Of course, in areas that had lots of alternate routes, fleshing those tiles out as fully realized staircases can visually get a bit crowded.
And yet, one of the features from the flat maps – the ability to see previews of yet-inaccessible areas – has somehow been retained. At one point, I saw a closed treasure chest in the foreground. After clearing out the surrounding treasure, I returned during the daytime to find that same foreground treasure was now indeed shown to be empty.
So many little quality-of-life improvements were considered and implemented. Many flavorful-yet-opaque foreground obstructions straight up vanish when you direct your characters behind them. And of course, they added some helpful hints to make things easier for the noobs as well, including a little flag indicating exactly where you’re supposed to jump off the Garuna Tower tightrope to find the hidden chambers.
Following these excursions, I took another shot at Kandar, and this time defeated him handily. I raced back to Baharata to see my new friend Gopal at the pepper shop, and… he didn’t have any pepper? Well, this is new. For some reason, they added a small fetch quest, where you have to travel to see Gopal’s supplier at Alltrades Abbey to the north to get the pepper you need. It is a bit funny though that they didn’t bother changing the dialogue of the doofus hanging around in Gopal’s shop. I guess he bought all the pepper before I could get there?
Not sure the point of this excursion, other than to force the player to visit Alltrades in a timely manner. Anyway, since the Abbey was already on my Return list, it was a quick jaunt to find the merchant with the little exclamation point over his head. Soon, I found myself back in the presence of the King of Portoga. Rather than give me a ship outright, he insisted on throwing a banquet in our honor. As he said this, little did I know it was a pretext to add an overnight sequence, where a light speaks to me in the same voice I heard in the game’s opening.
I guess this was to make sure the player knew what the game’s objective going forward was, in case one didn’t feel like talking to the lighthouse guy across the Strait of Gibraltar. The king also conveyed some added dialogue the following morning, warning you about dour omens coming from places named Jipang and Manoza (formerly Samanao), which your Hero from Aliahan has never heard of.
After some party reorganization (which I’ll get to later), I promptly satisfied my own curiosity about Soo / Persistence. For those who didn’t read my previous post on this, the game had always included a Native American town named Soo, located up the Mississippi River. This town was present on the NES/Famicom version, the Super Famicom remake, and the Game Boy Color remake. However, with the more recent mobile/Switch version, it was swapped for a Puritan-themed settler town named “Persistence”. The whole issue is a bit complicated. On one hand, since the game is ostensibly depicting the real world around the time of Magellan, this does constitute erasure of the actually existing native people living on this land prior to the arrival of the European settler society so identified with the United States today. But on the other hand, the game’s depictions of other cultures have proven… less than kind, in some ways.
Playing this edition, I arrived to find the Puritan town “Persistence” had returned, which given the advent of voice acting and how it was implemented elsewhere, I’d say that’s for the best. Interestingly, the visual design of “Persistence” is still replete with Native American trappings, as if you are supposed to recognize what the town stands in place for historically.
But the villagers have the same Christian-coded dialogue from before – “If the Goddess had wanted Her children to use magic, She would have given us wands instead of arms”, etc.
A lot of beloved characters who populated the original game’s world have returned, in one form or another. You can still find Ed, the talking horse. You can still find Mocrates, awaiting the coming of nightfall each day. At Alltrades Abbey, you can still find this guy:
Like I said before, “cultural silliness”.
But the most important character remains the one you only see in flashbacks:
It’s your old man, Ortega. You hear about him constantly – much more than in previous releases of this game. Everyone met him, or was saved by him, or heard about him, or fought alongside him, or rode the bus with him once, or was in a freaking book club with him. King gives you a scroll? He’s gotta tell you about the time he gave one to Ortega, too. Someone else is giving you a key item? Boy, would you believe some bloke named Ortega gave it to him? Even if they never caught his name, these random NPCs make a point to say “Huh, the last person who came this way said they were from a place called Aliahan”, as if you’re supposed to know exactly who that was. (Although to be fair, who else could’ve come from isolated Aliahan?)
Meanwhile, if you bring your father’s old helmet back to your momma in Aliahan, you’re treated to a bonus scene, where she recalls the day Ortega’s local pals gifted it to him.
While Ortega left a very subtle trail in the original, with only one or two NPCs expressing their doubt as to the rumors of his death, this game is constantly reminding you that he’s the real deal, and he’s gotta be out there somewhere. I know that remake writers love changing core aspects of the original, and I think on the whole that’s a positive thing. But there’s no way they could be so daring as to change Ortega’s ultimate fate… could they?
THE PREQUEL CONTINUES
Unsurprisingly, my occasionally interrupted gush-fest over this game ran long. But lucky for you, you can head over and check out Part 2 right away. (I had to split it up, because if I put too many images on a single page, it tends to make browsers cranky, lol.) See you there, and thanks for reading!